ViCoo – Visioni Cooperative, Legacoop Bologna, 16 May 2016

by Chiara Fratalia | May 13, 2016 | The Urban Media Lab

LabGov with professor Christian Iaione will take part in the ViCoo – Visioni Cooperative conference!

On the 16^th May prof. Iaione will attend the presentation conference of ViCoo – Visioni Cooperative, the laboratory of ideas created by Legacoop Bologna to introduce new roads towards innovation for communities and territories elaborated with research centers and international and Italian universities. The event will be opened by Sarwanth Singh, member of the Advisory Board of the Leeds University Business School and founder of the research group on Mega Trends. Many researchers will intervene, those who work together with Legacoop Bologna to elaborate strategic trajectories and innovation proposals for the development and growth of territory cooperatives.

The conference follows other events on the same subject that occurred in the last month.
For instance, CUBO (Unipol Centre Bologna) on the 26^th of April hosted a reflection on the development of suburbs and urban requalification, by means of a comparison between the experiences of Turin, Melpignano (Lecce), Naples and Bologna. This event was part of the program #PrimaveraPilastro2016, a series of events in the framework of a bigger project that aims at adding value to the Pilastro neighbourhood in Bologna by trying to build a cooperative community.

Another event on this subject was organized by Eutropian and took place in Rome on May 5-7, with the title “Funding the Cooperative City. New models for community spaces”. The event aimed at discovering new economic models for community-led urban development, through comparisons of experiences and initiatives in a debate that involved researchers coming from Italy and Europe.

LabGov coordinator, prof. Christian Iaione, has contributed to the research effort in finding new theoretical and practical frameworks to realize and promote the collaborative city model. He recently wrote an article, published on the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, in which he investigates if urban assets and resources can be transformed into sharing, collaborative, cooperative, commoning ecosystems that enable collective action for the commons.

Prof. Iaione underlines the important social functions carried out by urban spaces and community services:  they encourage higher sense of belonging to the community, help to overcome political apathy, foster social cohesion, thus being crucial to a community’s well-being. He also states that urban commons are undergoing a deep crisis period, determined by the decline of public or collective spaces and citizen disaffection; urban public spaces are thus perceived as nobody’s places, rather than everybody’s places.

For this reason, it is necessary to rethink the governance of the commons: the quantitative and hierarchical, centralist approach to promoting urban space, typical of an exclusive public administration, must be replaced by a polycentric, qualitative, and relational concept of urban welfare and urban commons, which is urban co-governance.

He also proposes five design principles of a “commonsbased urban governance matrix”:

• introduction of urban commoning through regulation or a new group or organization;
• collaborative governance of sharing, possibly in conjunction with a collaborative economy based on a complementary currency system and local development agencies;
• social innovation as the basis of a shift from a traditional urban welfare system to a collaborative welfare system;
• radical transformation of the internal organization and work methodologies of urban bureaucracies into citizens enabling communities of service designers;
• establishment of a collaboration laboratory (Co-Lab), a living lab where collaboration takes place, is taught, and communicated.

Prof. Iaione discussed his paper in the 4th European Regional Meeting of IASC, that took place in Bern from the 10th to the 13th May with the following subject: “Commons in a ‘glocal’ world: global connections and local responses”. The article was debated in the B20 panel, which would like to examine the concept of Smart Cities in India, and contrast it with the advances that other countries made in redefining their concepts of urban commons.

For more information, see the ViCoo – Visioni Cooperative event program.

You can also read our previous articles on Pilastro2016, Rome Eutropian conference and Bern IASC conference.

_____________________________________

Il prof. Christian Iaione, coordinatore di LabGov, parteciperà alla conferenza di presentazione di ViCoo – Visioni Cooperative, un laboratorio di idee organizzato da Legacoop Bologna per esplorare nuove rotte verso l’innovazione di comunità e territori. L’evento ne segue altri sullo stesso argomento tenutisi nell’ultimo mese, come la conferenza CUBO #Pilastro2016, l’evento Eutropian a Roma e la 4a Conferenza Regionale Europea di IASC a Berna. Proprio in quest’ultimo evento il prof. Iaione ha presentato un importante articolo che propone i cinque pilastri fondanti per una corretta ridefinizione del concetto di governance dei beni comuni.