In Italy, co-design processes are increasingly implemented in urban and social regeneration projects, fostering community empowerment in decision-making. This has unlocked the potential of empowering local communities in the decision-making process. However, limitations emerge from the point of view of the co-design regulation. To avoid co-design becoming a tick-box exercise, it is essential to rethink the top-down approaches to ethically setting and running co-design processes. Based on Reggio Emilia's Neighbourhood Common Good ('Quartiere Bene Comune') experience, this chapter defines a set of successful elements, shifting from models of representative democracy (political delegation to the ballot box) and deliberative democracy (listening and internalising the 'voice' of communities in public decisions) to a collaborative democracy that emphasises shared responsibilities in decision-making, resource allocation and evaluation. Starting from an analysis of the outcomes of the past decade (2015-2025) and the phases adopted during the process, this chapter identifies the key elements of a successful and ethical example of a collaborative democracy model, intending to answer the question 'What are the key features of Quartiere Bene Comune that have generated change and innovation in the co-design process experimented by the local authority?' The authors' findings provide an important tool for public policy to mitigate power imbalances through multi-actor partnerships, evidence-based regulations and renegotiating hierarchical practices to amplify bottom-up protagonism. This study highlights the importance of embedding these principles in policy and practice to create ethical and effective co-design frameworks. Local authorities can ensure that co-design processes achieve meaningful and sustainable impacts by fostering collaboration and equitable decision-making.
This chapter examines the case of Cavallerizza Reale in Turin, an extensive historical building complex that has been occupied and transformed into a site of artistic production and commoning experimentation. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, the authors' contribution focuses on this ephemeral but very revealing experience, which encapsulates many of the risks that commonly afflict commons. By outlining the tensions between two factions within this large community, the so-called politicians and the artists, and their divergent political visions of self-government, the authors expose two different conceptions of commoning. On the one side, the authors explore the community's relationship with local institutions, particularly the attempts to establish a commons-public partnership, and how a legalistic conception of the commons affects the role of rules in the everyday life of this community. At the same time, the authors will look closely at commoning practices among the 'artists', using the critical tools from the anthropology of art to highlight both their potential and their limits. In both cases, the authors emphasise the friction between the aim of carrying out processes of commoning within the community and the necessity of dealing with external urban actors, such as the municipality, the mainstream art world and other economic actors. Acknowledging that many members of the community perceived this experience as fleeting and fragile, the authors propose a perspective that overcomes the conventional success/failure dichotomy.
In the last 20 years, urban commons have been the foundation of many urban initiatives that have created community spaces for practicing collaboration, forms of shared social responsibility, imagining socially innovative practices and regenerating common spaces and places. A field of practices has sparked an increasingly structured debate that seeks to identify the perspectives and ambiguities of these processes to trace their 'contours' and boundaries. Some of these initiatives, such as community hubs and cultural centres, focus on the (re)generation of the commons and serve as experimental spaces for new forms of political subjectivation through commoning and self-governance. These practices span different areas of social action, with various origins and degrees of institutionalisation. This chapter explores, without claiming to provide definitive categories, the relationship between space, community and common goods, proposing some analytical trajectories that emerge from the reference literature and several years of research on urban commoning processes in the city of Bologna. Using three typical cases, this chapter provides a frame for the systematisation of urban commoning development, taking into account the following variables: the 'top-down-bottom-up' dynamics; the forms of space governance; the relationship between regenerated/managed space and the city in terms of access, accessibility and exchange; whether or not there is attention to a 'commoning' of resources and their regeneration in terms of commoning understood as a social practice.
Between 2012 and 2017, an abandoned barracks located in the Italian city of Bologna was squatted and renovated by a group of young people, culminating in the establishment of Lucha, a self-managed centro sociale (social centre). Within Lucha, a wide range of social projects (such as a kindergarten, a shelter for homeless people, a library, a pizzeria and a microbrewery) and public events (e.g. concerts, seminars, public screenings of movies and documentaries) were organised with the ambition "to give back a square to the city". Using ethnographic data, including field notes and interviews with activists, this chapter analyses Lucha as an example of a "utopia of care" (Fano Morrissey & Serughetti, 2024). In dialogue with studies on commoning, the analysis aims to shed light on the daily "practices of care" through which the space was managed, as well as to examine the use of "narratives of care" to defend the squatting and its activities. In this exploration, the chapter draws upon feminist perspectives to recognise care, love and solidarity as "cultural residuals of hope" (Lynch, 2022) and their key role in the everyday organising of prefigurative politics.
The Commons have been described both as an ethic of political action and as a political principle aimed at self-governance. This implies that they possess an ideological framework able to withstand the principal regulatory institutions of our times, that is: representative democracy, capitalism and neoliberalism. Despite more than two decades of existence, this counter-model has not reached its ideological goal. Conversely, the more the commons spread and multiply as an "empty signifier" within repertoires of collective action and among public opinion, the more that neoliberal forces colonise urban environments. A different, and less radical, theoretical approach (notably put forth by Arena) addresses urban commons as tools for reshaping the relationship among citizens and local administration which arises in "collaborative governance" ("shared administration") in Italy. This approach has also displayed is limits, particularly in terms of the depolitisation and bureaucratisation of urban ecosystems and citizens' activism. If the preceding assumptions are indeed correct, what are the empirical function of urban commons? The argument put forth in this chapter is that urban commons serve an "expressive" role for certain groups that may be considered "avant-garde" in terms of cognitive resources and critical weltanschauung. The aforementioned argument is validated through the analysis of case studies in the municipalities of Bologna, Rome and Naples.
Commons can be understood as an organisational model based on relationships and social entanglements. These bonds primarily stem from the simultaneous actions of creating and governing the commons. Therefore, some scholars suggest using the term 'commoning' instead of 'commons'. This chapter presents the case of the Associazione Genitori Scuola 'Di Donato', established at the Di Donato Elementary School, a public school located in the Esquilino neighbourhood in Rome. Unlike other cases presented in this book, this experience began with the initiative of the school director, who, in 2003, decided to offer some unused spaces for activities organised by parents after school hours. Currently, the association offers a variety of activities and sports on a daily basis, and the building is open for meetings and gatherings after school and on weekends. This became a good practice that is disseminated through mutual learning in a network with other parents' associations in Rome and across Italy. The relationships with the neighbourhood grew stronger when the street in front of the school was pedestrianised. The parents' association knew that for the pedestrianisation to be successful, it was essential to fill the space with furniture and activities. For this reason, they reached out to other local associations (primarily those they were already familiar with) and began organising collective initiatives. This case aims to demonstrate how collective activities can enhance publicness and strengthen social bonds.
Shared administration is analysed as a form of governance of urban commons through the case study of Bologna, which adopted the first Italian Regulation on this matter in 2014. This research analyses civic collaboration on common goods 'in practice', based on 28 interviews conducted in 2019-2020 with promoters of collaboration agreements concerning urban green spaces. The case study is discussed in order to analyse the main challenges of civic collaboration and its transformative potential in relation to both forms of participation and quality of urban life. The research found that the risks of a delegated administration to citizens and the push towards individualisation and depoliticisation of the care of urban commons, frequently emphasised by critical literature, do not fully account for the civic experience investigated, which is capable of both resilience and resistance to the neoliberal urban model. Civic collaboration practices are an expression of the pursuit of new ways of doing politics and experiencing citizenship. The authors also considered which natural environments are recognised as urban commons in the negotiation between the administration and citizens and what balance is achieved in practice between care and regeneration activities. Urban green spaces are frequently recognised as commons by citizens, but these are exclusively the domesticated or tamed natural environments, which are mainly the object of maintenance and care. Wild natural environments do not seem to be included in the field of shared administration, while paradoxically, they would be the most suitable for acknowledgement as commons and for counteracting the logic of neoliberal urban capitalism.
This chapter examines the commons in undesirable urban areas, the challenges of heritage conservation and the lack of common interests among communities, based on the case study of Pionta Park in Arezzo, Italy. While urban parks are generally regarded as valuable resources, Pionta Park presents a challenge due to its historical association with mental illness and its current state, characterised by the presence of drug trafficking and insecurity. Despite the presence of a potential commoner community comprising citizens, including more than 50 associations, the university of Siena, public schools and students who could collectively preserve this cultural landscape, they are still in the process of developing a common consciousness. Pionta Park embodies the essential components of urban commons, yet it has not fully achieved this status. Notwithstanding the existing empirical research on transition, communities and urban commons, further studies are warranted. The authors employed the metaphor of 'cooking' to describe the urban ingredients in Pionta Park, as they evolve according to their environment and require different kinds of preparation times or conditions, with each practitioner adapting to specific requirements. The authors demonstrate that commoning involves transforming the lack of recognition and understanding of common resources, which are influenced by sociocultural relationships that develop over time.
This chapter introduces the term Oppositional and Territorial Commoning (OTC) to describe Rome's self-managed political-socio-cultural places (SMPs), activist-driven spaces established through the illegal occupation of abandoned buildings for self-managed social, cultural and political activities. While existing labels, such as 'liberated spaces', 'autonomous resource spaces' or 'urban commons', capture certain aspects of SMPs, they fail to encompass their full essence. Drawing from extensive research, this study first conceptualizes SMPs as commons by highlighting their a-hierarchical management structure and their capacity to gather 'strangers' and foster relationships of care between them. The analysis extends beyond these features to explore SMPs' particular way of commoning, characterized by their oppositional nature - resisting dominant political and economic systems, such as through illegal occupations that challenge private property - and their territoriality, rooted in their reliance on physical spaces as tools for activism. Establishing the concept of OTC provides a framework for comparing experiences across diverse contexts, emphasizing similarities between movements separated by spatial, temporal, or political divides and potentially fostering alliances. Grounded in an embodied analysis, this chapter critically examines the concept of commons through concrete case studies, offering insights into the specificities of oppositional and territorial forms of commoning while highlighting both their potential and their limitations.
The chapter examines two case studies of renewable energy communities (RECs) carried out in two different territorial and socio-economic contexts: (i) MES Rec (Sicily, Southern Italy); (ii) RIC Rec, in the province of Trento (Northern Italy), fostered by the historical energy cooperative 'RIC Rec Co-Op.' Using Ostrom's concept of polycentric governance and a comparative analysis, the authors highlight the historical and social conditions that have affected the two REC organisational practices, as well as the transformative effects on the urban and spatial level that RECs are producing. The different legal forms of the promoters of the energy communities (cooperative for RIC REC CO-OP and philanthropic body for the MES Rec Foundation, with which a social ESCo is associated) imply a diverse organisational practice both in the management of the REC and its services and in the participatory mechanisms of the citizens/users. Despite these differences, both RECs are based on the idea of energy as a common good and on a community logic that makes REC a model of socio-technical innovation to strengthen community and local welfare and generate positive externalities.
This chapter offers a comparative study of five urban commons experiences in the city of Bologna. They include three experiences that are social movement and activist in nature, one that is more of a cultural movement and one that is community-based. LU and PT self-identify as anti-systemic, anti-capitalist, CO aims at a more inclusive society that recognizes the rights of the LGBTQIA1 communities, while BL questions the sustainability of the mass consumption capitalist model. IS is a community-based group creating and sustaining neighbourhood social cohesion. Five different categories of analysis the authors selected to offer a deeper understanding of the nature and scope of each of these experiences and to what extent they can be understood as forms of citizenship: (a) inclusive commoning and governance; (b) feminist values and practices; (c) goals around identified and satisfied needs of beneficiaries; (d) appropriation of space/right to the city and ecology; (e) implication in politics and sociopolitical alliances. The authors explore the characteristics, values and actions according to which urban commons can be considered a post-capitalist or a post-industrial alternative to state- or privately run urban spaces or forms of resilience and social cohesion. The authors' argument is that not all urban commons are post-capitalist and many experiences are in continuity with community organizing and social movement collective action that the authors define as urban citizenship.
What are the factors that a � ect social mobility? How are early adulthood educational and labor trajectories correlated with intergenerational mobility? This paper presents three contributions to the intergenerational mobility literature. First, this paper develops one of the first attempts to measure intergenerational mobility using administrative panel data sets in a developing country. A panel data was created using a national educational test and surveys and follows students, starting in 8th grade, and analyzes their intergenerational income mobility at 27 years of age. Second, this paper uses social class and role models proxies and shows that the college educational outcomes are related to initial social and educational environments. Third, a detailed analysis of academic and labor market trajectories is used, indicating that students with irregular educational and labor market trajectories show lower intergenerational income mobility. The results of this research open a new approach for analyzing life decisions and expects to provide further guidance for public policies that intend to promote social mobility among low-income individuals. These last results also confirm the and downward mobility for students. As the level there is high upward educational mobility in all
Various indicators of income inequality and social welfare can be obtained simply by using the Gini index and the mean income of the population. This paper reviews existing indicators and presents several new indicators of this kind. While contemporary researchers seem to be preoccupied with relative inequality, this paper advocates for using intermediate inequality views and supplementing inequality rankings of countries with rankings based on social welfare. Empirical analysis, performed for 36 European countries, demonstrates such an approach’s advantages.
In large parts of the world, income inequality has been rising in recent decades. Other regions have experienced declining trends in income inequality. This raises the question of which mechanisms underlie contrasting observed trends in income inequality around the globe. To address this research question in an empirical analysis at the aggregate level, we examine a global sample of 73 countries between 1981 and 2010, studying a broad set of drivers to investigate their interaction and influence on income inequality. Within this broad approach, we are interested in the heterogeneity of income inequality determinants across world regions and along the income distribution. Our findings indicate the existence of a small set of systematic drivers across the global sample of countries. Declining labour income shares and increasing imports from high-income countries significantly contribute to increasing income inequality, while taxation and imports from low-income countries exert counter-vailing effects. Our study reveals the region-specific impacts of technological change, financial globalisation, domestic financial deepening and public social spending. Most importantly, we do not find systematic evidence of education's equalising effect across high- and low-income countries. Our results are largely robust to changing the underlying sources of income Ginis, but looking at different segments of income distribution reveals heterogeneous effects.
Contemporary cities are the subject of new forms of visualization that are not only changing how we see the urban world but how it operates as a social environment. This chapter explores Google's Street View database and the Google Maps platform as sites for the production of distinctive new streams of visual data about cities around the world. I argue that this kind of digital infrastructure presents urban researchers with both new opportunities and new challenges, raising complex questions about the role of visual images in the context of the ongoing transition to a digital, computational, and networked image world.
Urban scholars employ numerous sources to study early cities, including primary sources such as historical maps, literary accounts, tax records, and the like to help visualize cities in various periods. In recent years, a variety of artificial intelligence programs have been employed to not only create visual images of earlier cities, but also to allow audiences to negotiate city streets and enter buildings within the city. The Assassin's Creed series of video games created by Ubisoft place the game player in historical settings where the assassin (representing peace and free will) will battle against groups of foes (representing order and control). Assassin's Creed II is set in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century and has been praised for the visual reconstruction of the city. But how well can a computer game represent the Early Renaissance City?
Photographs are primary source documents that, like manuscripts and printed documents, carry layers of embedded information. As an example of a research strategy that can be used to study the time, place, and context of the development of early photographic businesses in America, a project to research and geo-reference the early photographic studios in New York City using information culled from imprints, census records, city directories, and other period sources is described. This case study example will focus on analyzing photographs and photographers operating in New York City and Brooklyn from the birth of popular photography in the 1840s to ca 1870s, and what researchers can learn about the development of the urban environments during this era. The study will provide an example of a research trajectory, brief background on the processes and early photographic business development, and note some of the research challenges that arise using historic photographs to study urban environments.
