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from MIT Press
A new model of urban governance, mapping the route to a more equitable management of a city’s infrastructure and services.
Identifying core elements of these diverse efforts, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione develop a framework for understanding how certain initiatives position local communities as key actors in the production, delivery, and management of urban assets or local resources.
About the Co-City Project
Project Origins
Co-City is a research project, developed by LabGov (Laboratory for the Governance of the City as a Commons), which serves to investigate pioneering forms of collaborative city-making in urban areas.
In recent years, policy debates, civic projects and civil contestations rooted in the critique of contemporary urban development patterns have arisen over the use of city space, urban social infrastructures and culture. Cities all over the world are promoting policies aimed at finding innovative solutions to the most urgent urban issues, including large scale urbanization processes, social and economic inequalities, socio-spatial polarization, the need of sustainable urban planning, equitable access to technology and CO2 emission control.
Despite the vast literature on natural resource commons, we found the urban commons to lack an adequate understanding and took up the challenge of shedding light on what are the peculiarities of common-pool resources located in complex, congested, and heavily regulated urban areas and how they can be successfully managed through new forms of democratic experimentalism.
Inspired by the pioneering work of Dr. Elinor Ostrom, our approach conceives cities as spaces where a multitude of actors, including city residents, civil society organizations, local governments, and various private actors, should have opportunities to work collaboratively together in order to regenerate and enjoy their shared urban spaces and resources. In the new city governance model we propose — what we call “urban co-governance”— the city (as public authority) acts as a facilitator of the emerging co-management structures throughout its territory and enables city inhabitants to actively take part in the regeneration of their habitat, improve their lifestyle, and develop the community they belong to. In this way, LabGov practices and advocates for the transition from urban commons intervention to a more just and democratic governance of the city as commons.
Our Research
The first LabGov project carried out in Bologna laid the foundation of the Co-City Protocol that was later tested in other Italian cities, including Battipaglia, Mantua, Reggio Emilia, and Rome. Several municipalities participated in developing innovative Co-City projects and experimenting with territorial collaboration pacts for commons-driven social and economic growth. Other Co-Cities emerged in various European and North American cities, including New York and Amsterdam, shortly followed by other projects in the Global South, in San Jose, Sao Paolo and Accra.
LabGov created a Co-Cities database which collects 130+ cities implementing 400+ commons-based projects and urban policies LabGov and closely track their progress to run empirical analysis. Using the knowledge acquired through observation of experimentations in the Co-Cities projects and the database, the first version of the Co-City Protocol was codified. This protocol, which is in constant evolution and adaptable to the needs and conditions of each local context where it is implemented, is a methodology aimed at guiding urban policy makers, researchers, and communities willing to be involved in co-governance experiments.
Case studies collected
Mapped cities
Case studies analyzed
Experimentation Grounds
Publications
Verso Savio 2030: la co-governance per lo sviluppo sostenibile della Valle del Savio
L’Unione dei Comuni della Valle Savio ha avviato a luglio 2019 Verso Savio 2030, percorso strategico volto a sviluppare un kit di politiche e di strumenti legali che favoriscano la collaborazione tra pubblico, privato e comunità nella realizzazione di progettualità...
Responsible Villages: the governance of the territory and the landscape as a commons
The School of Architecture of the Universidad Latina, together with the School of Public Relations and the School of Biology, are proposing a pilot project that began on May 2019, which aims to work on “Villages and the Territory as a Commons”. For the first time,...
Co-Baton Rouge
Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana with approximately 800,000 residents, is a city that is spatially stratified by race and income. Some describe it as a tale of “two cities” with higher quality housing, amenities and transportation in white areas and a lack of...
The Co-Cities Open Book is the result of years of research and experimentations on the field to investigate new forms of collaborative city-making that are pushing urban areas towards new frontiers of participatory urban governance, inclusive economic growth and social innovation.
Structured around three main pillars, the Co-Cities Open Book is composed of the “Co-Cities Protocol”, the “Co-Cities Report”, and the “City as a Commons Papers”.
Explore Nearby Co-Cities