CO-Battipaglia is the result of Co-design/co-planning Laboratory, open and collaborative, called Organized legality. A nursery of civic energy for growing the future of the territory. The Prefect, appointed in Battipaglia in 2014, after the dissolution of the Municipal Council due to Mafia infiltrations, commissioned a study to both ALVISI-KIRIMOTO and LUISS LabGov – LABoratory for the GOVernance of commons, in order to develop the strategic guidelines for the Municipal City Plan (PUC).
The team has the objective to produce the guidelines for the realization of a collaborative territorial/local Pact for the care and regeneration of the local commons. The Pact will create a stable public, private, community partnership, that will be technically validated and shared between citizens and local institutions. The Pact will be the base for the establishment of a collaborative implementation method of the future PUC. Moreover, the Pact will be the first step of a new paradigm of local development for the care and regeneration of Battipaglia’s commons. From February to March 2015 the team encountered associations, active citizens, social innovators, enterprises, public administrations and schools of the city. The meetings have been held in the ex-Scuola De Amicis of Battipaglia. From the participatory process emerged four main themes, that will be the base for the definition of a urban collaborative strategy for the regeneration and redevelopment of the city:
1. PUBLIC BATTIPAGLIA: Battipaglia lacks public spaces (green areas, meeting places, ect.). It is important to recover and regenerate the public spaces all around the city. Indeed, to transform abandoned spaces in public spaces could be a possibility. It should be used a collaborative method through public, private, civic, community partnerships.
2. REGENERATED BATTIPAGLIA: The landscape of Battipaglia is marked by abandoned spaces: industrial areas, masserie and cascine (typical farmhouses), real estate seized to the Mafia, unlawful houses and buildings. These are potential sources of economic development. For this reasons it is important to re-activate these places for the urban renaissance.
3. ECOLOGICAL BATTIPAGLIA: To invest on the collaborative care of the “wealth of the territory” should become a priority. It is important to solve both infrastructural and behavioral problems, that impact on the geological risk and provoke groundwater pollution. Regulations is needed for the use of the land, both in case of quarries and greenhouses. The costline should be protected for the high ecological value (pinet forest, dunes, beaches). Moreover, the wealth of the territory pass through the redesign of the urban mobility.
4. CREATIVE BATTIPAGLIA: The future of Battipaglia have to be based on education and knowledge. The schools and the cultural institutions have a key role. Sites such as the ex-Scuola De Amicis, the Castelluccio and the Tabacchificio should become the strategic nodes of the knowledge development of the city. Battipaglia will become a crossroad of culture, research and scientific experimentation.
The 21 and 22 June 2015 the Municipality of Battipaglia in collaboration with Alvisi-Kirimoto and LUISS LabGov – LABoratory for the GOVernance of commons organizes the first global day of the organized legality. The event, called “Battipaglia Collabora” (Battipaglia collaborates), put together citizens and virtuous economic and social groups, for the collective and collaborative regeneration of the city. The activities that will take place during the two-day event Battipaglia Collaborawill be a sample of the possible ways in which citizens can collaborate with the public institutions for the future of the Battipaglia’s territory.
The CO-Reggio Emilia process begins with #CollaboratorioRe, a co-design path that will lead to the creation of the Open Laboratory (Laboratorio Aperto) of Reggio Emilia. #CollaboratorioRe aims at creating the first incubator of sharing and pooling economyof Reggio Emilia, a new urban actor that will revolutionize the way we think about the city and will emphasize the role that civic collaboration should play in the care and management of the urban commons. The path of #CollaboratorioRe will enable us to collectively define the subject that will take care of both the physical space (The Saint Peter Cloister, Chiostri di San Pietro, part of an historic monastery and built in the Renaissance -1524, 1584- that will be regenerated by the Reggio Emilia Municipality, through a regional program) but also of a new economic institution. The Saint Peter cloisters will host the Open Laboratory, a public-private structure for experimenting innovative solutions the field of social services and innovative entrepreneurship.The Open Laboratory will be a place for experimentation, a space where new forms of democracy and economy will be practiced, employment and new skills will be created, innovative solutions able to answer to the needs of individuals and the community of Reggio Emilia will be collaboratively created.
The Open Lab will therefore constitute an infrastructure through which the principles of local economic democracy, outlined in the Italian Constitutions, might be implemented. The Lab will be open to all those actors who believe in the importance of fulfilling their “political, economic and social solidarity duty” (Art. 2, Italian Constitution) and are willing to contribute to the “material or spiritual progress of society” (Art. 4, Italian Constitution). The Open Lab aims at generating cultural and cognitive institutions that will be open and collaborative (Art. 9 and 33, Italian Constitution) but also at creating “workers and users communities” or autonomous initiatives dealing with activities of public interest (Art 43 and 118 Italian Constitution).
CO-Bologna is the main field of experimentation of the CO-Cities project, a research project aimed at developing, testing and adapting to the urban environment the design principles for the governance of the commons located by the Economics’ Nobel prize Elinor Ostrom to the urban context Since 2011, the City of Bologna initiated a policy process to introduce collaboration as a methodology for governing the urban commons. After two years of field experimentation in three city neighborhoods, in the context of the “City as a commons” project supported by the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna and Ravenna, the City of Bologna adopted a regulatory framework, the Bologna Regulation on civic collaboration for the urban commons, in February 2014. The central regulatory tool of the Bologna Regulation on Public Collaboration for the Urban Commons is the pact of collaboration, through which the city and citizens (informal groups, NGO’s, private entities) agree on an intervention of care and regeneration of an urban commons (green space, abandoned buildings, squares). Since the approval of the Regulation, 280 pacts of collaboration have been signed.
The second phase of the Bologna Collaborative City program, the CO-Bologna process, aiming at applying the same design principles of the governance of the urban commons to other local public policies started in 2015. CO-Bologna, an open pact of collaboration between the City of Bologna and the Foundation Del Monte of Bologna and Ravenna and operated under the scientific coordination of LabGov (The Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons) builds upon the experience of the Regulation for the urban commons and intends to transform City government into an institutional ecosystem based on public-commons/people/community partnerships through the quintuple helix approach (which implies the involvement through loosely coupled systems of the local private entrepreneurs, the knowledge institutions, the civil society organizations) to enable collective action in the city and the birth of institutions based on the three dimensions of urban co-governance: sharing, collaboration and polycentricity.
The CO-Bologna project consists in the experimentation of co-design of governance institutions in three fieldwork, corresponding to three city area that mirrors the pillastr of the CO-city; Pilastro (making togheter, urban commons) Bolognina (living together, social innovation) and Croce del Biacco (growing togheter, collaborative economy disctrict). Another core pillar of the CO-Bologna process is the establishment of an Office for Civic Immagination. The Office for Civic Immagination is a policy innovation lab, structured as a co-working area internal to the municipal administration, through which the civil servants can work together in order to find innovative solution to common problems and implement the principle of civic collaboration. Finally, the CO-Bologna process also includes the evaluation of the Bologna Regulation, in order to understand the impact of the public policy on the urban democracy. The evaluation is indeed one of the crucial phase of the CO-city protocol, that describe the cycle of a collaborative public policy to implement the city as a commons. Evaluation is conceived as an intermediate phase between prototyping and modelizing, that is realized in order to enrich the understanding of the evolving of the policy process and introduce appropriates corrections. This methodology is coherent with the principles of experimentation and adaptiveness as crucial characteristic of an innovative collaborative policy making at the urban level.
Image source : screenshot April, 6th 2022 https://www.comantova.it/
Country
Italy
City
Mantova
Name
Co-Mantova
Date
2014
Description of the project
Co-Mantova is a prototype of an institutionalizing process to run cities as a collaborative commons and therefore as “co-cities“, whereby urban, environmental, cultural, knowledge and digital commons are co-managed by the five actors of the collaborative governance – social innovators (i.e. active citizens, makers, digital innovators, urban regenerators, rurban innovators, etc.), public authorities, businesses, civil society organizations, knowledge institutions – through an institutionalized public-private-people/community partnership. CO-Mantova builds on the experience developed by LabGov through the “City as a Commons“ project and the Regulation on collaboration for Urban Commons that LabGov contributed to draft for the City of Bologna at the end of that project.
As a reaction to the Result of the National Referendum on the Privatization of Water, held in Italy in 2011, the City of Naples implemented the transformation of the Agency for the management of the water into a “Special Agency” – according to the Italian legal framework, the ABC Acqua Bene Comune, ABC Water as a Commons. The company was transformed officially into a commons corporation on April 22, 2013. It is a sort of “public-common partnership”, an experiment of how public law tools can be used for protecting citizen’s access to clean and affordable water and increasing democratic participation and transparency in local public services’ governance. The Special Agency ABC draws upon an existent form of the public corporation, although with some adaptation in order to pursue social interest instead of profit. It ultimately aims at promoting forms of self-organization and the inclusion and participation of workers and users of water.
U. Mattei, Social Movements as Constituent Power: the Italian struggle for the commons, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 20, 2, 965-1013 (2013).