How Bologna is regenerating the urban commons

LabGov|April 5, 2018March 4, 2019

Here's the problem: There is a crucial legal gap in the management of cities — it is often illegal for citizens to improve or maintain public spaces, parks, abandoned buildings, and other urban commons that directly impact their lives. Regulation using institutional technology and public collaboration is necessary to mitigate this issue.

Here's how one organization is working on the problem: In 2014, the city of Bologna in Italy adopted the Regulation on Collaboration Between Citizens and the City for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons and launched "the city as a commons" project. The regulation and project represent a new and important legal and administrative framework for citizens to directly care for urban commons in Bologna and beyond.

Behind the scenes, the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna and Ravenna, LabGov, and innovators within the city paved the way with two years of field experiments applying co-governance methods to the management of urban commons. The bulk of the learning was accomplished through three "urban experimentation labs" with citizens and essential urban resources such as green spaces and abandoned buildings. The output of the research was the world’s first regulation and administrative process outlining how cities and the citizens can collaborate to co-manage urban commons.

A key tool supporting the regulation are "collaboration pacts." A collaboration pact defines the specific commons in question and the rules for collaboration between stakeholders, including the city government. Collaboration pacts can be designed and signed by a single individual, informal groups, communities, and nonprofit organizations. They regulate both single, short-term interventions and long-term care of the urban commons. The regulation also fosters the creation of hyperlocal institutions for urban co-governance like community cooperatives, neighborhood foundations, and block consortia. Importantly, the regulation provides for the transfer of technical and monetary support from the city government to citizens. It also promotes citizen action in five categories: social innovation and collaborative services, urban creativity, digital innovation, collaborative communication, and collaborative tools and practices that foster urban commoning.

Results:

More than 180 collaboration pacts have been signed in Bologna since the approval of the regulation. The regulation, collaboration pacts, and associated administrative processes have become an "administrative good practice" on a global basis. The regulation has also triggered the design of a broad urban co-governance program. Building on the success of the regulation, Bologna launched "Collaborare è Bologna" (CO-Bologna), an innovative public policy with two main purposes:
- Coordinating several projects and policies on the regeneration of the urban commons through social innovation and collaborative economy. Key achievements include the Pilastro and Incredibol projects. Prototyping a process and institutional infrastructure to keep experimenting with the urban commons movement. To be sure, CO-Bologna is structured as an open collaboration that seeks to involve whoever is willing to practice civic imagination in the city.
- The long-term goal of the project is to lay the foundation for the transformation of Bologna into a co-city with a robust collaborative ecosystem. Building on the care and regeneration of the city, efforts will now to focus on meeting people's basic needs by developing the local collaborative economy and leveraging collaborations between the public, private, and commons sectors.

Learn more from:

This case study is adapted from our latest book, "Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons." Get a copy today.

Header image of the LabGov team after a civic maintenance operation on a piece of property being turned into a collaboratively owned and managed community land trust in Rome, Centocelle provided by Christian Iaione

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LabGov

The LABoratory for the GOVernance of Commons (“LabGov“) is a place of experimentation in all respects. However, instead of alembics and tubes you can find students, scholars, experts, activists thinking and discussing about the

LabGov was created, on the impulse of theLUISS Guido Carli Department of Political Science to train a brand-new breed of professionals, the “experts in the governance of urban commons.” These are young women and men able to create forms of partnerships between citizens, NGOs, public administrations, and local business fostering the smart specialization of urban and local communities. Today, LabGov is an independently run organization that continues with its roots of collaboration and the urban commons.

The crisis has impoverished all of us from an individual standpoint (i.e. the institutional capability, the property of private goods). Thus, the only way to be able to maintain a high quality of life is to create a new institutional and economic system based on the model of “civic collaboration”, “collaborative governance of the commons” and “circular subsidiarity”, according to which public institutions shall favor all citizens, as individuals or in associative forms, willing to care for the general interest. The implementation of this model requires specific competences that are exactly those that LabGov aims to create.

As part of its activities, LabGov involves about thirty students in a yearly series of workshops mixing theoretical training, soft skills training and real in-the-field action. Considering its nature as an in-house clinic and place of experimentation, LabGov continues its work beyond these workshops acting as a “gymnasium” for future social and institutional designers, engineers and innovators, engaging them in research, training, project management, and communication activities.

LabGov is based on the idea that, in order to achieve social and institutional regeneration, it is necessary to create collaborative relationships between citizens, administrations and businesses to share the scarce resources and to take care of the commons, whether tangible or intangible, in urban and local communities.

LabGov also engages with organizations and local governments in order to develop projects, regulations, and policies surrounding the urban commons. After significantly contributing to “Le città come beni comuni” Fondazione del Monte project and the drafting of the “Bologna regulation on public collaboration for urban commons“, the establishment of the CO-Mantova cultural and knowledge commons-based territorial pact of collaboration, the collaborative urban land use regulation “Battipaglia Collabora“, LabGov is currently working on the “Bologna città collaborativa” Fondazione del Monte project to implement the Regulation and foster the idea of public collaboration in the city of Bologna, the CO-Roma project to design a collaborative urban mobility plan to regulate and run the urban roads as a commons, and the CO-Palermo project to establish a regeneration agency for industrial and cultural commons. In November 2015, LabGov hosted a global conference on the urban commons entitled “The City as a Commons,” which successfully brought hundreds of international scholars on the urban commons together in Bologna, Italy.

LabGov’s activities are currently developed under the umbrella of a joint venture between two world-renowned research institutions, LUISS International Center on Democracy and Democratization led by Professor Leonardo Morlino and Fordham Urban Law Center led by Professor Sheila Foster. This partnership will enable LabGov to develop the international research and experimentation protocol “Co-Cities” to design the city of the future based on the governance of urban commons, collaborative land use, social innovation, sharing economy, collaborative economy. LabGov’s activities are coordinated by professorChristian Iaione.

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