How can the recognition of the fundamental right to collective action of city inhabitants and local communities foster the sustainable development of cities and urban innovation thereby promoting social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and prosperity?
The volume walks readers through the new, emerging models of urban governance, such as Community Land Trusts, community coops and pacts of collaboration or civic uses, aimed at ensuring a more equitable and sustainable management of both the city as a complex system and some of its specific essential resources such as parks, abandoned or underused buildings, and basic technological infrastructure such as broadband network and local renewable energy production infrastructure such as energy communities. The contribution seeks to tackle the daunting challenges of 21st century urbanism from an equity, inclusivity, and justice perspective. By so doing, it has developed a common framework and understanding of recurrent principles and shared methodological tools employed in different contexts and for multiple urban resources and assets.
The concept of a “co-city” moves from the legal recognition of the right to use, manage, own city assets and infrastructure but calls for a wider range of tools such as innovation policies, new skills of local bureaucracies and new administrative structure, as well as emerging technologies, community-based business models and financing schemes. As a matter of fact, the Co-Cities book adopts an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach to address urban challenges in a more holistic approach. Nonetheless, it is based on very strong theoretical premises rooted in Elinor Ostrom’s work on the governance of the commons and the scholarship on urban commons initiated by scholars such as David Harvey and Stefano Rodotà.
The work is structured into five chapters. The first chapter, “Rethinking a city”, capitalizes on Polycentrism and the Quintuple Helix Approach for approaching governance issues (public, community, civic, knowledge, and private). The second chapter, “Urban Commons”, focuses on Elinor Ostrom’s groundbreaking studies on natural resources commons as they translate to the city level, and it grounds the theory of the Co-city on the rich literature on urban commons. The third chapter, which reflects a more legal approach and is dubbed “City as a Commons”, discusses some examples of urban public policies that enable collaborative and collective actions between private, civic, knowledge and public actors. The fourth chapter, “Urban Co-governance”, reveals an interaction between urban policies, the main private & public actors and community members to co-create and co-govern urban resources. The fifth chapter enucleates from the previous discussion and presents a case study analysis of the five key institutional design principles of a potential Co-City model in detail: collective governance, enabling State, pooling economies, urban experimentalism, and tech justice. The book ends by presenting challenges that this innovative framework has to face, as well as opportunities for its further development. An empirical appendix is also provided, but for more information on concrete practices, see a previous work here: www.commoning.city
The hope is that the co-cities framework will offer useful insights to cities, civil servants and activists across the globe, despite the contextual differences amongst cities.
Find out more information about the projects here:
Commoning.city
LabGov.City
Stay tuned for next posts. We will go through the book together and with the authors, delving deeper for a better understanding of the Co-cities theory and practice!
We are honored to announce that the “Co-Cities Book: Innovative Transitions Toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities”, by Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione won the 2023 Association Of American Publishers Prose Award for Architecture and Urban Planning in Social Sciences Category.
“Where we are able to identify a network of urban commons, or some degree of polycentricism in the governance of urban resources, we begin to see the transformation of the city into a commons—a collaborative space—supported and enabled by the state.”
The article “Ostrom in the City: Design Principles for the Urban Commons” by Sheila Foster, Washington, and Christian Iaione, published in The Nature of Cities, on 20 August 2017, investigates how designing the city as a commons can help in addressing urgent urban issues such as urban poverty, gentrification, climate change, and migration, among others. Authors take reference from Elinor Ostrom’s groundbreaking research about collaborative management of common pool resources, or commons, for economic and environmental sustainability adapting the Ostrom design principle to the urban context with the aim of rethinking the governance of cities and the management of their resources. Urban commons are different from natural resources and more traditional commons in important ways, so the adaptation of Ostrom’s theories to the urban context implied an extensive research. The study at the basis of the article surveyed 100+ cities around the world to extract from these examples a set of design principles that resulted distinctively different from those offered by Elinor Ostrom but kept the potentiality of paving the way towards a transition to more fair, inclusive, sustainable, resilient futures given existing patterns of urbanization and the contested nature of urban resources.
The article, The Right To the Co-city, authored by Christian Iaione is published on the Italian Journal of Public Law, Volume 9 Issue 1 2017.
The study is an effort to contribute to the current urban studies debate on the way to conceptualize the city by advancing a rights-based approach and to suggest that to build such vision one needs to reconceive the city as a commons, which is to say that the city serves as an infrastructure enabling the “pooling” of city inhabitants actions, energies, resources and the cooperation between city inhabitants and other four urban actors thereby embedding a “quintuple helix” or “pentahelix” approach in the governance design of the city. Part I articulates the most prominent visions or paradigms of the city of the 21st century and the “metaphors” that are currently used to conceptualize the city. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this part then discusses some complications and emerging key points that deserve further reflection. In Part II, the article argues that a rights-based paradigm or vision in the conceptualization of the city is emerging. It does so through the analysis of urban laws and policies adopted in exemplary case studies such as Naples and Barcelona, on one side, and Bologna and Turin, on the other side. Two main rights-based approaches seem to emerge: the rebel city model and the co-city model. In Part III, to better define this fourth urban paradigm and in particular the second approach, a focus on the key concept of commons and a review of the main bodies of literature is provided which are key to carve out the concept of “pooling” as a form of cooperation that encompasses both sharing of congestible resources to avoid scarcity and collaboration around non congestible, constructed resources to generate abundance. Building on the existing literature of a particular subset of studies on infrastructure commons, the concept of pooling is extracted from the observation of how pooling as a demand-side strategy can both expand or leverage the idle “capacity” of an infrastructure to avoid congestion and at the same time generate abundance. Pooling is particular effective in explaining the main features of a peculiar vision of the rights-based city, the co-city approach, ultimately envisioning the city as an enabling infrastructure for social and economic pooling. Part IV offers concluding remarks and proposes the idea of the “right to the co-city” to build a body of urban law and policies advancing “urban rights to pooling” as a key legal tool to structure a commons-oriented interpretation of the fourth vision of the city, the rights-based approach.
The article is available in an open access format here.
“Citizens should not just be involved, but they should be driving the process, being the managers.”
What does the rise of bottom-up initiatives mean for our current welfare state? Does it provide a way out of the growing dichotomy between active citizens and non-active citizens?
Professor Christian Iaione (LUISS University, Rome) talks about the idea of a ‘co-city’ – cognitive, collaborative city – which has been implemented in Bologna’s administration.
“Society runs, the economy follows. Let’s (re)design institutions and law together.” This is the credo of LabGov – the Laboratory for the governance of the commons in Italy, that was behind the pioneering “Bologna Regulation” – a guidebook on public-civic collaboration in the city. Kati Van de Velde spoke with LabGov’s founder, Professor Christian Iaione. He and his team are currently working on the “Bologna Co-City” project, to implement the Bologna Regulation and to foster the idea of public collaboration in the city of Bologna. Read the full interview here.
