In this interview, conducted in Trento in February 2016 by Urban Next, Professor Christian Iaione speaks about the importance of developing a scientific and methodological protocol allowing for the creation of Co-Cities, based on the idea of the city as a commons. The video originally appeared on Urban Next’s official website.

A Co-City is characterized by “urban co-governance, which implies shared, collaborative, polycentric governance of the urban commons and in which environmental, cultural, knowledge and digital urban resources are co-managed through contractual or institutionalized public-private-community partnerships”.

The Co-City protocol aims at drawing a series of design principles which can be used to develop forms of collaborative governance in our cities. Such principles, which strive for being universal, will need to be adapted to the peculiarities of the context in which we are operating in order to result in the most suitable form of governance. The protocol envisages 5 phases: mapping, practicing, prototyping, testing and evaluating.

LabGov has recently launched the Co-city platform, through which city users and practitioners can become part of the network, discover the different forms of collaborative governance which are emerging all over the world and begin applying the design principles to other cities, in order to develop commons-based governance systems.

Christian Iaione | Developing Protocols for the City of Commons from urbanNext on Vimeo.

“The tragedy of urban roads: Saving cities from choking, calling on citizens to combat climate change” is an article wrote by LabGov co-founder, prof. Christian Iaione, and published on the Fordham Urban Law Journal in 2009.

This article argues that the best response to the tragedy of road congestion has to rely on market-based regulatory techniques and public policies aimed at controlling the demand-side of transportation congestion. Among market-based regulatory techniques, economists seem to favor price-based instruments over quantity-based instruments. This article argues instead that quantity instruments, such as tradable permits of road usage and real estate development, can better internalize all the externalities that road congestion produces. This article also advances the idea that quantity instruments are more successful tools in addressing urban congestion for four reasons: (1) they respond better to equity concerns; (2) they are therefore more politically viable; (3) they are more likely to be well designated; and (4) they are able to represent a catch-all strategy for externalities produced by congestion.

Part II of this article illustrates that the costs that congestion imposes on society or, to use the preferred language of economists, the negative externalities that road congestion produces. Part III sheds light on the underlying causes of urban congestion. Part IV enumerates regulatory tools that are available to address the negative externalities of urban congestion and proposes a comparative analysis of the different strategies that have been implemented to address this problem throughout the world. Part V outlines possible policy options that should complement the regulatory framework. Finally, the last section concludes by stressing the need for further differentiation and experimentation in order to shape a new understanding in the use and management of the “commons” and advocates for a bottom-up regulatory strategy to address climate change and global warming, a strategy centered upon the regulation of individual behavior at the urban level.

If you are interested in this subject, please explore the full article here.