Ostrom in the City: Design Principles for the Urban Commons – Sheila Foster, Washington, DC. Christian Iaione, Rome. The Nature of Cities, 20 August 2017

Ostrom in the City: Design Principles for the Urban Commons – Sheila Foster, Washington, DC. Christian Iaione, Rome. The Nature of Cities, 20 August 2017

by | Aug 20, 2017 | Blog, Publications, Uncategorized

“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.

Read the full article here.

The City as a Commons – Christian Iaione interview by Kati Van de Velde for The Green European Journal. November 9, 2016

The City as a Commons – Christian Iaione interview by Kati Van de Velde for The Green European Journal. November 9, 2016

by | Nov 9, 2016 | Publications, Uncategorized

“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.
The Co-City: From the Tragedy to the Comedy of the Urban Commons – Sheila Foster, Washington, DC. The Nature of Cities, 2 November 2016

The Co-City: From the Tragedy to the Comedy of the Urban Commons – Sheila Foster, Washington, DC. The Nature of Cities, 2 November 2016

by | Nov 2, 2016 | Publications, Uncategorized

“When widely and intensely shared urban resources increase solidarity and generative potential, they can invert the tragedy of the commons paradigm.”

The article “The Co-City: From the Tragedy to the Comedy of the Urban Commons” by Sheila Foster published in The Nature of Cities, on 2 November 2016 analyses the concept of “urban commons” increasingly embraced by scholars, activists, citymakers, policymakers, and politicians. Taking reference from the essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garret Hardin, the author investigates how the concept of the commons changed once applied to the urban context, acquiring new meanings and transformative potential. The article investigates the difference between natural resources (traditional commons) and urban commons, and analyses different forms of management and governance of common goods in cities in line with the Bologna regulation – and the related co-city protocol designed by LabGov – that defines “urban commons” as following:

“Urban commons: the goods, tangible, intangible, and digital, that citizens and the Administration, [through] participative and deliberative procedures, recognize to be functional to the individual and collective wellbeing…to share the responsibility with the Administration of their care or regeneration in order to improve [their] collective enjoyment”

Read the full article here.