Abstract
A good city is like a good party, people stay longer than really necessary, because they are enjoying it. The vibes of places matter, feelings and perceptions play a crucial role in leading people’s choices and behaviours when it comes to public space. Indeed, pages have been spent in addressing to the concept of atmosphere in social life a somewhat function. In this chapter, I will try to investigate why collective moods arise and to what extent they are effective in making and maintaining specific kind of urban communalities. In discussing the conditions of such processes, we should refer to what has been identified by David Harvey with the name of commoning. How different actors join together in a common governance of a certain public space? Or to put it differently, which resources contribute to increase social capital in a given urban setting?
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Notes
- 1.
The equivalence, public space-public good, has been explored by different scholars in accordance to different approaches. Among the others Ilaria Vitellio expresses it clearly in her text “Spazi Pubblici come beni comuni”; she explains that in order to split up the double dimension of space, the economic theory comes to help. In fact, before defining space as economic good, crucial is to deeply understand its nature. Indeed, spaces have a multifaceted identity: a physical place where things can happen and a place to craft a collective moral code. Among the theories that have influenced the practice of planning, the one adopting public goods’ glance seems to be the most efficient. In fact, it allows to translate the physical dimension in economic features and to transmit the public dimension of space in the figure of the State and a modern citizenship. Indeed, the first characteristics, i.e. being the place of and for all can be read as non-excludability and non-rivalrous features of public goods (Vitellio 2005).
- 2.
The debate on subsidiarity is still evolving, albeit its pivotal role. The most recent definition highlights the importance of a strategic interdependency among civil society and public administrations at local level in order to explore new possibilities of integration to cope urban and societal challenges. Horizontal subsidiarity plays in a wide range of actions, involving at different scale and levels public administration and social actors (Foster and Iaione 2016).
- 3.
Respectively, Teatro Valle Occupato and Macao of Milano are two different examples which point out how a range of actions are undertaken by civic society to raise voice against privatisation and unmet needs. On 5 May 2012, a group of artists and professionals in the field of culture have occupied a 33-storeys abandoned skyscraper, which soon became Macao or “The New Centre for Arts, Culture and Research”. Same fate awaited Teatro Valle in Rome, when back in 2011 a theatre of the Eighteenth century was occupied in the heart of Rome. The theatre had closed that year after the abolition of Ente Teatrale Italiano, which was the main public funding body within the Italian Theatre sector. In this case, the occupation was supposed to last few days, but instead the theatre has remained occupied for three years, until 11 August 2014, and by that time, the occupants, who defined their selves as “communards”, developed a range of activities based on arts and culture.
- 4.
The Magna Charta is a document dated 1217: the charter placed implicit limits on the exploitation of natural resources and paid attention to the need to reproduce and preserve those resources.
- 5.
Specifically, with regard to the Italian framework, it is possible to recognize different approaches in terms of collective ownership: public goods and the so-called collective properties. If we think about the commons as ethic and civil value, both of the ownership’s models can be encompassed in these two definitions. However, attention must be put towards the concept of collective properties, which origins from the idea of “civic uses”. This particular case finds its roots in a crucial historical function: indeed, first of all they are the legacy of an ancient tradition of collective resources’ shared management, which highlights the community’s value in spite of the individual dimension. Secondly, civic uses taught us that a forward looking contribute to avoid depletion and the tragedy of commons. Civic uses both in public and administrative law, presents the collective rights of use and enjoyment of certain goods as one of the three cases which, together with the state property and the property itself, craft the notion of public property (Capone 2018).
- 6.
The idea of commons comes down from the past and moves its first steps from Garret Hardin’s famous article “The tragedy of commons”. The seminal paper by Hardin represents the threshold beyond which every discussion was brought, emphasizing the controversial issues related to the delicate balance between benefits and costs.
- 7.
Rivalry and excludability are features belonging to all economic goods’ categories. According to their nature, i.e. public, private or club goods, those two characteristics may change. As far as concern CPRs, they are not excludible but rivalrous. This means that one’s individual consumption of a good or service does not prevent others from consuming the same good, whereas being rivalrous means that the use of these resources by one person diminishes what is left for others to use.
- 8.
At the beginning of the French Revolution, healthy and sanitary conditions in France were miserable as in the rest of Europe and the Country was in need of reforms, yet a deep economic crisis was at the core of the institutional stakes. Right after the end of the Middle-Age, the black plague ended to murder a third of the European population and when, thereafter, cities started to grow again in terms of inhabitants and dimension, hygienic conditions were still a legacy of the previous era. In London due to the high rate of population growth, new housing solutions were required, and more houses meant more pollution, contributing to increase the already existing unhealthy environment. A common belief addressed the risk of infection to airborne contagious, whereas the epidemy cause needed to be found in the streets’ cleaning standards. Just then, a bunch of engineers realized that in order to overcome that decay, by acting as city’s craftsmen, they could have been entitled to provide better life’s conditions. Therefore, new smooth flooring flourished throughout cities with the aim of facilitate the cleaning. This is just to say that the underlying belief was that, by making the streets cleaner, inhabitants would have been less keen to make them dirty again, producing a sense of stewardship for something of common interest. And so it was (Sennett 2018).
- 9.
Quality of life as paramount achievement for cities has become so relevant in the global discourse that the European Commission has tracked the quality of life in cities since 2004, and the United Nations has stressed the importance of the qualitative impact on urban life by funding studies and projects based on social inclusiveness, sustainability and participation (European Commission 2013).
- 10.
Source: Comune di Roma, La popolazione di Roma. struttura e dinamica demografica, 2017.
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Antonucci, F. (2020). From Urban Commons to Commoning as Social Practice. In: Macrì, E., Morea, V., Trimarchi, M. (eds) Cultural Commons and Urban Dynamics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54418-8_12
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