International Conference of Urban Commons

In June 2021, the University of Turin hosted the international and multidisciplinary conference on Urban Commons. Scholars and researchers involved belong to many different academic fields, ranging from architecture and urban planning experts to roman law and computer science scholars. The conference is part of the Horizon 2020 gE.CO project on generative commons.

Professor Ugo Mattei opened the Conference outlining the main roots of the Theory of the Commons. Such concept was born as a bottom-up defence against the rampant capitalism mind-set and the privatizations’ mantra. As regards the latter, Mattei noticed the unbalanced protection characterising expropriations processes vis à vis privatizations’ initiatives undertaken by governments. The former undergoes a strict ‘legal journey’ with the view of properly ensuring the due process, whereas privatizations are mere political decisions put forward by governments and legislatures. Accordingly, privatisations are often seen, and justified, as choices taken on account of the people such a government and legislature represent and they rest on the democracy principle that ties people and governors. However, Mattei pointed out, today’s privatisations very often do not pursue the interests of the people but purely economic rationales.

Some legal scholars started to reason about arguments to build a counter-hegemonic institution capable of facing that neo-liberal and privatizations’ view, coming up with The Commons. One of the first steps in this debate was to shape a principle of legitimacy able to underpin this legal category. Such a principle, or to say it better, the point of orientation steering the Theory of the Commons, was identified in the interests of future generations. To give further significance to the category future generations, Mattei pinpointed the necessity to consider long-term consequences of legislative measures and policies, specifically in the field of technology and environment. To this aim, the principle of precaution should play a role to counter the technology-solutionism perceiving technology as the sole and irrenounceable mean to solve each and every problem. On this background, the Conference aimed at describing the manifold aspects allowing Urban Commons to come into life.

In a nutshell, the term Urban Commons refers to a series of experiences in which groups of active citizens organize themselves from the bottom-up to take direct care of urban immovable goods, often urban voids or abandoned spaces, with the aim of managing and administering them through open and participatory governance mechanisms.

The first day of the Conference was devoted to analysing the places suitable to host Urban Commons, the participatory models underlying their governance and the challenges that Urban Commons may put forward. The second day shielded light on the technological and legal infrastructures of Urban Commons and, in the afternoon, a round table of day-to-day experiences was presented.

The first panel of scholars was mainly devoted to depicting where Urban Commons may develop. In the discussion about this argument two layers emerged, on the one hand, the material demand for spaces to create Urban Commons and, on the other, the need to acquire knowledge and awareness of places suitable to that end.

Chiara Lucchini exposing the ROCK project highlighted the role that historical and cultural heritage might have in fuelling regeneration, sustainable development, and economic growth for the whole city. Under this lens, the promotion of cultural heritage can be understood as a triggering factor for urban regeneration policies, interconnecting actors, skills, knowledge and values.

The researcher focused on Turin as a Model city for experience on the renovation of the city centre and the re-use of industrial cultural heritage to boost long-term publicly led to cultural policies. Accordingly, she proposed to expand the meaning of tangible cultural heritage to encompass not only the buildings located in the city centre but the entire built heritage of cities. Lucchini argued that building heritage should be defined in relation to the dismantling, abandonment and obsolescence generated on the urban fabrics by economic transition processes. Thus, vacant urban heritage should become an asset for defining strategic and development horizons of urban systems. More in-depth, she singled out vacant publicly owned properties as an opportunity to re-define widespread (temporary and permanent) urban regeneration processes.

Against this background, Lucchini investigated the main potentials of vacant public properties. First and foremost, such units could be useful in reactivating public spaces to support local development. Secondly, in mobilizing new actors with the view of increasing the relational and social capital and to develop new skills and competences. Lastly, enhancing vacant public may foster co-design and co-management of shared goods and services. To support these finding, many ongoing projects have been described.

To strengthen the potentials of vacant public units, Chiara Lucchini pinpointed an issue that under different shapes has been addressed in many other interventions throughout the Conference, namely the needs to increase city mapping to acquire a thorough knowledge of spaces suitable for Urban Commoning. The main tools in these regards can be surveying municipality-owned properties, using data analysis and mapping, merging and connecting data sources belonging to the municipality concerned (such as Cadastre, city plans). Nonetheless, alongside the potentials of vacant public units, the lecturer advocated a change in the political mind-set to re-define our system of values concerning the role of built heritage and its role in city planning.

With the same mind of exploring spaces potentially suitable for hosting Urban Common, Davide di Modugno investigated Ecclesiastical and Ecclesial goods. The researcher estimated over 600,000 places of worship in Europe but, such a bulk of goods screeches if confronted with other phenomena affecting the communities of believers. Indeed, rampant processes of secularization are eroding these communities as well as the number of priest and religious people. Moreover, movements of population from villages to metropolitan area are leading to the abandonment of many places of worship. Accordingly, di Modugno proposes the adaptive reuse of these churches, oratories, chapels and monasteries.

Starting from 1978, The Diocese of Turin is readjusting to manifold profane uses some of its worship places, specifically, 47 churches, 13 chapels and 38 oratories. However, di Modugno pointed out some pitfalls in those initiatives, such as the lack of strategic vision, the recourse to simple legal instruments (gift to municipality or free loan) and the scarce involvement of the local community.

This notwithstanding, some examples testify a different approach is possible. In particular, Belgium legislation provides for the public ownership of parish churches and for the strategic plan as a way to solve the redundancy of Catholic places of worship in Flanders. A local association, the Centre for Religious Art and Culture, is in charge of drafting strategic plans and supporting participatory processes. Therefore, di Modugno advocates the introduction of those plans in each municipality to foster participation between stakeholders (Diocese, municipality and local communities), cultural valorisation, mixed use and adaptive reuse.

The third intervention edited by Federico Camerin investigated the panorama of former military sites as potential generators of Urban Commons. Before discussing the commoning processes those sites, (specifically military barracks) might host, the researcher underlined the legal framework of military sites. Those goods are owned by the State and considered unavailable domain but, if the Ministry of Defence establish their usefulness, those sites can be transferred to the available domain.

However, the national legislation on the disposal of military barracks do not give clear guidance on how to deal with those sites. Accordingly, Camerin advocated the adoption of new laws and burocratic procedures capable of guaranteeing the overlay between institutional and local actors.

Moreover, as yet indicated by Chiara Lucchini, research in the public properties field is hampered by the lack of knowledge about the current state of the assets and by the lack of State public resources.

Then, Camerin presented the main characteristics for assessing re-development processes aimed at creating Commons from those sites. Overall, these features point toward fostering participation, a comprehensive vision of the project, the valorisation of the nature and biodiversity and the harmony between public bodies, real estate agents and citizens involved. And, against this background, he exposed two case studies, one as profit-driven space and the other as a champion of urban commoning.

The Guido Reni barracks is an example of redevelopment of large real estate steered by economic considerations. The project started as a top-down approach and erasing the tangible and intangible values. Moreover, the transparency and democracy in the decision-making process was largely unsatisfactory. Even the visual culture of the buildings was used for supporting marketing strategies. Completely different is the Porto Fluviale barracks project born as a bottom-up initiative aiming at conserving and enhancing the existing community and activities. Thus, such a project tried to advance the anthropic function of the properties and seeking harmony between occupants and public bodies.

Camerin concluded advocating for a comprehensive urban scale planning based on long-term strategies able to consider military sites. However, he noticed that urban commoning processes in this domain are hampered by the highly lucrative and desirable locations of former military places for real estate development.

Lorenza Manfredi exposed an example of interim uses taking place in Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Since the beginning of the new millennium the city of Berlin was insert into the competition between global cities, thus it witnessed a rampant neo-liberal development and urban lands appropriation. This notwithstanding, many protests related to urban issues took place in the last 10 years and processes of familiarisation, namely collective feelings of connection with urban space, are evident in several areas.

One of the most meaningful examples of the latter processes is the project developed in the abandoned zones of the urban area of RAW Gelande. The space started to be accommodated to host cultural and sport facilities, concert hall and many other community initiatives. Such a project is interesting for the dialogue process undertaken by the current owner of the site and the district administrations to get access to fund to renovate the site while preserving the community projects already present. Such a dialogue involved several stakeholders, users, neighbourhood representatives, politicians and policy makers, owners, residents, and the general public. The District Assembly acknowledged that ‘self-managed, alternative housing and cultural projects are an indispensable part of our district’ and are worth preserving.

The morning session concluded with the presentation of the ‘Active ground floor’ project aiming at combining abandoned urban areas with the absence of public free in Thessaloniki (Greece). As the name of the project suggests its focus are the ground floor of buildings, mainly shops that are empty because of the economic crisis.

The project started recognising the crisis was affecting the neighbourhoods in many Greek cities, namely the physical, social and economic decline experienced by residents in some urban areas.

After a brief historical overview of the urbanisation process of Greek cities, where urban growth was out of State control hence construction regulations foresaw few common areas for inhabitants, the speakers started outlining how their project began.

To counter the lack of common spaces, a survey was launched in 2018 about eight building blocks. The results highlighted 67 inactive stores at the ground floor. Accordingly, such empty space underwent a social and physical renewal to become urban commons. The two main feature of the project are how local communities were engaged and the implementation process in collaboration with the municipality. The concrete implementation of the project involved once again many stakeholders, the municipality funding the project, the owner of the shop giving its agreement to using the empty space and the local community engagement to strengthen social cohesion and to improve the leaving standards and daily life of the inhabitants creating entertainment worth for them.

The two round of the afternoon session were devoted to describing the engagement in and the impact of urban commons. The first pool of lecturers investigated how communities participate and seek to govern urban commons.

The first intervention focused on the Greek framework and was edited by Fotini Nasioka and Paschalis Arvanitidis. They investigated how citizens act collectively to provide themselves basic utilities through bottom-up strategies, specifically they shielded light on the role of political ideology in the commoning process and the role of collective action.

First and foremost, the lecturers pinpointed two of the main drawbacks of the Common Pool resources, the non-excludability of people from the use of common resources and the rivalry between users, meaning that someone’s consumption reduces the overall availability of resources. Moreover, the independent action of individuals leads to using more resources that coordinated activities.

Accordingly, the authors presented main cornerstones the ‘Ostromian’ theory on collective action: (a) the design principles, (b) the methodological frameworks (SES and IAD frameworks) and (c) the multiple methods used (i.e., case studies, meta-analysis, comparative research, experimental research, Agent-based models – ABM). These theory was practically analysed by referring to two case studies taking place in Athens (Greece) ‘Agroscholoi Vrilissou’ and ‘Botanical garden in Petroupoli’.

The analysis concluded in identifying some critical variables for the success of the project, the ideological neutrality, the relationship of participants with the resources, the existence of rules of appropriation and the presence of leadership.

Juan Arana presented two strategies of collective spatial appropriation taking place in Madrid and the author focused on how the Covid-19 outbreak influenced those strategies. They aim at creating value in their urban environment by supporting neighbourhood and providing participative responses to local communities’ needs. Such strategies recognise the urban space as an ever-evolving environment shaped by social relations and local political actions, and they intend to react against devaluation and enclosure of public spaces.

The first project is The Liberated Self-Managed Sociocultural Space Eko de Carabanchel (ESLA Eko), one of the bastions of the Occupied Social Centres movement in Madrid since 2011. Today, it is a place of networking between different projects governed by principles of political resistance and governance. Two of the key principles are horizontality and mutual care thereby it is considered as a social prototype in which the relationships among people, the environment, space or work are not mediated by the capitalist system. During the pandemic such a centre kept assisting vulnerable families with food basket and hygiene pack.

The second project presented neighbourhood solidarity network Vallekas Somos Tribu. It was born during the first weeks of pandemic crisis with the view of helping vulnerable people in a city’s area (Puente de Vallecas) having high level of vulnerability. It opened solidarity food pantries based in self-managed spaces in every neighbourhood of the district.

As a last remark, the author exposed the ambiguous relationship between the City Council and those projects. The city administration does not openly support the latter even though social services kept deriving people to them and promotes enclosure campaigns for those self-managed spaces.

Maria Francesca de Tullio e Violante Torre explored the relationship between commons and EU institutions trying to figure how the latter can better support the development of the former while countering exclusionary dynamics endangering direct participation of commoners to EU projects. Their analysis builds on the case study of Hablarenarte (Madrid), in the EU project ‘Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities’, this example is emblematic because it involves strong stakeholders necessary for the match funding of EU programs.

On this background, the authors underlined the main participatory problems between the EU and the commoners, specifically favouring strong intermediaries not connected with commons and the blurred distinction between municipality and commoning experiences in the EU understanding. Such drawbacks reverberate on the practical management of EU projects, where the EU prefers to support institutional actors and EU projects are confronted with strong problems of accessibility and political emptiness of the topics treated.

To counter these loopholes de Tullio e Torre proposed to create networks connecting commoners directly, rather than public or private intermediaries bearer of commoners’ interests; to provide for some participatory requirements in the application process of EU projects; to develop a toolkit for local authorities in order to recognise commons and to develop a Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) to certify commoning activities based on the criteria identifying a common, such as the active participation of all the relevant stakeholders.

The last intervention on the participatory governance of urban commons held by Federico Damin looked at legal issues concerning the right to the city and the enforceability of horizontal subsidiarity.

The author tried to spell out the normative content of the right to the city, as the right to control the means of urbanisation but also as the right to participation, appropriation and self-management. Such a right appears to be a collective right with an individual exercise. Furthermore, it is acquiring further normative content through one of the most authoritative legal documents on sustainable development, namely the 2030 U.N. Agenda on sustainable development, where one of the goals refers to sustainable cities and communities.

Alongside, Damin focused on the principle of horizontal subsidiarity, principle aiming at favouring the expression of individuals and social organisations and encapsulating a duty of public authorities to abstain in activities of public interest. However, under the Italian Constitution (article 118.4), such a principle seems a mere procedural principle to allocate social activities and public services.

The author argues that principle might acquire substantial significance by combining it with the right to the city. Some hits in this direction can be drawn from how the legal standing of commoners is evolving in disputes challenging local governments’ decisions on urban commons. At the European level, some jurisprudential innovations are trying to re-shape the current criterion to determine the legal standing for annulment proceedings (Plaumann test). Specifically, the individual and direct concern test is evolving toward a substantial adverse effect test. Other evidence to give substantial meaning to subsidiarity can be derived from the case-law of the Italian Constitutional Court in the judgement 131/2020 on the value of subsidiarity in expressing people’s identity in the realm of social freedoms.

Altogether, the author concludes that individuals need to have the right to challenge decisions on the use of urban commons because the right to the city afford legal standing and the horizontal subsidiarity is violated when there is no prior participation.

The second round of lecturers dealt with the challenges and the risks urban regeneration may have on the communities and spaces it takes place.

Clara J. Reich, Adam Curtis and Anna Louise Bradley presented A Youthful Urban Commons: high schoolers reimagine the schoolyard as public space. They referred to Norwegians project PlaceCity: Placemaking for Sustainable, Thriving Cities, a placemaking initiative funded by the EU.

Placemaking is an approach to ensure both public spaces and the Urban Commons function to jointly serve and motivate benefits for locals – such as strengthening a sense of belonging, forming liveable and loveable neighbourhoods that are affordable and representative, and stimulating value creation. Such approach rests on four ingredients (1) anti-gentrification mechanisms via genuine inclusivity of locals, (2) temporary interventions indicating the most appropriate long term design/use of the public space, (3) innovative governance models to sustain local circular value creation, and (4) open-access tools to encourage engagement, understand the place, and contextually compare applications.

Veronica Pecile addressed the phenomenon of turistification in Southern Italy, a discourse and an ideology aiming at re-organising urban spaces in line with the needs of investors and tourists, based on a moralised, depoliticised and governmental notion of the commons. To investigate such a framework the author relied on the case study of Palazzo Penne in Naples, city simultaneously marked by a tourism-based urban economy, based on a value extraction, and by a strong mobilisation toward common.

The public administration started an impressive urban renewal plan in order to redeem the city’s image from its reputation of European urban outcast, plan accelerating in the aftermaths of the 2008 economic crisis. However, in carrying out such renewal public property assets have shifted from being used as a tool to guarantee the right to housing for popular classes to being a monetised resource to meet increasing amounts of touristic flows.

Against these flaws the network SET – Southern Europe against Turistification started being active in Naples as a form of resistance against the consequences of the adoption of a tourism-led urban economy. An example of such resistance takes place in Palazzo Penne, a publicly owned building which should be turned in an ‘House of Architecture and Design’ managed by the University of Naples. The SET movement criticises on several grounds such an initiative being it a paradigmatical example of social economic distortion driven by tourists and economical needs and reclaims the right to access and use of Palazzo Penne for all inhabitants.

The last intervention presented by Alessandra Pera sought to investigate the Italian initiative of ‘Case a 1 euro’ launched with the view of preserving abandoned properties in some Southern cities. The analysis based on the case study of the Gangi municipality looked into the contractual schemes employed to implement such an initiative and into the policy choices in order to determine whether the proposed goals were achieved by the administration and other parties involved.

On the first point, the municipality provides for a list of eligible houses and these properties are transferred through a process known as ‘cessione a titolo gratuito’, a threefold arrangement involving the owner of the property, willing to transfer the property for free, the municipality, mainly mandated to promote the initiative and the beneficiary that receive the house and commits to comply with some objectives. The main requirements are to secure the building immediately after the acquisition, prepare the renovation and the refurbishing of the project within two months and enter into a ‘polizza fideiussoria’ in the interest of the municipality. The municipality is not a party of the property transfer, but it is involved in the procedure since it stipulates some obligations to handle those buildings. Accordingly, two contractual schemes are necessary: beneficiary-municipality and owner-beneficiary.

In recent developments of this initiative, the municipality restated its commitment with some adjustment, for instance in case the beneficiary does not abide by its obligation, the municipality can acquire the property of the good or cashing in the surety policy.

Such initiatives are an example of cooperation between public and private entities, whereby the municipality monitor and follow-up the compliance with refurbishing obligations. A report of April 2021 indicated that beneficiaries were complying with the above-mentioned obligations.

The morning session of the second day was devoted to the infrastructures for Urban Commons particularly exploring the digital tools and the legal frameworks able to craft and develop them.

Sean Peacock exposed how to create digital urban commons for and with youth. He presented three projects involving and supporting youth in designing toolkits for place-based actions. In details, Sense Explores a toolkit to engage children in addressing air pollution crisis in Newcastle by gathering data about problems in their neighbourhood – such as air pollution or speeding traffic – and come up with ideas to make it a better place. Secondly, Sunderland Youth a blended toolbox to support environmental action and thirdly The Transport Forum an online repository to help youth use public transport by providing the latest information on bus, metro and ferry services.

The second intervention presented by Tommaso Fia looked at the datification of community interactions and services supply, such as data-driven water supply and sensor enabled urban mobility. Altogether, these solutions constitute the smart city but, at the same time, imply the marketisation and the privatisation of public services. The standpoint proposed by the author aims at proposing a new kind of governance for all these data based on the idea of ‘urban data commons’ (UDC).

Fia went through the bulk of literature presenting governance systems opening up data access, namely to enable citizens to ‘take back their data’ thereby managing them in a common fashion. The author posited that enhanced data access would increase accountability, transparency and competitiveness of smart city (private) actors while recognising that open commons and open access do not solve the problems related to power centralisation.

To solve such a loophole, the author proposed to see data governance in smart cities as a matter of positive and negative externalities. Accordingly, models to mitigate externalities need to be found. On positive externalities, drawing on the Fritz Schumacher’s critique of large-scale ownership, Fia imagined the redistribution of data-driven surplus in the smart city from the top to the bottom through participation of local communities to decision-making and profit or through IP-benefit sharing principles. On negative externalities, he referred both to the notion of algorithmic nuisance based on the precautionary principle, processing purposes valuing citizens’ and communities’ flourishing and to liability rules for compensation and indemnification.

Alberto Guffanti presented the Co3 Project – Disruptive Technologies for Urban Commoning aiming at studying how those technologies impact on co-creation, co-production and co-management of open public services, hence in the relationship between the Public Administration and the citizens. The five disruptive technologies considered are Augmented Reality, Blockchain, Delocalized Social Networks, Interactive Democracy and Gamification and their impact is analysed on a threefold dimension involving social engagement, economic sustainability and legal implications.

To the study’s ends, the Co3 projects established an Augmented Commoning Area (ACA), a physical-digital blended space where relationships are enhanced by Co3 technologies promoting the mutual exchange of tangible and intangible resources among participants.

Guffanti focused on the pilot projects taking place in Turin, Paris and Athens. The one in Turin have being implemented through the network Rete Case del Quartiere, in charge of managing public spaces and for active citizens. For instance, Augmented Reality is employed to visualise contents relating to ongoing and upcoming activities, a Blockchain wallet is used as co-management support to facilitate the allocation of spaces to planned activities.

Overall, the lecturers concluded that disruptive technologies could foster citizens’ participation in productions and management, but some risks and difficulties exist, as privacy and ethics concerns and the digital divide hampering the access to those kinds of technologies.

The second round dealt with the interactions between Urban Commons and the law, specifically deepening the existing legal tools to support and substantiate urban regeneration and commoning practices.

Simone Gheduzzi analysed the relations between communities of self-government and management of common goods and public administrations trying to strike the proper balance between the growing number of committees and associations willing to take care of the city and the role of Public Administrations’ mandate to bear the costs of managing urban commons.

The author acknowledged the PA is poorly equipped to truly valorise public patrimony. It would need new instruments to this end and private law, surpassing urban and public law, can help to build a civic community as a kind of ecosystem, in which innovation processes my incubate. Gheduzzi referred to three private law models able to facilitate the implementation of interventions on public patrimony, the Trust, the Common Good Foundation and the SPAB (Società per Azioni Buone, in English Good Action Company). These three models were analysed by making reference to three different case studies. Interestingly enough, the SPAB, developed in the Farm Cultural Park (Favara, Sicily), is a company that aims to improve the city and the life of its citizens, open to all: every citizen can be a shareholder and therefore owner of a small piece of city. The projects carried out by such a company have to be economically sustainable and a part of the profits deriving from these projects will then be redistributed between the partners.

Tommaso della Massara e Alvise Schiavon explored some institutes of Roman law useful to be taken into account in the discourse of urban commons. At the outset, the authors clarified that roman law recognised a class of public goods characterised by their availability to the public (res in usu publico), regarded as the object of a collective possession by the citizens, in respect of which the latter had specific possessory claims vested by interdicta, exercisable by any Roman citizen to defend the public usability of the good. These possessory remedies marked the prevalence of everyone’s possession over someone’s ownership.

This legal construction deriving from Roman law would confirms what was already recognised by Stefano Rodotà, that commons are the opposite of property, individual claims concerning the co-usage of a common cannot take the form of a traditional property claim.

On this background, the authors proposed to interpret article 1145 cc (possession of things extra commercium) to establish a system of possessory remedies protecting the common usage of public goods. However, such a line of reasoning presents several hurdles; the main one is the Italian Courts’ reticence to maintain the general interest to keep the conditions of usability of a public good can be a legitimate cause for instituting possessory remedies, rather only recognising the individual possession as protected under article 1145 cc.

Fabrizio Cesareo was confronted with the relationship between civic uses and urban commons and environmental protection and environmental resources. Civic uses have been defined as partial real rights over the property of others that member of local communities exercise so each individual community member can benefit from it. Many legislative measures recognise and protect civic uses and their existence is intrinsically linked to the environment. Likewise, the Italian Constitutional Court itself has recently underlined the central function of civic uses for environmental and landscape conservation.

Considering that the environment is deemed a ‘public good’, the author advocated a rereading of the social function of the property (article 42 Italian Constitution) to establish social and ecological functions and brings about the free and dignified existence of the human person. To this aim, the principle of environmental solidarity and the principle of sustainability come to the aid, translating in the social function of the property by striking the balance between the interests of the individual and the present and future interests of the community.

In these regards, the author noticed the Law 20 November 2017, no. 168 which expanded the legislation on civic uses through the discipline of collective domains, recognizing its private nature, also acknowledges the concept of collective property, the role of the community, the collective function of civic goods.

The last intervention of the morning session Seitanidis Sokratis and Gritzas Giorgos introduced their case study on the former military camp Karatasiou in Greece to explore the role urban commons play in official planning practice and process.

The camp was an urban void and, in 2011, a group of dwellers Periastikoi Kalliergites (PerKa), against privatization, segmentation, selling out of the land and construction on it, committed to maintain the area as an open green space for citizens. They established a self-management and community decision making congregation of cultivators discharging farming activities not for profit, it covers part of the members’ needs, and it supports vulnerable social groups and is based on the principles of organic, biodynamic or natural farming. The regeneration of the former military camp took place through a broad public participation urban planning and design. The plan has been recently approved by the municipality but not by the Ministry of Defence.

Such an experience shows as urban common may protect public spaces from privatization and enhancing the publicness of open spaces.

The conference came to an end organising a Round Table of Urban Commons in Action, exploring some day-to-day experience from all around the world.

Nicolas Bataille, Teresa Carlone, Federica Gatta, Cècile Lèonardi and Ianira Vassallo presented a comparison of commoning processes between Italy and France. The lecturers investigated whether urban commons regulations produce urban and architectural regeneration or, vice versa, urban regeneration produces urban commons regulation issues. The research was carried out on three different cities, Turin, Bologne and Grenoble.

As regards Bologne, the authors focused on the models of Patti di Collaborazione and Laboratorio Spazi, two tools aimed at involving local communities to take charge of urban commons, the latter providing for the participation of communities in administrative procedure put in place to allocate and administrate real estate owned by the Municipality or to promote temporary uses. The Turin’s experience was built on the Co-City – UIA (Urban Innovative Actions) project (2017–2020) implementing pacts of collaboration and making residents actor of urban change. Lastly, Grenoble administration devised a policy instrument called GREN’ DE PROJECT aiming at optimising public properties.

Alice Covatta dealt with the Montreal’s transformation from post-industrial city into a creative hub. The starting assumption is that urban voids are perceived as a problem under both an aesthetic and health point of view, conflicting with our idea of beautiful and transmitting insecurity and deterioration. The lecturer presented five transitory project that embody the idea of ‘temporary city’ developing alongside traditional planning aimed at permanent requalification of sites. Such temporary urbanisms can foster participation and creativity.

Adriana Goni was confronted with the recovery of empty spaces for civic uses at Montevideo City. Iolanda Bianchi analysed how public policies democratise community asset transfer in Barcelona, she viewed urban commons as a way to radically democratise local governments by analysing two models put forward in Barcelona. Barcelona en Comù a legal framework to institutionalise community asset transfer and Patrimoni Ciutada, a normative framework to foster citizens management of socio-cultural facilities and spaces.

In conclusion, Zacharias Valiantzas and Paschalis Arvanitidis explored how commoning can create alternatives for supporting housing initiatives. The underlying theoretical path rest on the social function of the property and the social obligations driving from it as well as on the right to the city tailored on housing as a right. The author analysed different case studies from Europe and Latin America outlining their specificities at contextual, organizational and political levels.