Malebolge
Right to the City or Urban Commoning?
Thoughts on the Generative Transformation
of Property Law
Ugo Mattei and Alessandra Quarta*
Abstract
The economic and political transformations determined by the rise of
neoliberalism are usually studied at a state dimension, while the urban one is
quite ignored. Nevertheless, the government of the city has been influenced
by global and national recent changes and all the municipal sectors have been
touched by the austerity’s recipe. The decrease of urban public spaces, their
privatizations as well as gentrification transform city planning that is often
unable to elaborate alternative solutions against the overexploitation of the
urban territory and the increase of inequalities caused by economic crisis. In
a city, after all, it is impossible to hide inequalities and injustices.
In the last years, cities have often been the theater of political struggles
against the privatization of public spaces, evictions and the dissolution of the
urban welfare. In many cases, the demonstrators have occupied parks or
abandoned buildings (theatre, condominiums…), and used them to find a
temporary solution to their different needs (housing, social space, new forms
of work, urban gardens…).
They denounce the great number of public or private empty spaces (for
instance, the abandoned infrastructures left by the process of deindustrialization) and their neglect. According to the right to the city they
claim, the inhabitants have to produce urban spaces starting from their own
needs: empty spaces become an opportunity, the urban care is a collective
task. This approach shares the logic of the commons, which reclaims a new
paradigm based on inclusion, participation and social and ecological use of
resources: according to many scholars, also urban spaces are commons.
After a description of this wide context, the article explores the
connection between commons and the right to the city.
* Ugo Mattei is Professor of Civil Law at the University of Turin, Department of
Law and Professor of Comparative Law at the Hastings College of Law, California.
Alessandra Quarta is Research Fellow at the University of Turin, Department of Law
and Director of Research at the International University College of Turin (IUC). The
research for this article has been conducted jointly. Alessandra Quarta has drafted
sections 1, 3, 4; Ugo Mattei has drafted section 2. Thanks to Giovanni Ferrero for his
comments and to Peppe Mastruzzo and Keaton Allen-Gessesse for their editorial
assistance.
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Introduction
If they study the topic at all, property law scholars usually only
study the economic and political transformations created by the rise
of neoliberalism at a State level (that of the Civil Code and of
legislation), often ignoring both the global and the local dimensions.
In particular, they ignore transformations at the urban level, leaving
it to scholars of administrative law whose approach very often tends
to be quite narrow and positivistic. Nevertheless, global changes have
affected the government of the city and the very nature of property
and the European austerity policy has stricken the autonomy of
national and local rulers. The contraction of urban public spaces and
their privatization as well as gentrification transform city planning
and weaken the power of municipal authorities. Most often, such
authorities are unable to resist overexploitation of the urban territory
enabled by extractive property law and cannot tackle the growing
inequality caused by global capitalistic transformations. This
phenomenon reflects the current ratio of power between the public
sector (very weak) and the private sector (very strong) with the
former at the mercy of the latter. In a city, the consequences of this
dramatic imbalance of power which defeats all the assumptions of
Western liberal constitutionalism are extremely easy to detect. After
all, in the urban context where, for the first time in history, most
humans live, it is impossible to hide inequality and injustice.
In the recent past, cities have often been the theater of political
struggles against the privatization of public spaces, evictions, and the
dissolution of the urban welfare. In many cases, the demonstrators
have occupied parks or abandoned buildings (including theatres and
condominiums, among others), and used them to find a temporary
solution to their different needs (housing, social space, new forms of
work, urban gardens, etc). Social movements denounce the great
number of public or private empty spaces — for instance, the derelict
infrastructures left by the process of de-industrialization — and their
neglect. According to ‘the right to the city’, they claim, the law should
enable inhabitants to ‘generate’ urban spaces starting from their own
needs: empty spaces become an opportunity, and urban care a
collective ‘generative’ task. This approach, now shared by a broad
international network of scholars and activists, assumes the logic of
the commons, which reclaims a new paradigm based on inclusion,
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Right to the City or Urban Commoning?
305
participation, and social and ecological use of resources. According to
many scholars, urban spaces are also commons.
This short essay intends to explore the connection between
commons and the right to the city in the Italian experience,
developing a broader idea of civic participation than that realized in
different contexts by the existent process of participated city
planning. In the last two years, the ‘right to the city’ that the
commons movement has unveiled has induced many Italian
municipalities to adopt some original models of urban regulation.
According to these ‘commons sharing regulations’ now approved in
dozens of cities throughout Italy, citizens can take care of urban
spaces such as flowerbeds, urban gardens, or empty buildings,
entering into a sharing agreement (patto di condivisione) with the
municipality. The enactment of such regulations recognizes a much
more horizontal relationship between the administrative authority
and ordinary citizens. It is the enacted result of years of cultural and
political struggles for the commons, and while often quite moderate
in its political inspiration, has the potential to change the very notion
of governance of the urban territory. If applied on both private and
public land of significant residential value, it can contribute to a
reduction of the land rent, giving a more immediate solution to
collective needs and facilitating civic engagement from which
political alternatives can grow.
I. The Neoliberal Crisis of the Cities
In recent years, many legal scholars and many social
movements have discussed the relevance and the real meaning of
the right to the city, theorized in the sixties by Henri Lefebvre,1
reactivated a decade later by Manuel Castells,2 and examined today
by David Harvey and his radical geography.3 Social movements
claim the right to the city to protest against the unfair distribution
1
H. Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968).
M. Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1977).
3
D. Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
(London-New York: Verso, 2012).
2
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of wealth and power:4 particularly after 2008, when the economic
and financial crisis exploded, they have claimed the public use of
urban spaces and demanded more participation in the decisionmaking processes that concern city planning.
Until the nineteen eighties, Italian legal scholars studied urban
development and in particular the contents of the Fundamental
Planning Act;5 they discussed the measure of compensation for
expropriation, the nature of the limits to property, and the
significance of the social function of private property (Art 42 Italian
Constitution).6 In this context, legal scholars verified the possibility
of applying the classic idea of property (based on individualism and
absolutism) in the urban framework, where the limits to the powers
of the owner are very clear and undeniable.7 In fact, the development
of the city involves the structure and the effects of private property,
since planning activities limit the powers of the owner. In particular,
an important issue addressed by that wave of scholarship was the
nature of development rights (ie the power to build) as a way to
control the growth of the city and to assure equality between owners
and non-owners. Property law scholars then did not simply consider
city planning as a part of administrative law and they discussed how
to control land rent-seeking, while today such a radical critique of the
structure of private ownership is all but taboo.8 For more than two
decades, coinciding with the hegemony of neoliberal thought, Italian
property law scholars simply revamped the paradigm of ownership
as exclusion from a zone of individual sovereignty to be reconciled
with other similar zones to which other owners were entitled.
4
The examples come from New York, with its Occupy Wall Street Movement,
Barcelona with Indignados, Istanbul with the struggles in Gezi Park, Hong Kong.
5
The legge no 1150 was passed in 1942 and modified many times, but a general
reform has never been made and every attempt at doing it has failed.
6
The last complete Italian studies about property and urban development are A.
Gambaro, Jus aedificandi e nozione civilistica della proprietà (Milano: Giuffrè,
1975) and Id, Proprietà privata e disciplina urbanistica (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1977).
7
Urban property is said ‘conformed’, because the owner has to respect many
limits, as for instance a defined distance between buildings, aesthetic standards,
height limits, etc.
8
A. Quarta, ‘La polvere sotto il tappeto. Rendita fondiaria e accesso ai beni
comuni dopo trent’anni di silenzio’ Rivista critica del diritto privato, 253-272
(2013).
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At the end of the seventies through the following two decades, the
return to dominance of the individualistic and absolute idea of
private property coincided with the political choice to liberalize the
market and to privatize many public services and public assets. The
Thatcher government in the UK began this neoliberal turn, which
quickly became the dominant paradigm in economics and politics
throughout continental Europe. In particular, in the early nineties,
the Italian government decided to privatize many public companies
and to sell many public assets.9 Property law scholars were called
upon to provide a robust theory of property rights to cope with the
new broad area that privatization opened to private law and to
ordinary jurisdiction as opposed to that of administrative law. The
most ‘natural’ move given the intellectual climate of the time was to
look to robust theory in the US legal system where the role and scope
of property rights were very significant and where administrative law
could not count on a different circuit of courts such as the one typical
of the civil law tradition.
These political and economic decisions have revealed or perhaps
even determined the weakness of the State and the public sector
against private corporations and, in general, against market forces.10
The neoliberal rhetoric in general and its translation into the Italian
system in particular would introduce the idea that the State is just
like any other market actor, which as such must compete on the
market which is the natural playing field. Nevertheless, bureaucracy
and corruption make the State a poor market competitor, so that it
would be desirable if it could abandon the market in favor of other
more efficient private competitors. Such prestigious and influential
public law scholars and policy-makers as Cassese, Amato and
Bassanini have thus theorized the so-called ‘regulatory state’ as the
only solution capable of reforming the Italian system.11 Under this
9
E. Barucci and F. Pierobon, Le privatizzazioni in Italia (Roma: Carocci, 2007).
U. Mattei, E. Reviglio and S. Rodotà eds, Invertire la rotta: idee per una
riforma della proprietà pubblica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007).
11
S. Cassese, ‘Stato e mercato dopo privatizzazioni e deregulation’ Rivista
trimestrale di diritto pubblico, 378-387 (1991); Id, La nuova costituzione economica
(Roma-Bari: Laterza, 5th ed, 2012); G. Amato, ‘Il mercato nella Costituzione’ Quaderni
Costituzionali, 7-19 (1992); for a general perspective about the regulatory state, see
D. Oliver, R. Rawlings and T. Prosser eds, The Regulatory State: Constitutional
Implications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); G. Majone and A. La Spina,
10
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theory, the State should only draft the rules of the game and check,
through independent authorities, that the private market actors
respect them. These ideas have been the Trojan horse for the final
dissolution of the public sector in favor of corporate interests, done
with the full consent of the most acclaimed in academia. Dissolving
the public sector through privatization thus became the desirable
policy and lawyers, busy in their preaching for the regulatory State,
simply ceased to do their job, which was to make sure that sufficient
guarantees of due process were in place to avoid arbitrary exercise of
power. Unfortunately, governments usually ignore the interests of
citizens when they decide to privatize services and to sell public
assets since the transfer of property from the public into private
hands is not accompanied by the same due process guarantees as the
expropriation of private property in the public interest.
For historical reasons shared by all countries in the liberal
constitutional tradition, the rules we find in the Italian Civil Code
(borrowed from the French Napoleonic Code) to protect public
property have not been useful to limit privatization, even if they
consider some goods as inalienable.12 In the Italian intellectual
climate of the early ninetieth, with ‘technical governments’ struggling
to enter into the Euro zone (1999), the issues of the distribution of
resources and justice gave way to efficiency and privatization, which
also marked the return of a strong idea of private property. The
theory of property rights of Demsetz13 and of many scholars within
the economic analysis of law contributed to spreading the neoliberal
model in the civil law tradition and Italy was not immune from this
trend.14 In this new (old) logic, property is an institution that reduces
transaction costs and internalizes negative externalities. It has not,
nor should it have, any redistributive function.
Throughout the neoliberal era, significant events have marked
Italian urban development: in three different times – the first in 1985
Lo Stato regolatore (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000). For a critique U. Mattei, Contro
riforme (Torino: Einaudi, 2013).
12
U. Mattei, E. Reviglio and S. Rodotà eds, I beni pubblici. Dal governo
democratico dell’economia alla riforma del codice civile (Roma: Scienze e Lettere
editore commerciale, 2010).
13
H. Demsetz, ‘Toward a Theory of Property Rights’ 57(2) The American
Economic Review, 347-359 (1967).
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Right to the City or Urban Commoning?
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– the legislature has legalized buildings previously in violation for the
main purpose of obtaining liquidity while pleasing powerful
developers. Compensation for expropriation of private property
returned to the fair market value criterion, mostly under pressure
from the equally ‘neoliberal’ European Court of Human Rights.15 New
legislation invented a ‘negotiated procedure’ between public and
private actors to work out legal deals on the location of buildings,
their scope, the amount of necessary infrastructure and similar
crucial issues. It is easy to see how in the aforementioned new
balance of power between the private and the public, city planning
has completely lost its public soul.
Neoliberal scholars considered this a desirable evolution of the
new ‘regulatory state’, setting the rules of a market in which private
actors could actually compete. In this vein, they celebrated
negotiated city planning as the decline of the authoritarian role of the
public administration, but, blinded by their ideology, they did not
consider that private corporations had seized our cities, taking
advantage of the public economic weakness during the negotiation.
In many situations, the most important economic opportunity for
municipalities comes from modifying the city plan with zoning
variations and changes of allowed uses that favor private subjects to
build. In fact, private developers pay some infrastructure costs to
build and cash-strapped municipalities can use this liquidity for their
ordinary spending.
In this way, municipalities use the money paid for infrastructure
costs or as legalization fees for previous abuses as instruments of
fiscal policy, forgetting their role of policy planning which requires a
long-term vision, some degree of independence, and some capacity to
actually enforce the law against strong vested interests.16 This is not
14
U. Mattei and R. Pardolesi, ‘Law and Economics in Civil Law Countries: a
Comparative Approach’ 11 International Review of Law and Economics, 265-275
(1991).
15
U. Mattei, La proprietà (Torino: Utet, 2015), Chapter X; A. Gambaro and U.
Morello, ‘Proprietà e possesso’, in Id eds, Trattato dei diritti reali (Milano: Giuffrè,
2011), I; G. Ramaccioni, La tutela multilivello del diritto di proprietà: profili
strutturali e funzionali nella vicenda della occupazione acquisitiva (Torino:
Giappichelli, 2013).
16
F. Adobati and V. Ferri, ‘Oneri di urbanizzazione, crescita urbana e debito
pubblico di domani’, in VVAA, Abitare l’Italia. Territori, economie, diseguaglianze.
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just a technical problem of classifying the nature of legal tools
available to the municipality or the legally correct uses of the
resources they can generate. This evolution has a concrete impact on
city development, as the conditions of suburbs demonstrate: large
residential buildings and shopping malls develop instead of public
services (such as libraries or youth centers) or green spaces, despite
the importance of the latter to integrate the inhabitants who live
distant from the city center.
Thus from a legal perspective, city planning is suffering a double
decline: on the one hand, it is losing connection with the idea of a
landscape to be approached with an ecological sensibility;17 on the
other hand, for the reasons previously summarized, city planning is
often sacrificed in the interests of the building industry or of the large
distribution.
The economic and financial crisis has exacerbated the situation,
as local authorities are suffering extensive cuts of national resources
transferred from the central government. The effects of neoliberal
policies over cities include privatization of local public services such
as water distribution, garbage collection, and transportation, now
standard practice of municipalities.18 By so doing they have reduced
many services previously available at subsidized prices, which has
especially afflicted the most vulnerable populations, such as the
elderly. In this way, the municipal welfare system, which since the
early part of the twentieth century in Italy has guaranteed some
social cohesion and solidarity, is progressively disappearing. The
ensuing trend is to address the needs of weaker citizens by
transferring public resources to private actors (often for-profit
corporations) or to deploy a variety of partnerships with banks and
charitable foundations that most often are very poor substitutes for
Atti della XIV Conferenza SIU (2011), available at http://siu.bedita.net/atelier-5
(last visited 12 October 2015).
17
U. Mattei, La proprietà n 15 above; P. Maddalena, Il territorio bene comune
degli italiani: proprietà collettiva, proprietà privata e interesse pubblico (Roma:
Donzelli, 2014); S. Settis, Il paesaggio come bene comune (Napoli: La scuola di
Pitagora, 2013); Id, Paesaggio, Costituzione, cemento: la battaglia per l’ambiente
contro il degrado civile (Torino: Einaudi, 2012).
18
VVAA, Servizi pubblici locali: innovazione e beni comuni (Milano: Franco
Angeli, 2015).
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Right to the City or Urban Commoning?
311
direct municipality engagement.19 Often public services provided
through private actors not only are more expensive for the users and
of poorer quality but they end up being more costly for the public
treasury given the high costs of procurement procedures and
monitoring and the complete lack of a long-term strategy with
consequent declines in investments.
To this grim scenario one must add the growth of evictions and of
closures of small business activities, created by the untenable growth
of proprietary rent extraction in the absence of public housing
projects due to lack of available public funds (which are mostly used
to service sovereign debt). The rise of protests and occupations to
solve this social catastrophe seems inevitable, as does the degree of
police brutality to cope with it. Many municipalities go bankrupt (an
unthinkable idea before neoliberalism, which is when public
authorities started to be considered as any other market actor); most
are highly indebted.20 This vicious circle is exacerbated by cities’
constant search for private investors through the organization of
major events (for example, the Olympic Games) or the building of
major infrastructures (for example, the high-speed train from Turin
to Lyon).
Cities are looking for new identities to survive to the death of
Fordism and the closure of factories, which are radically changing the
local economy as well as the urban landscape. Many abandoned and
neglected industrial plants exist and cry for some generative use.
Many derelict public buildings are equally necessitating care and
deserve a destiny different from transformation into more shopping
malls. All of the public and private goods draw a map carved out by
empty spaces, now simply wasted, while they could provide muchneeded social services such as shelter for refugees or homeless people
or places of social aggregation. These empty spaces could moreover
host alternative economies of a variety of kinds as has already
happened in many instances before.21
19
S. Busso, E. Gargiulo and M. Manocchi, ‘Multiwelfare. Le trasformazioni dei
welfare territoriali nella società dell’immigrazione’ FIERI – Rapporti di Ricerca, 1110 (2013).
20
P. Berdini, Le città fallite: i grandi comuni italiani e la crisi del welfare
urbano (Roma: Donzelli, 2014).
21
P. Pedrocco, F. Pupillo and I. Cristea, ‘I vuoti urbani e le infrastrutture
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II. The Right to the City and Its Institutional Denial
Is it a smart strategy to argue in terms of right to the city? Can we,
as lawyers, articulate some technical translation of such a right
capable of making it enforceable?
We have described how municipalities have transformed
abandoned industrial plants into residential zones, changing the
rules on intended use often to the advantage of the very same owners
and managers which still own the plant but have abandoned it to
transfer production to the global south. If the ownership of
abandoned buildings is public (for example, a vacant military
complex) the cash-strapped public sector often tries to sell it to a
private developer often at an extremely undervalued price. When
such buyers are not available, municipalities themselves create
private law-governed special purpose vehicles (SPV) that borrow
money from banks to buy the buildings, allowing the municipality to
all but ‘pretend’ it has actually sold them when in fact it has just
borrowed more money to make its books look better. This kind of
financial creativity falls short of ‘cooking’ the accounting books. Once
again, financial needs guide the urban development. City dwellers are
excluded from any decision-making.
For example, in Pisa in 2012 an abandoned factory was occupied
and transformed into a thriving commons with a library, a tailor, a
school for migrants, a nursery school, a bicycle mechanic, a farmers
market, a restaurant and a gym.22 For a few months, the Colorificio
Toscano thrived, with hundreds of low-income people bettering their
lives and finding a purpose, before being brutally evicted by the
police. The Mayor of Pisa and the corporate owner of the empty
factory planned to transform the area into residential buildings,
sharing rent-seeking purposes. The classic coalition of the public and
the private against the commons quashed the experience of the
Colorificio Toscano.
dismesse. Un’occasione per la classificazione dei beni demaniali sul territorio’ TRIA
– Rivista Internazionale di Cultura Urbanistica, 111-121 (2011).
22
A. Quarta and T. Ferrando, ‘Italian Property Outlaws: From the Theory of the
Commons to the Praxis of Occupation’ 15(3) Global Jurist, 261-290 (2015); VVAA,
Rebelpainting. Beni comuni e spazi sociali: una creazione collettiva (Pisa: Rebeldia,
2012).
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To take another example, in 2013 in Torino, a large portion of a
beautiful royal complex which had been abandoned for decades, la
Cavallerizza Reale, was occupied to protest against the unacceptable
lack of care for the building and the planned privatization of the
complex. During the occupation it surfaced that the municipality had
already sold the complex to an SPV which it wholly owned one
hundred percent and that the city had already cashed some eleven
million euros borrowed from a major bank enabling it to put this
further debt service out of the books and making it look much better
than its grim reality of quasi-bankruptcy. The occupation is
continuing to provide citizens with access to a beautiful park and
some cultural or political entertainment, but the substantial
privatization of the area (for a luxury hotel and boutiques) is just a
matter of closing the deal with some ‘private investors’.
There are no legal remedies against such scandals. There is no
such thing, legally speaking, as a right to the city. There is no way to
bring these issues to the courts according to Italian law. The
Colorificio Toscano in Pisa was private property and the right of
property includes the criminally sanctioned power to exclude
anybody from the premises. Non-use while waiting for the best
moment to sell is a classic stick in the property bundle.23 To be sure,
there are, here and there, provisions of the Civil Code that can be
interpreted to limit the unfair or arbitrary power of exclusion from
the proprietary sticks.24 Municipalities do have some power to act in
case of nuisances created by non-use or perhaps, with a direct
application of the Constitution, even in general against antisocial
uses of ownership.25 Unfortunately, such interpretations require
some willingness to take risks. They also require mayors less cozy
with corporate interests than the one of Pisa. Who else would have
standing to claim a right to the city? The answer is simple: no one.
The Cavallerizza Reale was a public property and the
municipality owns it. It is free to privatize it, and this choice is
23
O. Liivak and E.M. Penalver, ‘The Right Not to Use in Property and Patent
Law’ Cornell Law Faculty Publications, 1437-1494 (2013), available at http://
scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/639 (last visited 12 October 2015).
24
A. Quarta, ‘Cose Derelitte’ Rivista di diritto civile, 776-799 (2014).
25
U. Mattei, ‘Una primavera di movimento per la «funzione sociale della
proprietà»’ Rivista critica del diritto privato, 531-550 (2013).
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political, mostly in the hands of the mayor, and is not justiciable. This
is a fundamental constitutional trait of the Western legal tradition
that limits due process protection to private property and not to
public property whose management is assumed to be an intimate
part of political discretion. Municipalities, as any other owner, are
free to create an SPV and to transfer to it the public property for sale.
The municipality-owned but independent SPV is free to mortgage out
the property to the bank.
Proprietary freedom and sovereign political discretion share the
same logic: concentration of power and exclusion. Who would have
standing to challenge this? Who can claim enforcement of his right to
the city? The answer is simple: no one.
If there is no technical content in the notion of right to the city, it
might be possible that there are some strategic political reasons to
use this right. We submit that this might not be the case. Indeed, the
logic of rights might well be part of the problem rather than part of
the solution to the progressive transformation of commons into
capital which has characterized the evolution of the Western legal
tradition and of its most successful product, bourgeois liberal
constitutionalism.26 Indeed the logic of rights is borrowed from that
of property and is a powerful device to individualize and atomize
society. The logic of rights implicitly opposes that of duties and thus
erases any social duty owed by the stronger toward the weaker or
toward community.
As extensively argued elsewhere, the fundamental institutions of
the modern (bourgeois) compromise between private property and
state sovereignty are grounded in the idea of individualized power (of
the owner or of the chief executive) to be exercised excluding anyone
who is not within the chain of command. This is the very structure of
power that the inclusive and collective logic of the commons
struggles to overcome and must resist. Historically, the right of
resistance was an eighteenth-century transformation of a previous
collective duty to resist theorized by French Huguenot jurists, and
held by the people through their magistrates against an unfaithful
ruler.27 The transformation of a collective duty to resist into an
26
F. Capra and U. Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune
with Nature and Community (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015).
27
E. Meiksins Wood, Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western
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Right to the City or Urban Commoning?
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individual right of resistance has been the strategy to make this right
irrelevant since the only legitimate way to exercise the right has been
individual litigation in the courts of law. It is easy to see how the
language of an individual right to the city can dangerously substitute
the notion of a ‘collective duty to make the city’, by actively and
effectively reclaiming it.
Further, the very structure of rights is enshrined in the Cartesian
logic of an opposition between the subject (res cogitans) and an
object (res extensa). This mechanistic opposition has generated the
positivistic vision of a separation between a domain of facts (that
can be scientifically described) and a domain of values (that are the
domain of personal arbitrary choices).28 This vision, dominant in the
current Western understanding of the reality, is a mechanistic trap
that is not only epistemologically outdated but also politically
disempowering. A right to the city separates the domain of the
subject (the individual citizen owning the right) from the object (the
city as some sort of furniture of the earth). Nothing is more
dangerous politically than objectifying the city. The city cannot be
seen as an object but rather as the complex and dynamic interplay
of plural subjectivities that make it while inhabiting it. Its
epistemology cannot be positivistic but rather fully phenomenological,
just like that of the commons.29 All these caveats should be taken
into consideration when suggesting the existence of a right to the
city.
III. Collectively Claiming the City as a Common
Recently, citizens have criticized the neoliberal style in managing
public assets and services as sources of rent extraction. In 2011,
twenty-seven million Italians (an absolute majority of those entitled
to vote) stopped the privatization of the water supply system and of
other municipal services of economic relevance (transportation,
Political Thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (London-New York:
Verso, 2012).
28
F. Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture
(London: Flamingo-Fontana, 8th ed, 1990).
29
U. Mattei, Beni comuni. Un manifesto (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2011).
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garbage collection) by a nationwide referendum.30 Encouraged by
this major political success, social movements denounced the
existence of abandoned public buildings as an injustice, often
deciding to occupy vacant spaces and to take care of the buildings
themselves.31 Legally, occupation is a criminal offense,32 but many
scholars argue now that in these cases of proprietary disobedience it
is ‘generative’ and the Constitution protects it. In fact, squatters or
occupants of theaters always open the occupied building to
collectivity and offer services to the neighborhood thus securing the
social function of these assets (Art 42 Constitution). These
movements usually claim the right to the city by regenerating spaces
and asking (through conflict and dissent) the municipal authorities
for more participation in the urban decision-making processes. In
this way, cities are obtaining a new political subjectivity when
creatively resisting austerity measures and becoming interesting
laboratories in which people can experiment new political coalitions
and new legal solutions.
Two main practices deserve some further attention: one,
‘temporary use’, is a bottom-up approach granting to squatters a
temporary use and thus recognizing the importance of their civic
activism. The other, the ‘municipal regulation of the commons’,
perhaps can be described as a top-down solution. It is nevertheless
quite an enlightened response to civic activism that would be a
mistake to simply dismiss as paternalistic. In any case, we use these
two examples to describe how city planning can be organized as a
dynamic activity, while the traditional legal tool of the city plan still
deploys a static approach that favors private investors over city
dwellers.
1. Temporary Use and the Insurgence of Urban Commons
Squatters generally give a second life to the occupied abandoned
30
U. Mattei and A. Quarta, L’acqua e il suo diritto (Roma: Ediesse, 2014); U.
Mattei, ‘Protecting the Commons: Water, Culture, and Nature: The Commons
Movement in the Italian Struggle against Neoliberal Governance’ 112 South Atlantic
Quarterly, 366-376 (2013).
31
S. Bailey and U. Mattei, ‘Social Movements as Constituent Power: The Italian
Struggle for the Commons’ 20 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 965-1013
(2013).
32
A. Quarta and T. Ferrando, n 22 above.
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Right to the City or Urban Commoning?
317
building, as occurred for instance in Berlin at the beginning of the
nineties: after the wall fell, artists, architects and activists occupied
vacant buildings and demanded the municipality consider projects of
temporary use as a strategy of urban regeneration.33
Temporary uses provide the possibility to modify the neoliberal
city planning urbanism, starting from a study of the way in which
value can be generated by producing public spaces.34 The regeneration
of empty buildings benefits all the stakeholders: the public or private
owner benefits from a reduction in maintenance costs; the
neighborhood enjoys the positive externalities produced by
regeneration, while the temporary users can find a place in which
they can work or live. In this way, ‘temporary’ is not a synonym for
‘exceptional’, because the new use is chosen with a bottom-up
approach which involves the neighborhood where buildings exist and
may become durable.
At the same time, the regeneration contributes to an ecological
development of the city and assures to temporary users an active role
in the city planning.
At the moment, Italy does not have a national legal framework
about temporary use. True, the transformation of industrial areas is
the subject of a bill35 but this approaches the issue just as an
economic problem, without considering an approach linked to urban
development. In spite of the absence of national regulation, some
local authorities have recognized temporary uses for the period
between the old and the new function of an abandoned area or
building. In 2012, for instance, the Municipality of Milan approved a
plan to regenerate abandoned or underutilized buildings. The
purpose is to loan them for use to non-profit organizations, start-up
companies or socio-cultural projects that pay a social rent.36
Temporary users can actively change the city, because they use
urban spaces while, according to a neoliberal approach, citizens
33
D.S. Silverman, ‘The Temporary Use and Economic Development’ 66
Planning & Environmental Law: Issues and decisions that impact the built and
natural environments, 8-10 (2014).
34
D. Patti and L. Polyak, ‘From practice to policy: frameworks for temporary
use’ 8 Urban Research & Practice, 122-134 (2015).
35
Disegno di Legge 24 March 2015 no 1836 ‘Misure per favorire la riconversione
e la riqualificazione delle aree industriali dismesse’.
36
Delibera Giunta Comunale Milano 30 March 2012 no 669.
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[Vol. 01 - No. 02
should just consume in urban spaces.37 In this perspective, there is
also the possibility to fill the gaps of participated city planning,38 an
institutional solution that falls short from generating a shared
control of urban development. In fact, citizens’ participation consists
in the collection of their opinions before starting a particular
building, infrastructural or urbanistic project. Municipalities usually
call experts to listen to citizens and collect their opinions; however,
at this point, the project is almost definitive and complete, so that
experts can just make it more acceptable or they can try to mediate
between the planner and the citizens if people resist the project.
Because of such a participatory scheme in these cases, citizens’
participation is passive and it often is useless, a sort of democratic fig
leaf to cover unpopular projects. In fact, after the experts’
intervention the project is unlikely to change, even if citizens ask to
stop or cancel it.
To the contrary, an idea of an ‘instantaneous city’ is behind
temporary use: a place of subjectivity in which inhabitants have some
possibilities to transform and organize urban spaces by themselves.
It is thus a much more genuine and advanced form of participation.
This is why the very notion of a right to the city, in spite of its
returning scholarly popularity, needs to get in tune with that of the
city as a common. Very often, the rhetoric of rights, with its load of
possessive individualism, is at odds with notions of duties of care and
community.
According to Lefebvre’s theory, ‘urbanity’ is the result of a
productive process created by the inhabitants of a city. The reuse of
abandoned buildings and the struggle against privatization are just
two examples of those activities that produce the city and new public
spaces. If this is the chosen perspective, it should not be difficult to
harmonize the right to the city with the discourse on the commons.39
In fact, throughout the last five years, many Italian social movements
37
F. La Cecla, Contro l’urbanistica (Torino: Einaudi, 2015).
D. Ciaffi and A. Mela, Urbanistica partecipata: modelli ed esperienze (Roma:
Carocci, 2011).
39
U. Mattei, ‘Protecting the Commons’ n 30 above; Id, Beni comuni n 29 above;
M.R. Marella, Oltre il Pubblico e il Privato (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2012); S. Rodotà,
Il terribile diritto. Studi sulla proprietà e i beni comuni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 3th ed,
2013); Id, Il diritto di avere diritti (Roma: Laterza, 2014).
38
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Right to the City or Urban Commoning?
319
have used the category of the commons to denounce the unjust
abandonment of buildings by occupying them.
After the already mentioned great success of the referendum in
2011, the language of the commons has been utilized to frame and
support a large variety of struggles, including claims against the
privatization abandonment of environmental resources and cultural
goods (whether public or private), as well as to defend workers
and their rights. As a consequence of this apparently inextricable
complexity, Maria Rosaria Marella has recently tried to provide a
simplified taxonomy of the commons by combining the different
interpretations and the variety of utilities they produce.40 Today, the
notion of commons – which goes beyond the public/private
opposition – includes material goods (water, but also natural
resources linked with the environment or with the historical, cultural
or artistic patrimony of the country) and immaterial resources (such
as intellectual creations and traditional knowledge, which cannot be
crystallized because they are in continuous transformation).
However, the notion of commons cannot be detached from its
political essence, considering its transformative potential. For this
reason, it can be used to frame and legitimize claims to obtain the
fulfillment of social rights (health, university, culture), and to
publicly discuss the ways in which urban space is organized. From
this perspective, we can thus consider the city as a commons, looking
for a new political argument against expanding urbanization,
destruction of green areas, and dismantlement of cultural
specificities of certain neighborhoods operated by gentrification. In
this field ‘thinking like a commoner’41 means that the city is the first
place where people can try to collectively live and transform it,
claiming a public use of its places. A consequence of a commoner’s
claims is that urban development needs inclusive rules and a real
participatory government.
The life of the commons is dynamic, so today this category is
different and broader than that defined by the Rodotà Commission42
40
M.R. Marella, n 39 above.
D. Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the
Commons (Gabriola Island: New Society Publisher, 2014).
42
This Commission was created by the Minister of Justice in 2007 with the
mandate to propose a reform of the existing regime of public goods, contained in
41
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eight years ago before its politicization through the referendum of
2011.43 In Italy today the commons are not merely an important
generative legal concept beyond private property and public
property. They are the complex institutional outcome of continuous
pressures and social struggles, including those generated by the
occupations as expression by the collective who re-appropriate
enclosed and abandoned spaces.
2. City Regulations of the Commons: An Alternative to
Occupations?
Municipalities can react to occupations and to the claims of the
right to the city in three different ways.44 They can ignore the
phenomenon. They can repress it through the police. They can co-opt
the experience by adopting acts receptive to the claims of the
protesters. The first two reactions generally prevail in Italy.
Nevertheless, the idea that citizens can take care of urban spaces
solicits municipalities to find a legal framework to encourage
inhabitants who want to collaborate with the public administration
without taking an antagonistic position (that is: not occupying).
Across Europe, this legal framework has different forms: for
instance, many municipalities discourage through taxation the
abandonment of property and provide for special registers to record
empty buildings. In Italy, quite interestingly a new wave of city
regulations deploys the language of the commons to limit the antisocial consequences of the owner exercising the right not to use his
Arts 822 through 830 of the Italian Civil Code. The Commission introduced the
category of the commons, beside the categories of the public goods and of the
private goods belonging to the public. Commons were defined as goods that
produce utilities that are functional to the fulfillment of fundamental human rights
and the free development of any human being. These goods belong to the natural
and cultural patrimony of the country such as rivers, streams, lakes, air, forests,
flora, and fauna, but also to all those goods considered of archaeological, cultural,
and environmental relevance. See U. Mattei, E. Reviglio and S. Rodotà eds, I beni
pubblici n 12 above.
43
In 2011, a referendum stopped the privatization of the water supply system
introduced by the Italian Government; the slogan of the referendum campaign used
the idea that water is a commons. See U. Mattei and A. Quarta, n 30 above.
44
L. Rossini, ‘Teorie globali per azioni locali: i processi autonomi di riappropriazione dello spazio’ Folio, 19-20 (2014).
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Right to the City or Urban Commoning?
321
property, and to abandon it.45 In most cities, however, a registry of
vacant properties does not exist and the exact quantity of abandoned
properties is unknown. Consequently, private property continues to
be carefully protected by municipal authorities embracing the
dominant neoliberal creed. While a few private law scholars are now
struggling to deploy the commons to re-open the debate on the
abuses of property rights in light of the appalling conditions of the
homeless and the poor, for the time being we can only register a few
significant developments involving public property owned by
municipalities.
In the last couple of years many Italian municipalities have
adopted particular city regulations on the shared care of urban
commons.46 In 2013, the Municipality of Bologna, following the
suggestion of two public law scholars Gregorio Arena and Christian
Iaione,47 ruled for the first time in favor of citizens’ cooperation for
the care and the regeneration of the urban commons (Art 1, para 1).
This act defines urban commons as tangible, intangible, and digital
goods that citizens and the Municipality consider functional to
recognize individual and collective welfare, through participatory and
deliberative procedures. Citizens and Municipality share responsibility
for the care or the regeneration of these goods in order to improve
their collective enjoyment. Citizens can take part in this process
individually or through social associations, formal or informal. They
identify the building, the square, the street or the flowerbed for which
they want to care (public spaces or private spaces or subject to public
use), then present a cooperation proposal to the Municipality or
respond to a public call when the initiative to propose some asset for
commoning is taken by the municipality.
In a second phase citizens and the municipality sign an
agreement (patto di cooperazione), outlining the ways in which they
want to care for urban commons, the powers and liabilities, the
division of expenses, the insurance, and the strategy to involve other
45
A. Quarta, ‘Cose Derelitte’ n 24 above.
Much information about regulations is available at www.labsus.org,
laboratory of subsidiarity leaded by G. Arena (last visited 20 October 2015).
47
G. Arena and C. Iaione eds, L’Italia dei beni comuni (Roma: Carocci, 2012);
G. Arena, Cittadini attivi: un altro modo di pensare l’Italia (Roma-Bari: Laterza,
2011).
46
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inhabitants as well as the agreement’s duration. The municipality
regularly lists all the available spaces and evaluates proposals,
merging them together should they be too numerous. In the Bologna
model, the solution of any dispute is referred to a particular
conciliation committee. The municipality can recognize certain fiscal
benefits for participating citizens and provide the equipment needed
by citizens to carry out their care activities.
Many other Italian cities have adapted the Bologna act to their
own local needs. Among the variety of experiments, in November
2014, the Municipality of Chieri, a thirty-seven thousand-person city
in the Turin Metropolitan area, approved the most original version
directly borrowing from the experience of the ‘cultural occupations’
of the Teatro Valle in Rome and of the Asilo Filangieri in Naples. In
the Chieri model, the ‘community’ or ‘commoning unit’, rather than
the volunteer citizen, can identify the commons (through any means
including occupation) and is the real protagonist of the process. The
commoning unit, understood to be in a fully horizontal relationship
with the municipal authority, enjoys full power in the management of
the recognized common. By signing the agreement, the municipality
no longer exercises any power over the urban commons and leaves
full freedom to the community. This element is very important in
order to distinguish the volunteering of the individual citizen from
the commoning of a collective movement which can also produce a
pluralistic political subjectivity. The regulations of Chieri
acknowledge the possible transfer of the urban commons to the
community, using particular solutions that assure a collective
management. The Chieri model thus sets the conditions to transform
the commoning rights into a private law institution, such as a
foundation or a community land trust48 or a trust in the interest of
future generations. Through this strategy, which can be referred to as
a counterhegemonic use of private law, the commoning unit will be
able to legally protect its management of the urban commons
including in the case in which a new municipal administration
decides to privatize the entrusted urban common in the future.
Paradoxically, the due process guarantees of private property
48
About Community Land Trust, see A. Di Robilant, ‘Property and Democratic
Deliberation, The Numerus Clausus Principle and Democratic Experimentalism in
Property Law’ 62 American Journal of Comparative Law, 367-416 (2014).
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Right to the City or Urban Commoning?
323
expropriation can be put to the service of the commons if the
governance of the collective entity (foundation or trust) is organized
in a way coherent with the criteria of openness, inclusion, and
participation. The commons can thus become a form of ‘generative’
property protected against expropriation and privatization through
the ordinary means of civil justice. Another important innovation of
the Chieri model is the ‘jury of the commons’ – composed of five
citizens selected through a draw which are in charge of resolving
potential conflicts especially on the interpretation of what is or what
is not a common.
These regulations are one of the many manifestations of the
discourse on the commons that implies two different strategic
alternatives: in fact, legal scholars interested in commons can use the
existing rules and fill them with a new ‘generative’ meaning, or try
completely new proposals, which however require a quite a mighty
political force to be put in place.49 The experience with the Rodotà
Commission which, despite generating major scholarly attention and
producing significant case law developments,50 never succeeded to be
actually discussed in Parliament, may suggest that the first more
humble and local strategy can better serve the interest of the
commons. Municipal regulations, in spite of the quite condescending
attitude of some of the ‘harder’ social movements before them, have
the potential to transform cities and produce a redistributive effect if
two elements are respected. The first element requires the
involvement of citizens in the process leading to the approval of the
regulation. This is fundamental especially when a local social
movement is active on the territory and struggles for some legal
recognition of its claims. An active role of social movements is
desirable, especially because these regulations are a concrete
proposal to get a minimum legal framework to reuse public spaces, in
a context of suffocating bureaucratic procedures such as that of
Italian municipal bureaucracies.
The second crucial aspect is to consider how innovative the
cooperation agreements can be since they can dictate basic care
49
U. Mattei, Il benicomunismo e i suoi nemici (Torino: Einaudi, 2015).
The Italian Corte di Cassazione 14 February 2011 no 3665, Giustizia civile, 595
(2011) has for the first time used the concept of common to indicate the particular
condition of some natural resources.
50
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measures like painting or cutting grass, all the way to allowing an
open community to manage an abandoned industrial area. In this
latter case, the community could produce new forms of work and
welfare from below, achieving a redistributive effect. The critics of
such regulations should consider this aspect.
Naturally, it is only the bottom-up activation of affected communities
that can counter the paternalistic approach that characterized many of
these regulations, making them yet another legal instrument to criticize
the role of property in the city and the distribution of resources. City
regulations of the commons must contain basic guidelines to facilitate
community self-organization and the political action of the
administrations that enact them should be monitored for the honesty of
the devolution of power that such regulations allow. Only if they serve as
tools of diffusion of power can they produce the generative effect typical
of the commons.51 Outside of this ‘devolutionary’ political nature,
municipal regulations of the commons are reduced to simple tools by
which local government obeys the current austerity machine by means of
exploitation of the participation of citizens in good faith. They would fall
short from working in the direction of producing a deep transformation
of this system.
IV. Final Remarks
In conclusion, many urban dwellers display a desire to participate
in city planning in an active way. This is a lesson we can learn both
from the occupy movement and the regulations about the care of
urban commons. The reuse of spaces and buildings is a bottom-up
alternative to a key concept of the Italian city planning vocabulary
that is the ‘area use zoning’ (destinazione d’uso). In fact, while zoning
is a static concept which can be modified only by obtaining an
administrative act, the concept of reuse is dynamic, factual and
shared. Reuse is a form of urban commoning, ecologically desirable
and generative of new opportunities.
In understanding and overcoming the neoliberal urban planning
that has hijacked zoning regulations, the ‘static-dynamic’ dichotomy
51
U. Mattei, Il benicomunismo n 49 above.
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Right to the City or Urban Commoning?
325
in the determination of urban spaces is a promising instrument. A
municipality needs a long period to create its urban plan, so when the
moment of execution comes the city – in its social aspects and
considering inhabitants’ needs – may have radically changed. In this
sense, the zoning plan draws a static vision of the city that legal
scholars might help to balance with its dynamic reality of urban
transformation. Giving voice to inhabitants’ interests by temporary
uses can fill this gap in timing (from the plan to its actual execution)
and information (what are the shared needs of the dwellers). With
innovative legal tools coherent with the vision of the commons,
municipalities can also balance the interests of city dwellers and
private investors. In the discussed neoliberal balance of power only
the latter can influence municipalities to modify the zoning plan for
an urban variation, while ordinary citizens – as we said – are de facto
disempowered. Temporary uses present a characteristic that is
typical of the commons since it unites physical aspects (the material
regeneration) with social and political profiles (participation and
forms of self-government that a community adopts to manage the
commons). It is a generative process, because inhabitants travel a
shared learning path to manage the commons, with a positive
empowerment effect on the whole community.
Through reuse and commoning, cities can adaptively change
thanks to the daily practices of their inhabitants.52 Reuse translates
an ecological sensitivity in a time when the majority of the world
population lives in urban areas rather than the countryside. Yet,
states cannot continue urban sprawl as they have in the past without
endangering the very subsistence of human civilization on the planet.
European states must pursue the EU goal of net zero land expansion
by 2050.53
Cities cannot continue to grow in extension like sponges, leaving
islands of urban emptiness within their tissue. Municipalities should
encourage the spontaneous regeneration of vacant buildings and
most importantly recognize commoning occupations because of their
generative capacity outside of a formalistic and hypocritical
opposition between legality and illegality.
52
F. La Cecla, n 37 above.
P. Bonora, Fermiamo il consumo di suolo: il territorio tra speculazione,
incuria e degrado (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2015).
53