Grupo de leitura | Oficina de Ecologia e Sociedade (2019-2020)

Commoning (in) the city: a subaltern democracy in practice

Roberto Sciarelli (CES)

26 de março de 2020, 14h30 (CANCELADO)

Sala 2, CES | Alta

Comentários: Gustavo Garcia Lopez (CES)


Resumo

During the last decade, the city of Naples (Southern Italy) has been animated by a flourishing commoning movement, which involved numerous activists’ and workers’ collectives and communities of inhabitants in the practice of self-government of big, abandoned or underused spaces of public property. Each one of these experiences started with an occupation and continued with an autonomous renovation of spaces and buildings carried out by the commoners. These commons now host numerous mutualistic, social, cultural, economic and reproductive activities and are animated by the principles of solidarity, inclusion and sharing of the means of production. Such urban commons have in turn animated a wider movement of neo-municipalist character, which succeeded in producing juridical innovations in the realm of commons’ and public space governance.

The objective of this paper is to show how such practices are contributing to enlarge the spaces for direct political participation in Naples, in opposition to a history of political exclusion and authoritarian apparatuses, renewed in the age of ordoliberal austerity. The specific contents will regard: the juridical instrument of the “Declarations of urban civic and collective use”, written by the communities of commoners and recognized by the municipality of Naples as regulations of self-government for the occupied spaces; the activities of the collective assembly of Neapolitan commons, which redacted a shared declaration founded on the principles of direct democracy and politicized care work, and which coordinates the relations of Neapolitan commoning movement with the national one; the institution of the “Permanent observatory on the commons of the city of Naples”, an advisory/intermediate body instituted by the municipality of Naples in conjunction with the urban commons to facilitate the dialogue between the movement and the institutions.

The main source of the paper is the material collected in one year of co-research and participant observation conducted within the Scugnizzo Liberato (one of Neapolitan commons), within the collective urban assemblies and within the Permanent observatory.

This seminar is part of the Political Ecology Reading Group series 2019-20 of the Ecology and Society Lab (Oficina de Ecologia e Sociedade-CES). If you wish to receive a copy of this paper, please contact ecosoc@ces.uc.ptpt