Right To the Co-City
* Article: THE RIGHT TO THE CO-CITY. By Christian Iaione. Italian Journal of Public Law, 2017
Abstract
"This study is an effort to discuss the argument that the current debate in urban studies on the way to conceptualize the city lack a rights-based approach and that to build such vision one needs to reconceive the city as a commons enabling collective action of city inhabitants and cooperation in the city between city inhabitants and other four urban actors by embedding a "Quintuple Helix" or "pentahelix" approach in the governance design of the city.
Part I articulates the most prominent visions or paradigms of the city of the 21st century and the " metaphors " that are used to conceptualize the city. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this part then discusses some complications and emerging key points that deserve further reflection.
In Part II, the article argues that a rights-based paradigm or vision in the conceptualization of the city is emerging. It does so through the analysis of urban laws and policies adopted in exemplary case studies such as Naples and Barcelona, on one side, and Bologna and Turin, on the other side. Two main approaches seem to emerge: the fearless city model and the co-city model.
In part III, to better define this fourth urban paradigm and in particular the second approach, a focus on the key concept of commons and a review of the main bodies of literature is provided which are key to carve out the concept of pooling as a form of cooperation that encompasses both sharing of congestible resources to avoid scarcity and collaboration around non congestible, constructed resources to generate abundance. Building on the existing literature of a particular subset of studies on infrastructure commons, the concept of pooling is extracted from the observation of their functioning which teaches us how to rely on pooling as a demand-side strategy to both expand or utilize the idle " capacity " of an infrastructure to avoid congestion and at the same time generate abundance. Indeed, pooling is used to better understand the main features of a peculiar vision of the rights-based city, the co-city paradigm, which applies the "City as a Commons" metaphor, ultimately envisioning the city as an enabling infrastructure for social and economic pooling. Part IV offers concluding remarks and proposes the idea of "rights to pooling". "