Co-Cities Report on the Urban Commons Transitions

* Report: The 1st Co-cities report on the Urban (Commons) Transitions. Towards a CO-City: From the Urban Commons to the City as a Commons. By Christian Iaione, Michel Bauwens, Sheila Foster et al. LabGov & P2P Foundation, 2017. With the research assistance of Vasilis Niaros.

(officially unpubilshed as yet, available online upon request)

Description

"The Co-City Project= is the result of a 5-year project to investigate and experiment new forms of collaborative city-making that is pushing urban areas towards new frontiers of participatory urban governance, inclusive economic growth and social innovation. The case-studies gathered here are from around the world, in different kinds of cities, and include groundbreaking experiments in Bologna (Italy), as well as other Italian cities (e.g. Milan, Rome, Palermo, Bari, etc.), as well as global cities such as Seoul (South Korea), San Francisco (California, USA), Barcelona (Spain), and Amsterdam (Netherlands).). The project focuses on emerging urban innovations and evolutions which are reshaping urban (and peri-urban) development and land use, urban and local economic patterns, urban welfare systems and democratic and political processes, as well as governmental decision-making and organization. Among the better known recent examples are the FabCity transition plan towards re-localized and distributed manufacturing of Barcelona; the Bologna Regulation on Public-Civic Collaboration for the Urban Commons; San Francisco, Seoul and Milan initiatives to transform themselves into “sharing cities”; and Edinburgh as a “cooperative city”.

The Co-City project is rooted in the conceptual pillars of the urban commons. The concept of the urban commons situates the city as a platform for sharing and collaboration, participatory decision-making, peer-to-peer production supported by open data,, and guided by principles of distributive justice. A co-city is based on urban co-governance which implies shared, collaborative, polycentric governance of the urban commons and in which environmental, cultural, knowledge and digital urban resources are co-managed through contractual or institutionalized public-private-community partnerships. Collaborative, polycentric urban governance involves different forms of resource pooling and cooperation between five possible actors—social innovators (i.e. active citizens, city makers, digital collaboratives, urban regenerators, community gardeners, etc.), public authorities, businesses, civil society organizations, and knowledge institutions (i.e. schools, universities, cultural institutions, museums, academies, etc.). These partnerships give birth to local peer-to-peer experimental, physical, digital and institutional platforms with three main aims: fostering social innovation in urban welfare provision, spurring collaborative economies as a driver of local economic development, promoting inclusive urban regeneration of blighted areas. Public authorities play an important enabling role in creating and sustaining the co-city. The ultimate goal is to create a more just and democratic city.

This open book aims to develop a common framework and understanding for “urban (commons) transitions”: patterns, processes, practices, public policies that are community-driven and that position the community as a key political, economic and institutional actor at the local/urban level in the delivering of services, production, management of urban assets or local resources. It seeks to extract from on the ground examples recurrent design principles and common methodological tools employed across the globe and for different urban resources and phenomena. The book brings together the contributions of several global thought leaders who have been developing and refining the concepts underlying the ideas that form the conceptual pillar of the Co-City. The book uses case studies to map where urban commons innovations are occurring, analyzes the features of each individual case, and presents the testimony of leaders or key participants in the case studies. The ultimate objective of this book is to raise awareness about the commonalities among these case-studies and to serve as guidance for urban (commons) transitioners around the world.

The open book editing process is managed by the the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons (LabGov), in collaboration with P2P Foundation, as one of the outputs of the CO-Bologna process." �