Activities and Publications

LabGov’s main field of experimentation is currently the “Co-Cities – Sharing, Collaborating, Cooperating, Commoning in the City” program, The empirical research is currently conducted through the observation of a dataset of commons-oriented urban policies and practices of 400 case studies in 130 cities worldwide, but it is in constant expansion: www.commoning.city. The observation of case studies is combined with the empirical evidences observed in the field experimentations.

The research action/action based research is currently conducted through Co-Cites field experimentations consisting in the creation or facilitation of the creation of “collaboratories”, as learning places/institutions, policy co-design and urban living labs where new forms of civic enterprises based on open, collaborative, creative and digital co-production are generated, and where at the same time the policies needed in order to enable those new forms of economy are designed. The main fieldwork in previous years was the city of Bologna where LabGov conducted Co-Bologna (www.co-bologna.it), result of a collaboration pact between Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna and the Bologna Municipality was run by LabGov to give a scientific support to the efforts of the administration and/or the local communities in the implementation of the more complex and experimental aspects of the Bologna Regulation on Urban Commons adopted in 2014.

An example of a recent experimentation focused on the Collaboratory is the Reggio Emilia Collaboratory project (www.co-reggioemilia.it). In Battipaglia LabGov carried out the Co-Battipaglia process, a co-design/co-planning laboratory called “Organized legality. A greenhouse of civic energy to grow the future of the territory” (www.co-battipaglia.it). The goal of the project is to run a collaborative process to draft the guidelines for the collaborative urban planning involving city inhabitants, institutions, enterprises, civil society, organizations schools and other. Another project, focused on sharing and collaborative economy at an ultra-local level, is CollaboraToscana (http://open.toscana.it/web/collabora-toscana), the process activated by the Presidency Department of Tuscany (which holds the mandate to innovation and participation) with the aim of creating a green paper outlining a regional policy on sharing and collaborative economy, with the scientific support of LabGov, and the methodological support by Sociolab. The green paper on sharing and collaborative economy contains a map of the regional public policies that need to be put into synergy and a proposition of goals, actions and measures, identified through the co-design process, that will have to be applied at different levels to maximize the opportunities while limiting the risks involved in the new practices that will develop in this field.

LabGov is currently involved in a research project funded by ENEA (Italian National Agency for new technologies, energy and sustainable economic development) on the Electric System finalized at giving birth to a “Smart Community” in one roman district (www.co-roma.it). LabGov through its experimental Co-City protocol and its living lab commons-oriented methodology, the Collaboratory is incubating forms of co-governance in the Centocelle/Alessandrino/Torre Spaccata district. In 2018, the third year of the applied research project, the focus is on circular economy in the district. LabGov is in fact co-managing together with Transition Italia and ENEA a living lab (called “Centocè”) for facilitators of circular economy. The scientific report of the first year of work in the Co-Rome process is available here: http://www.enea.it/it/Ricerca_sviluppo/documenti/ricerca-di-sistema-elettrico/adp-mise-enea-2015-2017/smart-district-urbano/rds_par2015-023.pdf/view. Thanks to the work developed through the Co-Roma project LabGov is partner of a consortium that won an H2020 call on Innovative financing, business and governance models for adaptive re-use of cultural heritage. Open Heritage aims at identifying, improving, testing and disseminating a set of combinable, multipliable and upscalable models of multi-stakeholder cooperation for the socially, economically and environmentally sustainable and resilient re-use of heritage sites in Europe.

Her most recent publications explore questions of urban law and governance through the lens of the “commons” and they are exemplified by the article The City as a Commons, Yale Law and Policy Review (2016), the chapter Ostrom in the City: Design Principles and Practices for the Urban Commons, Routledge Handbook on the Study fo the Commons (2018) and forthcoming MIT Press Book, The Co-City. Several other publications on the theoretical framework and empirical analysis of the Co-Cities project appeared or are work in progress, such as, among others: C. Iaione, The Right to the Co-City, Italian Journal of Public Law, (2017); C. Iaione & E. De Nictolis, Urban Pooling, Fordham Urban Law Journal 44:665 (2017); C. Iaione, E. De Nictolis and C. De Angelis, La co-governance dei beni comuni nei quartieri delle grandi metropoli. Il caso di Roma, Planum publisher (forthcoming 2018); C. Iaione, E. De Nictolis & A. Berti Suman, The Internet of Humans (IoH): the interplay between Human Rights and the Commons for achieving Tech Justice in the city, Law & Ethics of Human rights (forthcoming 2018).