From Urban Commons to Commoning as Social Practice
A good city is like a good party, people stay longer than really necessary, because they are enjoying it. The vibes of places matter, feelings and perceptions play a crucial role in leading people’s choices and behaviours when it comes to public space. In
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Abstract
A good city is like a good party, people stay longer than really necessary, because they are enjoying it. The vibes of places matter, feelings and perceptions play a crucial role in leading people’s choices and behaviours when it comes to public space. Indeed, pages have been spent in addressing to the concept of atmosphere in social life a somewhat function. In this chapter, I will try to investigate why collective moods arise and to what extent they are effective in making and maintaining specific kind of urban communalities. In discussing the conditions of such processes, we should refer to what has been identified by David Harvey with the name of commoning. How different actors join together in a common governance of a certain public space? Or to put it differently, which resources contribute to increase social capital in a given urban setting?
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Introduction to Public Space
In a situation where deep transformations cross contemporary societies and affect cities and their population, a crucial challenge seems to enrich and better articulate the public sphere. Public sphere comprehends a variety of realms, nonetheless political, social and infrastructural activities that take place on it. Public space is a paramount and crucial setting for social life. What happens there seems to have no
F. Antonucci (&) Department of Architecture and Territory, Mediterranea University, Reggio Calabria, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 E. Macrì et al. (eds.), Cultural Commons and Urban Dynamics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54418-8_12
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equals. As a matter of fact, over the last years and increasingly at fast pace, public space is returning to be stage of claims (Mitchell 1995). Far in the past, public squares were an example of encounter and exchange according to the Greek idea of agora and the Roman Forum. Nowadays, we deal with a somewhat public space renaissance: after a persistent tendency which led spaces to be space of representation of governments rather than people and citizens, they are returning to be sites of resistance. Consequently, planning public space becomes a complex and multifaceted duty: the usage and management of public space are functional to the production of sane and vibrant public sphere. The dichotomy between public space and public sphere is a recurring theme throughout urban studies’ history: Michel de Certau in “The Practice of everyday life” highlights the paramount dual dimension of public space that he divides in ‘place’ and ‘space’. Whereas the former involves a degree of physicality, the latter, instead, refers to ‘a performed place’. To put it differently, he draws the attention to the ways in which people create their own meaning of space, individually or collectively, through their specific behaviours in space and put them to use (De Certau 1984). Indeed, the public space analysed in this paper combines features of physicality and
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