In July 2024 the urban commons of Làbas released an instagram post which defined the space a "climate shelter"; climate shelters are spaces designed to protect people from extreme weather phenomena, namely urban heatwaves, during the warm season. The space, in fact, now offers publicly accessible shaded spaces and, above all, free showers to vulnerable people. A few months later, in early October 2024, an article by the Italian newspaper "La Repubblica" was dedicated to another major urban commons of Bologna, TPO, which had installed monitoring devices to measure particulate matter pollution in the air. Research on the commons has for a long time focused on natural commons; at the beginning of the XXI century, a new emphasis was placed on the urban dimension as a political arena for the right to the city. Today, the climate crisis is severely impacting human health and the well-being of urban and rural environments; the urban commons are, therefore, redesigning their function and scope to also feature green infrastructures and nature-based solutions for climate resilience. This bridges the unnatural gap created in commons theory between the natural and the urban: starting from case studies which display innovative actions to safeguard the health of vulnerable people, the paper will problematize commons conceptualization and the related taxonomies, highlighting the role of the commons in fostering climate resilience in urban environments. The Italian context provides an ideal backdrop to explore tensions in different approaches, both institutional and grassroots ones, as Italy is a country that is extremely vulnerable to the impact of climate change; furthermore, it presents a high level of urban sprawl, making it necessary to devise new solutions to the planning and management of spaces, at the interface between urban and rural dimensions, able to safeguard human health against the climate crisis.
