In Italy, and in the rest of Europe, the urban centres as well as the suburbs and inner areas of many cities have witnessed the spread of bottom-up collective action on the part of old and new citizens, rooted in the territory and aimed at ensuring the collective use of urban resources or commons, such as streets, parks, buildings and services, for the benefit of the general interest. Such activism is particularly interesting in the Italian case, where the crisis of conventional forms of participation is severe, while in just over a decade there has been a ferment of other forms of political participation from below, aimed at claiming public spaces for a better practice of citizenship. Urban commons have been studied from different perspectives, and others have already highlighted the role of trust in sustaining the commoning practices. However, we still lack knowledge about the role of trust from a dynamic-relational perspective. Adopting a sociological point of view, in this study I will merge collective action and commons theories, to explore in depth the solidarity mechanisms that underpin trust as a resource that enables the strengthening, but also the emergence, of urban commoning. As we will see, commoning in Italian cities emerges from previous experiences at the urban level, from urban mobilisations to civic participation, which lead to the production of trust-based relationships that often transmute into commoning. During the commoning phase, new incentives for solidarity are distributed, resulting from the creation of new jobs, the promotion of social and environmental justice, the representation of needs such as the availability of a service deemed important and the role of the social presidium. These in turn lead to more trusting and resilient collective action. The analysis of such processes will be carried out through a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with relevant actors in different Italian urban contexts.
