Segapeli, Silvana

The leading question of this paper is one from which only a few architects or urban planners would start when talking about innovation in urban design: how could political aspects of urbanity change the quality of daily life in urban neighborhoods? To answer this question, we will use the approach of the commons, highlighting the fact that producing alternative visions through creative patterns of the commons (Bollier, Helfrich, 2019), revealing relationships of use, innovating with institutions - and even breaking with the inherited administrative system - lead to a real exercise of political imagination (Dardot, Laval, 2015).
The Turin case study, that we intend to treat, is of particular interest in understanding the relationship between social practices, urban design and forms of governance. In recent years, the city of Turin has relied on two factors as vectors of innovation: first, the representation of a new epistemology of the crisis as a lever of transformation; urban regeneration programs using European funds such as ToNite (UIA) or national or even local funds are in this vein.
The second proposes different governance frameworks for common urban resources, moving from participation to collaboration. This is made possible by the new co-governance tools: the "Pact of Collaboration" (a civic deal through which the city and civic actors constitute a form of shared governance to regenerate, care for and manage together one or more urban commons) and the "Regulations on Collaboration between Citizens and Administration for the Care, Shared Management and Regeneration of Urban Commons" (2016).
The hypothesis of this paper is that the shift from participation to collaboration in urban practices may favour the questioning of past urban planning principles, which paid little attention to bottom-up generative forces and the human/environment relationship in terms of co-evolution. In this framework, how to create new urban patterns of commoning? Every pattern has an underlying challenge, that of bringing a different look at reality and this implies bringing into play the value system of a society. What are the values that guide the construction of new patterns of commoning? Just as Tim Ingold identifies the “path” as the metaphor of something that is continually coproduced in the collaboration of multiple people (Ingold, 2000), the pattern of commoning represents the vital movement that aims to cross different narratives, and the web of forces that can produce intercommoning and shared culture.

The shift from monocratic systems of government to those of representative democracy has led to the emergence of theories based on the application of systems theory (Von Bertalanffy, 1969; McLoughlin, 1969, Luhmann, 1984) in the construction of public policy and planning approaches. In this framework, different social components perform a specific function and relate to other components. Among these functional differentiations, that between the state and citizenship takes on particular relevance. If one follows the logic of complex systems (Maturana and Varela, 1985 ; Von Foerster 1984; Atlan 1979), applied to the sciences of politics and territory (Cavallaro, 1995), the separation between the functions of systems can be overcome and one can move toward models of participatory and deliberative democracy, in which state-apparatus and citizenship are parts of the same element.
The commons approach (Ostrom, 2006), and especially the urban commons approach, definitely moves in this direction, which allows the apparatus state and the citizen-state to co-govern: co-decide and co-manage.
The paper analyzes in depth the Italian situation - with particular reference to Turin (Segapeli 2022; 2024) -, where cities are moving toward forms of participatory democracy in the governance of commons (City regulations) that design new roles for formal and informal neighborhood groups and associations, according to experimental collaborative patterns and new forms of governance. Admittedly, the state legislative framework, with its proliferation of codes and regulations on administrative procedures and accountability and safety, still remains structured according to an authoritative model (the state authorizing, granting, sanctioning), which holds back momentum for change. Whereas the urban commons approach needs appropriate forms of governance in which the translation from the ineluctability to the universe of the possibles is achievable, that is, from the single all-embracing vision (the state) to the variety of scenarios produced by the multitude.