Lo spazio urbano come bene comune

Cities are quintessentially human and collective products. Not only the public space in the cities is functional to human flourishing. The entire urban space is the product of social cooperation. Therefore, it has to be conceived as a commons. Different philosophical and sociological images of the city – rectius metropolis – ranging from the envision of the metropolis as the major site of production of value1 to the identification of the metropolis with the biopolitical apparatus par excellence2 – support and enrich our understanding of the urban space as a commons. In fact, urban space is both the site of social conflicts concerning the appropriation of social value, i.e. value produced collectively by the social cooperation, and the laboratory of social experimentation and political transformation. Nowadays it identifies with the material substratum (or the frontier) of the global governance management of the crisis, after that speculative real estate investing in the cities was at the core of the financial bubble3 . In this framework the notion of commons – and the concept of the urban space as commons – becomes a keyword within a strategy aiming at opposing the process of extraction of value from the products of social cooperation – accumulation by dispossession according to David Harvey4 – that affects the production/reproduction pattern within the metropolis. Besides, it emphasizes the primary character of the metropolis as the place of collective production. The identification of squares, streets, parks and public gardens with urban commons is generally uncontested. There is a huge literature concerning these ‘classic’ urban commons. To my opinion, however, not only the ‘public’ space because functional to political participation and, ultimately, to human flourishing (think to the square, commonly depicted as the symbolic birthplace of public opinion), but the entire urban space as such has to be considered as produced, possessed and transformed in common. Therefore, the urban space as a whole has to be qualified as a commons5 . This assumption is obviously not neutral from a legal point of view. Especially if the notion of commons that it entails has a substantive meaning in legal theory for its implication with fundamental rights and the marginalization of property titles implying. Hence the primary question of whether private property of urban land is compatible with the conception of urban space and its portions – neighborhoods for instance – as commons.