"prof. Christian Iaione, presented to the public the idea emerged from the Lab: to create a new institutional prototype called CO-Mantova. This new subject will be based on the care and shared regeneration of cultural commons and will aims to make collaborative local governance for the community. CO-Mantova aspires to be the institutional mechanism that enable the collaboration among Public authorities, Businesses, Civil society organizations, Schools and Universities and Social innovators. This new subject will be a community business for innovation, collaboration and cultural commons and will have three policy areas: Making, Growing, Living." (http://www.labgov.it/in-mantua-at-work-for-the-governance-proposal/)
If there's one thing that obsesses local government organisations in recession-ridden Italy, it's cutting spending. One way many of them think can help them achieve that goal is ditching Microsoft and going open source.
Earlier this summer activists in Rome won the right to self-manage a vast lake in the city’s capital, effectively expropriating a private company from prime real estate. From marches and public debates to concerts and open dinners their campaign is an inspiring example of a rebel city at work.
"The city council expects to open at least 12 labs in the coming years. There are emerging community based initiatives like MADE, and private initiatives as Fab Café (brought from Tokyo and Taipei by MOB). We have been pushing hard to get the city council to support those community and private initiatives in order to build a richer ecosystem around digital fabrication, it seems that will work, right now there is a lot of collaboration being built, and it is hard not to fall into the dynamics of a “small” city like Barcelona, and move from competition to real collaboration, I think is a matter of time and will happen at FAB10 and the Mini Maker Faire, will bring different communities together and help to build the Fab City, which is not one-side vision of the city as a laboratory, but a complete ecosystem which includes also industry, universities, commerce and many more actors which could benefit and participate of it. The municipality is a big entity, and they have their vision of creating their very own spaces, which are being also called Ateneus de Fabricació (in a more local basis), my concern is the interpretations that the public sector can make of Fab Labs, we are try to work as close as possible and is working, but there are always risks.
A public gathering in Rome, uniting administrations, politics, civil society and the cultures of the Italian capital become the occasion to explore the Human Ecosystems, the Real Time Museum of the City and the Ubiquitous Commons: the emergence of a vision of the relational ecosystem of the city and of the transformation of citizenship in the age of ubiquitous information.
The concept of the common has been gaining popularity in activist circles around the world in recent years, but it is perhaps being spelled out most explicitly in the cycle of struggles taking place in Italy right now.
Collaborative governance will become the salient characteristic of the City of Bologna and paragraph 118 (4) of the Italian Constitution, introducing the principle of horizontal subsidiary, will finally become the keystone of a new relationship between cities and governments. Horizontal subsidiarity demands all levels of governments to find ways to share their powers and cooperate with single or associated citizens willing to excercise their constitutional right to carry out activities of general interest.
"The students at ISIA Design Florence, a famous italian Design University which faced closure due to financial cuts, have decided to experiment on the Near Future Design of their own education system, to abandon the state of crisis through the design of a commons-based, peer-to-peer, emergent, permeable model.
The new Fab Lab Roma – Innovation Gym (also on Facebook) will be inaugurated at the RomeCup 2014 – Excellence in Robotics in Rome on March 20 at 7:30 pm at the Rome Città Educativa in Via del Quadraro 102.
In a precarious context induced by a struggle for the essential, one term has re-emerged as indispensable, providing many of us with a new sense of direction, creation and sharing, and ultimately, like a boomerang, assuming the ‘austere’ dignity of that which cannot be renounced: the commons.
If some ‘laws of History’ could be taken seriously, in Italy we should feel predestinated to be first in conceiving a better democracy. Not because of the glories of our remote past, rather for the simple fact that our democracy is more disfunctional than other ones in the West.
Milan has embraced the idea of car-sharing so much that Car2Go, the first private operator of the service in the city, said it has reached its financial target ahead of time in its first year.
Coordinated local action in Rome led to a lake and surrounding area being designated public park, to be managed as a commons by a collective of activists.
"Tiziana Terranova is well known for her thesis, formulated in the early 2000s, that the free labor of users is the source of economic value in the digital economy. Free labor is an ambivalent concept, rooted in Italian post-workerist labor theories of value, such as Paolo Virno's re-reading of Marx's notion of the general intellect, Antonio Negri's theory of the social factory, and Maurizio Lazzarato's concept of immaterial labor. It defines both the outcome of the 'refusal of work' of the 1960s and 1970s and the resulting investment of subjective needs and desires for expression into production (culture, technology, the arts); and its subsequent transformation into the engine of economic production in the post-Fordist economy first and the digital economy later (branding, marketing, social media). Free labor is both free as in 'free beer' (for digital entrepreneurs) and free as in free speech (for those who perform it voluntarily). It is no more of an illusion than industrial labor was, it is simply a new source of value and engine of production which is open to capture by the capitalist enterprise, but maintains a potential to express itself in new forms of economic organizations such as the p2p economy."
"The «businesses for the commons» project is based on a logic of social inclusion, reached by an institutional strategy focused on the creation of a network of partnerships between administrators, citizens and businesses. An innovative paradigm which finds its reference in the Italian constitution where, at the fourth comma of article 118, horizontal subsidiarity is expressed; according to such possibility citizens have available precious means to care about overall interest through improving and defending commons. In this framework the culture, a fundamental equally material and immaterial common, is considered as the core for the establishment of a social partnership which make the cultural heritage a driving force in the development, both economic and social, of the Italian city of Mantua. The final objective is to revitalize the cultural heritage of the territory of Mantua by improving social innovation and creativity, and establishing a governance lab which aims to sustain experimentations of shared ideas for the renovation of cultural commons. Through the “businesses for the commons” Lab, will be tested in practice the activities of shared care of the cultural heritage. Project activities require testing of living lab and fab lab, creation of an incubator for cultural enterprises and cooperative placemaking’s experimentation." (http://www.labgov.it/projects/mantovalab/)
Over here the situation is very bad, and people abroad are completely disinformed about it. Every day we read nonsense and bullshit on Grillo by people who completely ignore the reactionary, authoritarian nature of his movement. A harsh reality is biting our arses and we need to send a message in a bottle right now.
Tom Wetzel details the Italian Factory Occupations of 1920, which matured beyond conventional trade unionism and at its height involved about 600,000 workers. This article was originally presented as a talk at the Conference on Workers' Self-Organization in St. Louis in 1988.
"We are a group of activists who fight for the conquest and defense of the commons. We are communards, volunteers, precarious, students, retirees, social workers, district policy makers, media and eco-activists. We come from Belluno (Italy), a small mountain province surrounded by the Dolomites, UNESCO’s World Heritage Site. Here, nature covers the biggest part of the province, but commons such water and landscape are constantly in danger. Numerous water predators have built hydroelectric power stations drying up 90% of the rivers’ beds and devastating our territory. Mountain mobility is not sustainable and services are insufficient. We live in a hostile planet where income, culture and rights seem alien elements and loneliness can really hurt. The need of a self-managed social space, in fact, has emerged in different forms and during several years. Finally, we found the place to build our future home, the House of Commons. A social lab in which to build a community response to the crisis, sharing knowledge and experiences. It will be the place of everything that, material or not material, may be self-produced, returned and conquered by the community, making it stronger.
"The students at ISIA Design Florence, a famous italian Design University which faced closure due to financial cuts, have decided to experiment on the Near Future Design of their own education system, to abandon the state of crisis through the design of a commons-based, peer-to-peer, emergent, permeable model.
‘European citizenship’ is a ‘constituent’ process that emerges, develops and is constantly elaborated within social practices. How does the practice of the commons effect it? This week’s guest feature reports back on an experiment conducted last September in Teatro Valle.
The first burning question we have to face is namely: is it possible to produce law from below? To my knowledge, there is no evidence of such a course in legal history.
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