Regeneration of Urban Commons and the Role of Culture: Bologna as a Case Study

In the last 20 years, urban commons have been the foundation of many urban initiatives that have created community spaces for practicing collaboration, forms of shared social responsibility, imagining socially innovative practices and regenerating common spaces and places. A field of practices has sparked an increasingly structured debate that seeks to identify the perspectives and ambiguities of these processes to trace their ‘contours’ and boundaries. Some of these initiatives, such as community hubs and cultural centres, focus on the (re)generation of the commons and serve as experimental spaces for new forms of political subjectivation through commoning and self-governance. These practices span different areas of social action, with various origins and degrees of institutionalisation. This chapter explores, without claiming to provide definitive categories, the relationship between space, community and common goods, proposing some analytical trajectories that emerge from the reference literature and several years of research on urban commoning processes in the city of Bologna. Using three typical cases, this chapter provides a frame for the systematisation of urban commoning development, taking into account the following variables: the ‘top-down-bottom-up’ dynamics; the forms of space governance; the relationship between regenerated/managed space and the city in terms of access, accessibility and exchange; whether or not there is attention to a ‘commoning’ of resources and their regeneration in terms of commoning understood as a social practice.