Naples was the first Italian city to establish a “Department of the Commons” and the first to change the municipal statute by inserting the “commons” as one of the interests to be protected and recognised as a fundamental right.
This italian city is just one of the hundreds of cases of new municipalism that are spreading around Europe. There are more and more examples of cities working on testing new citizenship initiatives and possible relationships with local institutions, looking for creative responses to the challenges of urban development, social harmony, and integration of migrants. What is needed beyond this is to deepen transnational cooperation between these experiments, to facilitate the exchange of knowledge in order to deal more effectively with the problems that nation-states seem unable to solve.
Photo: Ondrej Kostal