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The Right to the Co-City. An article in the Italian Journal of Public Law, 1:9 (2017) providing a reflection on the understanding of the concept of Co-city from a legal perspective.
The article, The Right To the Co-city, authored by Christian Iaione is published on the Italian Journal of Public Law, Volume 9 Issue 1 2017. The study is an effort to contribute to the current urban studies debate on the way to conceptualize the city by advancing a rights-based approach and to suggest that to build such vision one needs to reconceive the city as a commons, which is to say that the city serves as an infrastructure enabling the “pooling” of city inhabitants actions, energies, resources and the cooperation between city inhabitants and other four urban actors thereby embedding a “quintuple helix” or “pentahelix” approach in the governance design of the city. Part I articulates the most prominent visions or paradigms of the city of the 21st century and the “metaphors” that are currently used to conceptualize the city. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this part then discusses some complications and emerging key points that deserve further reflection. In Part II, the article argues that a rights-based paradigm or vision in the conceptualization of the city is emerging. It does so through the analysis of urban laws and policies adopted in exemplary case studies such as Naples and Barcelona, on […]
The tragedy of urban roads, Fordham Urban Law Journal (2009), an article by Christian Iaione
“The tragedy of urban roads: Saving cities from choking, calling on citizens to combat climate change” is an article wrote by LabGov co-founder, prof. Christian Iaione, and published on the Fordham Urban Law Journal in 2009. This article argues that the best response to the tragedy of road congestion has to rely on market-based regulatory techniques and public policies aimed at controlling the demand-side of transportation congestion. Among market-based regulatory techniques, economists seem to favor price-based instruments over quantity-based instruments. This article argues instead that quantity instruments, such as tradable permits of road usage and real estate development, can better internalize all the externalities that road congestion produces. This article also advances the idea that quantity instruments are more successful tools in addressing urban congestion for four reasons: (1) they respond better to equity concerns; (2) they are therefore more politically viable; (3) they are more likely to be well designated; and (4) they are able to represent a catch-all strategy for externalities produced by congestion. Part II of this article illustrates that the costs that congestion imposes on society or, to use the preferred language of economists, the negative externalities that road congestion produces. Part III sheds light on the underlying causes of urban congestion. Part IV enumerates regulatory tools that are available to […]
Governing the urban commons, Italian Journal of Public Law (2015), an article by Christian Iaione
“Governing the Urban Commons” is an article written by LabGov coordinator, prof. Christian Iaione, and first published in 2015 in the Italian Journal of Public Law. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a crucial question relating to institutional design in the public sector. After two centuries of Leviathan-like public institutions or Welfare State, do we still need full delegation of every public responsibility and/or exclusive monopoly of the power to manage public affairs? In particular, is there space for a collaborative/polycentric urban governance matrix? In the “sharing”, “peer to peer” “collaborative” age, there might be space for a new design of public institutions? Can urban assets and resources or the city as a whole be transformed into collaborative ecosystems that enable collective action for the commons?”. To investigate this question I chose the city, conceptualized as a commons, as an observation point. A large, developed urban city like Italy is a unique point of study. It is a large community of its own, and it is also developed of individual smaller communities that have their own networks. If you are interested in this subject, please explore the full article here.
