Bologna Regulation on urban commons (since 2014)

Background

Italy's 2001 constitutional reform (Constitutional Law no. 3 of 18 October 2001) rewrote Article 118 and added the principle of horizontal subsidiarity: the State, regions, metropolitan cities, provinces and municipalities shall favour autonomous initiatives by citizens, alone or in association, for activities of general interest. For years the clause had little practical effect. The association Labsus (Laboratorio per la sussidiarietà), led by the legal scholar Gregorio Arena, argued that it could ground a new model of "shared administration", in which residents are treated as partners rather than users of public services.

In Bologna, as elsewhere, residents who wanted to look after public spaces had no clear legal procedure through which the city could authorise, insure or support them. A collaboration between the city, Labsus and researchers produced a draft regulation. It was presented in Bologna on 22 February 2014 as the first model regulation for collaboration between citizens and administrations on urban commons, and adopted by the city council on 19 May 2014 (resolution no. 172).

How it is governed

As described by its designers, the model works as follows.

• Urban commons. The regulation defines urban commons as goods, tangible and intangible, that citizens and the administration recognise as serving individual and collective well-being — squares, parks, schools, abandoned buildings, digital assets — whatever their formal ownership.
• Active citizens. Individuals, informal groups, associations and businesses can propose activities of care, shared management or regeneration.
• Collaboration pacts. The core instrument is the patto di collaborazione, a written agreement between the city and active citizens that specifies the goal, duration, responsibilities, resources, insurance, and how results will be reported. Simple pacts for routine care follow a light procedure; complex pacts for regeneration of buildings or larger spaces involve more negotiation and review.
• City role. The city supplies materials, training, insurance cover, tax and fee relief, and visibility, rather than money for private benefit; a dedicated office coordinates proposals across departments.
• Principles. Trust, transparency, inclusiveness, sustainability and proportionality: residents are not paid, and the commons remain open to all.

Economy and public goods

Pacts mobilise unpaid civic work alongside public resources. Typical uses include maintaining green spaces, cleaning and decorating public areas, running community gardens and reopening disused buildings for cultural or social purposes. The economic logic is co-production: the city lowers transaction costs and liability barriers, citizens provide time and local knowledge, and the result stays a public good. The sources reviewed for this entry do not give city-level totals for the value of resources involved.

Conflict and disputes

• Volunteers in place of services. Critics warn that, in a period of fiscal austerity, collaboration pacts can be used to shift maintenance onto unpaid residents.
• Unequal capacity. Well-organised, better-off neighbourhoods may sign more pacts, reproducing inequalities in public space.
• Who speaks for a commons. A pact gives one group a role in caring for a space that others also use; conflicts can arise with neighbours or informal users who were not party to it.
• Commons in name only. Because ownership and final authority stay with the city, some commons scholars see the model as participatory administration rather than commons governance in Elinor Ostrom's sense of self-organised resource users.

Outcomes

The Bologna regulation became a template. Labsus drew up a prototype regulation, revised in 2017 and again in 2024 in the light of a decade's experience. By Labsus's count, more than 300 municipalities, including Rome, had adopted such regulations by 2024, and more than 8,000 collaboration pacts had been signed across Italy; its list also records regional laws in eight regions. Bologna itself later replaced its original text with a revised regulation on forms of collaboration between civic actors and the administration. Christian Iaione and others developed the approach into the "co-city" model of urban co-governance, which has been proposed for adaptation in other countries.

Lessons for institution design

1. Legal plumbing unlocks civic energy. A clear procedure for authorisation, insurance and support removed obstacles that had blocked residents for years.
2. Contracts can carry governance. The collaboration pact is a flexible, local instrument for sharing responsibility without transferring ownership.
3. Equity needs active support. Without outreach and resources, pacts concentrate where social capital is already high.
4. Guard against substitution. Rules should prevent pacts from replacing paid public services or employment.

Further reading

• Christian Iaione (2016), "The CO-City: Sharing, Collaborating, Cooperating, and Commoning in the City", American Journal of Economics and Sociology
• Gregorio Arena (2024), "Dieci anni dopo, un nuovo prototipo del regolamento", Labsus
• Labsus, list of regulations for the shared administration of commons