Old and New Urban Expression of Collaborative Commons

The paper wants to investigate the city according to the interpretative key of relational goods and of commons goods, two categories of goods identified by economic science, which influence each other in the urban habitat. The city is infact not just a set of common spaces and structures (not excludable, but rival in access), but also a set of social relations guided by the principle of reciprocity (symmetric or generalized), on which may depend social cohesion and urban economic development. In this regard the paper refers to medieval town and to Italian free cities as a successful example of places very rich in common goods where relational goods, in addition to ensuring peaceful coexistence among people, have fertilized economy. On the other hand the quantity and quality of common spaces and structures available in a city, more and more influenced in the present by economy, affect the degree of social cohesion existing in it. The evolution of the city is infact related to the evolution of capitalism, being able to find a correspondence between models of capitalism and city models. The actual financial and patrimonial capitalism, together with knowledge economy, bring on one side to the birth of creativity cities and smart cities, on the other side to the erosion of common goods and to the destruction of social capital in modern towns. Urban transformation processes can not be stopped and must not to be exorcised, but should be governed democratically and shared through new urban planning practices that, while innovate, safeguard common goods and relational goods thanks to “generativity economics” paradigma. In this regard the paper provides a survey of some instruments of Italian and European interactive planning and describes the future of European cities.