geografie luoghi spazi città

Aa.Vv. (2016), Commons/Comune, Società di studi geografici. Memorie geografiche NS 14, pp. 79-87
GIORGIA IOVINO
WATERFRONTS AS COMMONS?
ON THE REDISTRIBUTION EFFECTS OF URBAN REGENERATION PROJECTS. SOCIAL
PRACTICES AND LOCAL PUBLIC CHOICE IN A CASE STUDY IN SOUTHERN ITALY
You want to know what’s wrong with our waterfront?
It’s the love of a lousy buck. It’s making the love of the lousy
buck – the cushy job – more important than the love of man.
(Karl Malden acting as Father Barry
in the movie On the waterfront, 1954)
1. INTRODUCTION. — Waterfronts in port cities are places full of cultural stratification, symbolic
and identity values, landscape and environmental resources. Their great competitive potential, in terms
of rent and land value, exposes them to a profit driven urbanization process more than in the case of
other types of urban spaces. This explains why these fluid and transitional areas, edges between land
and water, when affected by regeneration plans, are transformed in most cases in the arena of conflicts
between different interests, values and objectives often diverging and difficult to reconcile.
The outcome of this tension may vary significantly, depending on the context and on different
variables such as, local governance structures, the level of local empowerment of specific groups and
especially their attitudes to collective action. By simplifying a bit, we could say that the base and the
stakes in these process end up in the confrontation of two alternatives: the commodification of the waterfront
and the generation of new urban common (commodity versus commons).
Starting from such perspective, the present paper compares two specific case studies in order to
understand the socio-spatial dynamics triggered by the competition for the use of urban space in waterfront
areas affected by regeneration projects. The framework of the empirical cases is Salerno, a city
of small-medium sized interested in the last twenty years by a significant urban renewal program. This
has been praised by many as a model of dynamism and local administrative capacity, a best practice to
look at in a difficult area like Southern Italy. Protests and local resistance actions, however, signal a
different reality that we deem important to analyze and understand in its articulations.
After a first section aimed at defining the theoretical framework, we discuss the case studies pursuing
three main objectives: a) describe methods and urban practices used by these grassroots movements
b) verify whether and to what extent they have solicited a change in social perception of the
place c) evaluate whether these practices have produced new urban common.
2. THE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND. — The growing demand for common goods (1) in urban areas
is the expression of a widespread social distress related to the many evils that afflict the contempo-
(1) Starting from the work of Elinor Ostrom (1990), Governing the Commons, an intensive political and cultural debate has developed
on the concept and the issue of the commons. From this debate a rich field of interdisciplinary studies has spurred. The expression – initially
used to indicate natural and traditional resources (pastures, forests, agricultural land, fishing areas) communally managed (through precise
rules of commoning) – has come to refer to a diverse and disparate range of new commons, global and local, natural and artificial, tangible
and intangible (Lessing, 2001; Hess, 2008; Bollier, 2015), a list that continues to grow, and – as pointed out by Coccoli (2013, p. 6; our
translation) – “makes increasingly difficult to find a common physiognomy that can provide us with operating rules of the concept”. A
certain vagueness also concerns the more restricted sphere of the urban commons, that ranges, according to the analytical (and ideological)
perspectives adopted, from public spaces (parks, squares, streets, etc.), to urban services (transport, health services, education, etc.), from the
environment to safety up to include the city as a whole (Hardt, Negri, 2009; Salzano, 2009; Harvey, 2012).
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