L’Asilo and the birth of urban Civic and Collective use in Naples

L’Asilo is born within the path of ‘emerging commons’ (Micciarelli, 2014). These ones are experiences that grow from the initiative of a community who identifies given resources as commons — because they are necessary for fundamental rights — and self-governs them in cooperative and mutualistic forms. Emerging commons also exist as a critic of austerity: their practices advocate for the duty of governments to prioritise human rights protection over the financial interests of States’ creditors, and thus subtract (mainly public) resources from privatisation and speculation, reclaiming them for social rights.

In Italy, emerging commons have produced their own community-made forms, starting from the landmark cases of Teatro Valle in Rome, Macao in Milan, and L’Asilo in Naples. Through conflicting actions of collective management and use of resources, these movements have joined the international movements occupying squares, streets, public and private spaces in order to claim decision-making power and protest against precarity and for everyone’s right to the city (Kioupkiolis 2017).

L’Asilo started in March 2012, when a collective of artists and socio-cultural workers, La Balena (The Whale), occupied an under-utilized monumental public building in the heart of Naples. This had to be used as the seat of a big cultural event expected to be hosted in the city. The political action arose as a direct response to this cultural policy arena wasting public money and heritage. The occupation was supposed to take three days. However, in the wake of the huge participation coming from the city, the collective made the decision to dissolve itself in a multitude that, still today, is self-governing and self-managing the space through weekly assemblies and round table discussions.

The community has created crucial precedents at local and trans-national policy level over the years. Besides, it has been imagining new participatory, inclusive, and open decision-making democratic institutions, daily constructed through the inhabitants’ practices of self-organization in the fulfillment of social and political rights.

Indeed, assemblies – open to everyone and deciding by consensus – have collectively elaborated a ‘Declaration of Civic and Collective Urban Use’, providing that the management and fruition of that good shall be open to whomever (Capone 2016). This normative process was acknowledged by two Naples city Government Resolutions (Nos. 400/2012 and 893/2015).

These acts have recognized the community’s self-governance of the space and the distribution of the economic responsibility between the community itself and the Administration, which has to ensure the economic and spatial accessibility and the extraordinary maintenance of the building (De Tullio, 2018). Public expenses were justified through the recognition of the ‘civic profitability’ of the experience, i.e. the ability of the commons to generate a social non-monetary value which is worth the expense of maintaining the building.

The ‘emerging commons’ experience is a way to innovate both political self-organization and participatory democracy, by obtaining new popular institutions as forms of dialogue with the municipal government. Firstly, the acknowledgement of commons was extended to seven additional spaces (Resolution No. 446/2016), forming the Neapolitan Network of Commons. Secondly, following commoners’ proposal and advocacy, the Mayor of Naples established a Council of Audit on Resources and a Permanent Observatory on Commons of the city of Naples. The Observatory is a new institution that has the power to give advice or make proposals on deliberations of the Council and proposals to the Council, on a wide range of issues, which do not only concern commons, but also fundamental rights, participatory democracy and all that varied world of acts that can be included in Neomunicipalism. The Council analyzes the debt of the Municipality of Naples to identify “illegitimate”, “illegal” and “odious” debt in order to claim the refusal of its payment by the city. These institutions are composed by activists themselves and experts that are engaged in defending commons themselves, against the selling off of local public services and public property for the defense of the commons; against the touristification of the city for a fair and solidarity-based territorial economy. Since then, the experience has acquired a decent symbolic capital in certain areas of social movements and beyond, especially for its ‘creative use of law’, allowing collectively-shaped ‘new institutions’.

In the same spirit of ‘legal hacking’, or ‘creative use of law’, Urban Civic and Collective Use – engineered by the community itself – sets a legal and political precedent in the management of public property, consisting of a public law pattern, strengthened by grassroots participation (Micciarelli, 2017). Because of this potential, the experience was awarded by the European Union as a best practice, to be translated in different contexts thanks to the Civic eState Urbact network. Activists were key in this process, claiming a strategic role in the implementation of the project’s policy learning strategies at both local and international level. In this way, commoners emerged as social actors capable of having a say on the management of public resources and this was further through their protagonism in processes of urban renewal and refurbishing of public buildings. As highlighted during the process of Ad Uso Civico e Collettivo, the City Hall could attract national and EU resources on public estate, thanks to commons that were creating social value and showing great potential to multiply investments. Hence, through participatory processes enacted to manage these public resources, the communities of Scugnizzo Liberato and ex OPG - Je So’ Pazzo, together with the whole Neapolitan Network of Commons, could give valuable guidance on strategic interventions and procedures to make spending more efficient towards its social purposes.