Collective auto-determination and reappropriation of the space: Naples and the case of ‘Beni Comuni’
Urban space in Naples (Photo courtesy of authors)
In this article Emilio Caja and Barbara Russo investigate conceptions of space in Naples. The article draws on historical literature, as well as the authors’ contemporary field research in Naples, to examine the shaping of space in the city over time.
The authors identify how emerging conceptions of space can change engagement and political representation, presenting new opportunities (and challenges) for the city. In the context of nascent civil movements around the world (including protests in Hong Kong and ongoing global climate strikes), the article provides insights into how urban space can be a tool for communication and engagement.
Emilio is currently reading for an MPhil in European Politics and Society at the University of Oxford. Barbara is studying philosophy at the University of Milan and is also a visiting student at the Sorbonne University in Paris.
To understand a city – its politics and its institutions – we need to begin from the space in which it is born and that it contributes to shape. Space, differently from place, is never simply a set of things present in a certain geographical context, but always a synergy between elements that actively live and model it. In general, the city is identified by this synergy and it is precisely for this reason that each city represents always a unique experiment.
Nevertheless, we must think about the precariousness of these experiments and about the forces that try to impose development models in contrast with the needs of the citizens. In fact, the more local administrations incentivize urban development projects driven by interests of third parties – namely foreign investors – the more it becomes difficult for the citizens to exercise a real right to the city [1].
Moving from the idea that the relation with others and with the group always and directly depends on the space we live in [2], the comprehension of the city requires a reflection on which housing model, and thus which lifestyle, are embodied in cities and neighbourhoods. In this sense, our analysis considers that the experience of an individual is above all a collective experience that needs to be investigated in the daily-life practices, singular and plural. In this way it is possible to discern why and how some of these practices survive urban systems that try to suppress them.
Panorama of Naples (Photo courtesy of authors)
In Naples, a series of occupations at the beginning of the 2010s are illustrating a path towards a free and inclusive citizen joint-participation. The reconversion of what were previously abandoned spaces, that become open spaces that spontaneously take on the territorial difficulties of Naples, can enrich the knowledge of contemporary practices of collective auto-determination. In particular, the dialogue between social movements and the local administration led to the definition of the judicial category of common goods, which goes beyond the classic definitions of both public and private property. Finally, these experiences show how the care for a common space is a political choice in contrast with the economic and moral logics of neo-liberalism.
The socio-economic context: Benjamin’s analytical framework
The Neapolitan socio-economic context has historically always shown a deficient attitude towards democratic participation. Consequently, powerful individuals and groups have profited from this lack of participation.
At the same time, however, creative solutions to overcome daily-life difficulties have made Naples a city full of experiments and contradictions, where improvements in living conditions develop side-by-side with street poverty.
In Walter Benjamin’s posthumous publication [3], the German philosopher and critic reports some of the most defining characteristics of Naples. Although his empirical account did not have any scientific aim, his words are helpful to understand the background of the city. Concerning the power of Church and criminal associations in the city, he says:
“Only the Church, and not the police, can face the organism of self-government of the organized crime, Camorra. Here then, a person who suffered an injustice, if she wants to have back what was stolen, does not call the police. Through civic or ecclesiastic mediators, if not personally, she speaks to a Camorrista. And through this, she negotiates a ransom.”
With respect to the way in which people live in the city:
“If it is true that the nineteenth century has transformed the medieval and natural order in favour of better living conditions for the poor, and housing and clothing have been made compulsory at the expense of food, here these norms have been refused.”
He then understands the strong psycho-geographic feature of this city [4]. There’s a strong connection between the way in which the city is built and the lives that its citizens live:
“The private life of a Neapolitan is the bizarre end up of a public life pushed to the excess. Indeed, it is not within the domestic walls, among wives and children, that private life develops, but it is in the devotion or in desperation. In the lateral alleys, going down filthy stairs, the gaze strays to dives, where two or three men sit close to each other and drink, hidden behind bins that resemble columns of a church. In these corner it is hard to distinguish the parts where buildings evolve and others where they are already in ruin. Indeed, nothing is completed and concluded. The porosity is not only in the idleness of the southerner artisan, but especially in the passion for improvisation. In any case, space and occasions shall be left to the latter. Construction sites are used as popular theatre.”
The poetical vision that Benjamin has of Naples sheds light on many of the controversies that persist in the city today as well. Idleness and a strong, eradicated relativistic morality are at the core of the conception of the city in Naples. This has allowed non-market forces, such as criminal associations, to take over city’s institutions and their role, but at the same time has preserved the identity and creativity of its inhabitants. Naples is therefore an extremely poor and informal reality, where public institutions have been historically absent.
Idleness in the city (Photo courtesy of authors)
From “occupato” to “liberato”: the new approach to squatting
In 2012, the Ex Asilo Filangieri was occupied by a group of activists in response to the Forum of Cultures that was taking place there and that they defined as “useless” [5]. The space was then recognized as legal through an innovative methodology of assignment: under the principle of the urban civic use, a place is considered to be legally occupied not in the presence of a recipient legal entity but on the basis of its cultural function which depends upon an open assembly promoted by a committee of guarantors. Following this starting point, developments happened in the next years both at the institutional and at the grassroots level.
In the 2010s, activists and collectives have been extremely active in Naples. In Bagnoli, a neighbourhood famous for its environmental scandals in industrial production, Villa Medusa Occupata emerged advocating an environmental transition in the neighbourhood to be guided by citizens and not by the central government, which instead has interests in transforming the whole coastal area in a touristic attraction. In this fight, the squat joined the historical occupation of Lido Pola. In poor areas of the city centre, it developed another environmental experience named Giardino Liberato, which aims at the requalification of parks and abandoned buildings in the neighbourhood of Materdei. The name “liberato” has been extensively used in this new wave of occupations.
Focussed on the city centre, activists of Santa Fede Liberata and Scugnizzo Liberato occupied two very different buildings. The former is a squat of an old oratory and the collective claims that the requalification of the city centres requires giving unutilised spaces out to social purposes. The latter is instead an enormous occupation in what was previously an abandoned reformatory and it is characterized by its strong openness to the neighbourhood. Finally, there are the Ex Opg- Je so’ pazz, which occupied what was previously a psychiatric hospital and it is politically the most active collective in the city, and the Ex Schipa- Scuola Occupata. All eight spaces have been recognized as common goods by city council’s deliberations.
At the grassroots level, all these occupations highlight new dynamics. Indeed, the chosen formula “liberato” (freed), which substitutes the more traditional “occupato” (occupied) is indicative of a shift in focus from an antagonistic approach towards institution to a more socially active engagement with the people in the neighbourhood and their problems. As an activist we interviewed said [6], militants believed that the activism based on the concept of occupation was not appropriate anymore. The new approach comes from a collective reflection on how to be more efficient on the territory. Given that they had no guidelines to follow, the experimentation has been full of errors and achievements through a trial-and-error approach.
At the institutional level, since the beginning of the mandate of the left-wing mayor Luigi De Magistris, there has been increasing attention to the theme of common usage of public goods. In particular, with the Deliberation n.740/2011, Naples City Council was the first one to pick up on the 2011 referendum Water-Common Good against the privatization of water provision. In the Deliberation, the council stated:
“The municipality of Naples affirms the principle of water as a common good and therefore of absolute public property”
In the following years, when the recognition of the Ex Asilo Filangieri took place, a series of new deliberations identified the principles for the identification, government and management of common goods in the city of Naples. The underlying philosophy is that every citizen has to be given the possibility to participate at the spiritual and natural progress of the city for the collective well-being. With the creation of the Department of Common Goods, the council took a practical step in the direction of breaking the historical idleness described by Benjamin by putting the creativity connected to it at the centre of a political and administrative programme.
As our interviewee confirmed, all the deliberations have been written by activists, both in their juridical and practical terms [7]. These activists are grouped into a platform called Massa Critica, whose aim is to group all the movements and collectives that want to build alternative experiences and bring their demands to the city council. It is through the gathering of different activists coming from a diverse set of backgrounds that the common good definition has emerged: an open box, where every collectivity could have the possibility to fit.
Deliberation n.446/2016 of the City Council recognizes the value of pre-existing experiences in the municipality’s territory and identifies the occupations named above as common goods. This has been the maximum point of convergence between grassroots movements and local institutions. The important step of the municipality has been to recognize that within those spaces private property no longer exists and there is no form of ownership.
Eight spaces recognized, another seven mobilized in the same direction, Massa Critica as the innovative force that provides dialogue between these institutions - where could the problem lie? As an interviewee says, “this confrontation cannot be free from a political fight”. Not all the squats in Naples have been recognized, and not all of them want to be. Older occupations, particularly, can find essential meaning in their conflict against institutions and younger activists have been conscious of this in their dealings with authority.
Deliberation n.458/2017 of the City Council, seeking “to promote actions of valorisation for social purposes of the public assets”, provides a possible point of departure for understanding this complexity. To interpret these micro-dynamics in practice, the authors visited the Scugnizzo Liberato.
Built as a convent, and more recently the reformatory of Naples, it was closed and abandoned for 20 years until 2015 when a collective of young activists of Naples occupied (in their words “freed”) the place. The idea was to open the doors of this structure to the inhabitants of the neighbourhood Montesanto, a heterogeneous and very poor neighbourhood, where there are no spaces for aggregation nor services. Above all, before the Scugnizzo, in the district there was no cultural place to go. On the other hand, the neighbourhood has historically been a politically active place, in particular with the experience of popular canteen for poor children in the 1970s. Therefore, the idea was to act in continuity with the history of this area and involve young people and citizens in the decision-making and participation processes.
All the spaces that are used for the activities have been redeveloped by the activists’ community and thanks to the collaboration of the people in the area. Indeed, the Interior Ministry, owner of the building, completely abandoned the place when it was closed.
Scugnizzo Liberato (Photo courtesy of authors)
After three years and a half of occupation, the Scugnizzo is perceived by citizens to be an active part of the neighbourhood. They have developed working tables for the different types of activities they organize, and a general assembly of community management. The activities organized around these tables are: schools for migrants, laboratories for artisans, libraries, gyms, a concert hall – the biggest of the city centre – whose construction has been funded through a crowd-funding initiative, and a theatre.
The artisans’ tables, particularly, operate on the basis that there is a body of traditional expert knowledge in the community that could not open a ‘laboratory’ elsewhere. In exchange for the space they organize courses for the youngsters. Similarly, the concert hall gives space to young artists that would not have possibilities to exhibit elsewhere. A football team has also recently been established after two years of territorial scouting to involve children and young people in the area. The football team trains in the courtyard of the space.
At the beginning, there was full participation in assemblies and flows of proposals came. Today, participation has decreased, but it is very fluid in the type of participation. Indeed, many activities have developed and today activists go into the assembly only when it is needed, while new people come and go once they find what they want to do. The interviewee wanted to specify that “it is a traversable space, where many people can interact and have dialogue, which is something that outside this place does not happen, because of the increasing individualism and societal fragmentation”.
Scugnizzo Liberato courtyard activities (Photo courtesy of authors)
In these same years, Naples has been rediscovered as an international touristic attraction, up to the point that tourism has become a problem – “touristification”. Indeed, development through tourism may have a side-effect: while it boosts the economy in the short-term through foreign private investments, it also cyclically fades, with activities closing and leaving the poor districts of the city centre – that will be minimally touched by the touristic wave – abandoned to criminal powers.
The risk is that, unintentionally, the free regeneration of these immense buildings in poor districts in the city centre becomes an opportunity for the interests of private investors that do not care about local problems. Therefore, a utopia of participated development may turn into a dystopia for Naples’ inhabitants.
Connecting theory and practice, given that uses of space determine the conditions of social life it is imperative to provide collective and individual answers aiming at the reappropriation of what Foucault called disciplinary spaces [8]. To follow this objective, the evolution of the city needs to be deconstructed and monitored, ensuring that the Lefebvrian right to the city is not sidelined for intrinsically market logics and continuing, instead, to plan and build sustainable living spaces.
Emilio Caja was born and raised in Milan, Italy. Emilio studied economics at Bocconi University. In the same years, Emilio founded a cultural organisation whose aim was to develop collective artistic projects, involving music, poetry and painting. With this experience Emilio learned in practice the great potential of co-operation and community engagement. Emilio is now reading for an MPhil in European Politics and Society at the University of Oxford focusing on welfare provision and territorial inequalities.
Barbara Russo was also born and raised in Naples, Italy. Barbara is completing her undergraduate student in philosophy at the University of Milan and is currently a visiting student at the Sorbonne University in Paris researching a thesis on the conception of space in Michel De Certeau.
[1] Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville, Anthropos, Paris 1968.
[2] Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984
[3] Walter Benjamin, Immagini di Città, Einaudi, Segrate, 2007.
[4] Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, Les Lèvres Nues, 1955.
[5] Maurizio Braucci, ‘Anche a Napoli si occupa’, Gli Asini, Roma, 2016
[6] Interview carried out in Naples, April 2019.
[7] All the deliberations can be found here: http://www.comune.napoli.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/IDPagina/16783
[8] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison, Allen Lane, London, 1977.