CONFLICTING CITIZENSHIP AND (RE)ACTIVE ZONES IN THE URBAN AREAS: CONFRONTING THE CASE OF BERLIN AND ROME

In times of crisis, the urge to imagine a better and different future gets the upper hand. Since the political and social upheaval of ’68 through the 1970’s systemic crisis and at every crisis since, European cities faced a phenomenon of “reclaiming” of urban physical spaces that was carried on by social movements and wilfully appropriated by citizens using “occupation” as a legitimate tactic of protest. In addition to that, insurgent citizenship, in the last decades, have developed reclaiming strategies to resist to the welfare state crisis and the problem in the provision of housing, the homelessness, and the lack of social space that mark contemporary society, paradoxically increasing together with the constant production of vacant spaces. Today's umpteenth crisis reopened the issue from a global Occupy movement perspective, embodying a series of dynamics of “insurgent (re)appropriation” of public space fostered by a new configuration of active citizenship. In the last years, at the same time a lot of “interstitial spaces” are being reclaimed, many of them are being incorporated in the city development strategies and discourses and most of them are in the process of being shut down by a large scale offensive against conflictive and non-authorized actions of dissent. These coercive and incorporating processes seems to be pushed by property developers’ and local and extra-local elites, so central in the neoliberal urban development strategies. In fact, in the last decade, new laws and policies have been deliberately constructed on one side to defend both the private property and interests to the detriment of new dynamics of collective action that spontaneously proliferated in urban contests, on the other side to gradually harness these creative, unplanned, dynamic and alternative “temporary uses of space” into urban development policies and city marketing discourses. Looking back in time over the past thirty years, the processes of re-appropriation of space linked to urban social movements (claiming social rights or the definition of new political and cultural identities) have been a characteristic feature of the development of many cities in the advanced capitalist societies (Holm, Kuhn, 2011) and have given rise to interesting experiences of participation from the point of view of the social practices of selforganization and self-empowerment. Nevertheless, I argue that the inherent “generative” and “evolutionary” potential of these bottom-up strategies was hidden or not fully understood. These performative practices embody “Dissent” in the moment in which they start to challenge the status quo (the existing structure of norms, values […] and especially authorities that underwrite the present ways of doing things) (Shiffrin, 2000) and therefore these practices are adversarial to the idea of “consensus”. Indeed, now is even more important to identify sort of legitimation tool to empower those “informal actors’ practices” and learn to know and recognize these practices of “self-made city” understanding them as a legitimate expression of a "right to the city", implemented by a part of civil society whose instances, although minoritarian, have the right to be heard and negotiated in the city’s transformation processes. It results crucial for the definition of more mature democratic approaches capable to include a “conflictive consensus” (Mouffe). This research aims to investigate the inherent potential of the “insurgent practices” seen as on-going experiments of self-organization, presenting these “state of exception proclaimed from the bottom” (Virno, 2012), and practices developed within these conditions, as silent driving forces behind the evolution and production of new urban policies and practices. These “practices of freedom” (Foucault, 2002) or “Spaces of hope” (Harvey, 2001) are the places where alternative politics can be both devised and pursued. Within such frame, the research also addresses the question of how the strategies developed by “informal actors” (re)appropriating public urban spaces have been or could be able to influence the agenda of urban planning and urban policies, and what happen when these practices are institutionalized. Indeed, the comprehension of the dissent’s procedural efficacy looks important from the perspective of democratic theory because of «its ability to oblige people to rethink their own views, conceptions, and underlying assumptions, especially when those other views challenge the status quo» (Martin, 2013). These bottom-up strategies of production of space, (re)claiming urban vacant spaces for public purposes, besides reveal the inherent political and imaginary potential of these “indeterminate” spaces, produce symbolic/political contents that make “visible” abandoned places in the urban geography of the citizens’ everyday life. Moreover, they define a space of counter-power from where push for the rights to the city’s “evolution”, more than for “revolution” - that implies the substitution of an hegemonic order with a new one (Newman, 2011). On the other side, considering that dissent often end up being manipulated by defenders of the status quo through the definition of a set of strategies that incorporate, co-opt, commodify or neutralize the adversarial practices and discourses (Mouffe, 2012) and incorporate them in the hegemonic strategies, how can we define who influences whom in this process? This analysis entails, then, the unfolding of strategies defined in the confrontation between configuration of power and counter-power positions, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic models, “having rights” and “having-not” (Arnstein, 1969) and this is why this analysis looks crucial for a deep understanding of issues related to forms of democracy and democratic participation, contrasting manipulation and reaching real citizen empowerment.

In tempi di crisi, la voglia di immaginare un futuro migliore e diverso prende il sopravvento. A partire dagli sconvolgimenti politici e sociali del '68 passando attraverso le crisi sistemiche del 1970 e ad ogni crisi da allora, le città europee hanno assistito a fenomeni di "riappropriazione" di spazi fisici urbani che sono stati sperimentati da movimenti sociali e volontariamente appropriati poi come pratiche dal basso dagli abitanti delle citta` che hanno utilizzanto la "occupazione" come una tattica legittima di protesta. Le pratiche di riappropriazione, sono state inoltre messe in pratica dalla cittadinanza insorgente, negli ultimi decenni, per resistere alla crisi dello stato sociale e individuare strategie alternative per dare risposta a problemi nella fornitura di alloggi a canoni accessibili, al numero crescente di senzatetto, e alla mancanza di spazi pubblici per la socialita` che non siano associati al consumo, problematiche che segnano la società contemporánea. Questi problemi in parte legati alla riduzione degli spazi pubblici e’ andata crescendo paradossalmente insieme alla produzione costante di spazi vuoti. L’ennesima crisi di oggi ha riaperto la questione da una prospettiva globale a partire dall’emergere del movimento Occupy, che incarna una serie di dinamiche di "(ri)appropriazione insorgente" dello spazio pubblico promosso da una nuova configurazione della cittadinanza attiva. Negli ultimi anni, allo stesso tempo, mentre molti "spazi interstiziali" venivano “recuperati” dal basso, molti di questi venivano incorporati nelle strategie e discorsi dominanti dello sviluppo urbano e la maggior parte di essi sono stati repressi o sono in procinto di essere chiusi da una ofensiva su vasta scala contro ogni forma conflittuale di dissenso non autorizzata. La tesi tenta di analizzare il potenziale democratico che è inteso nella negoziazione di queste pratiche del dissenso cosiderate come elementi potenziali di sviluppo urbano dal basso. Il cambio di prospettiva nella comprensione di questi fenomeni, intesi non solo piu’ come legali o illegali ma analizzati dal punto di vista della legittimita’ e della capacita’ di intercettare il bene comune, risulta fondamentale per aprire un dibattito sulla possibilita’ di individuare strumenti capaci di introiettare alcune di queste pratiche nelle forme piu’ tradizionali della pianificazione.