The “City Project”
The “City Project” Research Group is an initiative promoted by the Department of Public, International and European Union Law (DiPIC), coordinated by Professors Filippo Pizzolato, Antonino Scalone and Fabio Corvaja. The initiative is part of the activities promoted by the Department with the establishment of an “Observatory on Sources.”
It is an informal and open place for discussion, seminar-style, and joint research on topics that pertain to public law, but intersect other areas, legal and otherwise. Indeed, professors, researchers and scholars from public law, but also from other disciplines (urban planners, philosophers, political scientists, economists, etc…) participate in the Group.
The City Project Group will follow, on behalf of the Department of Public, International and European Union Law (DiPIC), the tasks of monitoring, studying, training and making proposals on the subject of the reorganization of participation and municipal decentralization, which is the subject of an agreement – in the process of being finalized – with the City of Padua.
FILIPPO PIZZOLATO, GUIDO RIVOSECCHI E ANTONINO SCALONE
EDITORIAL COORDINATION GIOVANNI COMAZZETTO, FABIO CORVAJA E PAOLO COSTA
Di ANDREA AMBROSI (Author), JEAN-BERNARD AUBY (Author), CRISTIANA BENETAZZO (Author), GIUSEPPE BERGONZINI (Author), MARIO BERTOLISSI (Author), ELENA BUOSO (Author), LUCIA BUSATTA (Author), GIOVANNI COMAZZETTO (Author), FABIO CORVAJA (Author), UMBERTO CURI (Author), GABRIELE LEONDINI (Author), PATRIZIA MARZARO (Author), VANESSA NOBILE (Author), CAROLA PAGLIARIN (Author), FILIPPO PIZZOLATO (Author), CLEMENTE SANTACROCE (Author), MICHELANGELO SAVINO (Author), ANTONINO SCALONE (Author), ELISA SPILLER (Author), GIOVANNA TIEGHI (Author), FABIO CORVAJA (Editor), FILIPPO PIZZOLATO (Editor), ANTONINO SCALONE (Editor)
In the academic year 2021-2022:
The City Group has identified the city between aspiration for autonomy and plural dimensions of heteronomy as the theme of reflections. This is, in a way, a radical and foundational question, from whose answers the research conducted around the participation and inter- and supranational projection of cities can also find a fuller sense.
The fundamental questions, with respect to which answers will be sought, are: what are the actual spaces that remain for the autonomy of the city legal system? And, before that, can the city legal system be defined as an autonomous legal order - according to the Roman lesson? With what limits?
The path of reflection would intend to focus on the dialectic between the city's aspiration for self-government and heteronomous conditioning/imposition coming from plural and heterogeneous spheres of normativity, not exclusively of an eminently political-institutional nature, but also (if not mainly) of a technical, scientific and economic nature.
In the academic year 2019-2020
the City Project Group has identified "the city beyond the state" as the theme to be the focus of its reflection.
As Sassen's studies, in particular, have shown, globalization, contrary to what one might imagine in the face of the processes of dematerialization and de-territorialization driven by information and financial flows that characterize it, coexists with - or even leads to - an unprecedented importance and vitality of cities. Not surprisingly, the evocative expression "the century of the city" (attributed to M. Bloomberg) has been successfully coined.
The city beyond the state, then: this is a conceptual "beyond," because of the autonomous foundation of the city's original and seminal politicity, of which administrative citizenship (increasingly less coincident with citizenship under the law) is a significant reflection;
but it is also a spatial beyond, which alludes to a growing international and supranational dimension of cities, sometimes promoted by international organizations, sometimes at the initiative of the cities themselves. This internationalist relevance seems to exceed the formal competence of local governments, anchored in the formula of "activities of mere international significance."
These two dimensions of the city's ulteriority seem to converge and join at one point: the network-city, a connecting element of plural, social and institutional, intra-city and extra-city (even extra-national) subjectivities. In short, a network paradigm is appearing on the scene, which already knows interesting theoretical declinations (among others, recall those of Teubner, Cantaro, Labriola, etc...). Cities, in addition to networking the social and institutional realities of the community of reference, manifest an increasing tendency to connect with each other, as nodes of a network capable of transcending the boundaries of statehood. In this way, as has been effectively written (Cantaro) "autonomy is no longer the side of that semiotic triangle that logically and historically relates the parts and the whole, the particular orders and the universal order. Autonomy is 'orphaned' of the other two sides of the triangle: there are no longer ontologically the parts and the whole; any node in the network can be both center and periphery."
At the outcome of these phenomena, we seem to be witnessing a progressive misalignment between the categories of city and municipality, which is a sign of the difficulty of embracing, within our conceptual and institutional horizon, the transformations taking place. These are transformations that convey opportunities, but also criticalities: are lecities really protagonists in this process or are they rather "used" and colonized by the actors of globalization (ICTs, first and foremost)? ...and then:which cities have the potential to "stand" in the network with an active position? For how many, on the other hand, is the reticular paradigm a rhetorical cover of subalternity and passivity?
In the academic year 2018-2019
the Group was formed and set as the theme of its seminar reflection the relationship between the city and participation.
Central to the Group's reflections was the theme of the city as a dimension of democracy and law. The hypothesis - certainly not an ideology - that moves and animates these reflections is that, also in the light of the Italian Constitution, the city constitutes a qualifying level of constitutional democracy, as well as by virtue of the fabric of relations that animates it, a foundational dimension of law, when it is interpreted as an ordering of social relations. The city is thus analyzed both as a territorial sphere of social and institutional relations, and as a specific institutional level - the municipality - that of that territorial community should be the exponential body of reference.
In times of debated, and ambiguous, democratic crisis (ranging from delegitimization of representative institutions to discredit for democracy as such) and recurrent temptation to simplification, the focus on the city allows the perspective of participation and social and institutional autonomies to be put back at the center. This perspective fits with full consistency within the constitutional horizon, of which, indeed, it represents a qualifying perspective that has never been fully implemented. Indeed, constitutional democracy, founded on labor, is entrusted to a feral participation of citizens and social formations that finds in the city dimension a privileged and even seminal place of unfolding and promotion.
At the same time, participation-often invoked as a remedy-not infrequently takes forms entrusted to a polarizing and de-empowering tool, namely the telematic network, both in the construction and animation of the public sphere and as a locus of decision-making. The appeal to the city means recognition of participation "embodied" and enlivened by a system of relationships and personal ties.
The outcomes of this seminar work were the subject of a publication, included in the Juornals series - Department of Public, International and European Union Law (DiPIC):
F. Pizzolato - A. Scalone - F. Corvaja (eds.), La città e la partecipazione tra diritto e politica. Giappichelli, Turin 2019.
https://www.giappichelli.it/la-citta-e-la-partecipazione-tra-diritto-e-politica-22848
Index https://www.giappichelli.it/media/catalog/product/summary/9788892131538.pdf
Meetings academic calendar year 2021-2022
- 22 November 2021: Scheduling of work and presentation of the theme.
- 18 January 2022, La città come ordinamento giuridico (Introduction by M. Croce, Philosophy of Politics, La Sapienza University).
- 24 February 2022: Ordine giuridico del mercato e autonomia locale (Introduction by G. Bergonzini).
Calendar of meetings academic year 2019-2020
- 9 December 2019: Work planning and choice of theme: La città oltre lo Stato.
- 28 April 2020: La città oltre lo Stato (introduction by F. Pizzolato)
- 20 May 2020: The global city (introduction by P. Costa and G. Tieghi)
- 27 May 2020: La città-stato: ritorno al futuro? (introduction by S. Solari and A. Pin)
- June 2020: La rilevanza europea e internazionale della dimensione urbana (introduction by G. Comazzetto and M. Dimetto)
- 15 July 2020: WEBINAR - ISTITUIRE LA PARTECIPAZIONE: LA CITTÀ COME BENE COMUNE A PARTIRE DA DUE RICERCHE
- 25 September 2020: STUDY MEETING: LA CITTA’ E LA PARTECIPAZIONE TRA DIRITTO E POLITICA.
- 22 Octrober 2020: Studiare le istituzioni attraverso le politiche (introduction by L. Perini e A. Rota);
- 26 November 2020: Max Weber e la città (introduction by M. Almagisti e M. Basso).
Calendar of meetings held in previous academic years
- 17 April 2018: Group establishment
- 16 May 2018: La città tra rappresentanza e partecipazione (introduction by A. Scalone)
- 6 June 2018: Gli strumenti della partecipazione comunale e dell’urbanistica (introduction by F. Pizzolato e C. Santacroce)
- 11 September 2018: I referendum locali (introduction by A. Ambrosi)
- 18 October 2018: La città come dimensione del diritto e della democrazia (conference with speaker the French juspublicist J.B. Auby, author of Droit de la ville. Du fonctionnement juridique des villes au droit à la Ville, LexisNexis, Paris 2016).
- 27 November 2018: Le città come soggetti istituenti della Repubblica delle autonomie: la riforma delle Province e i CAL (introduction by C. Benetazzo e F. Pizzolato)
- 29 january 2019: La cittadinanza amministrativa (introduction by F. Corvaja)
- 26 February 2019: Fondazioni filosofiche della città (introduction by U. Curi)
- 3 April 2019: La progettazione partecipata delle città (introduction by M. Savino)
- 28 May 2019: La cultura come veicolo di partecipazione nella citta (introduction by M. Giampieretti)
- 25 june 2019: La democrazia possibile e le città (introduction by M. Almagisti)
Filippo Pizzolato - filippo.pizzolato@unipd.it
Antonino Scalone - antonino.scalone@unipd.it
Fabio Corvaja - fabio.corvaja@unipd.it
Paolo Costa – paolo.costa.2@unipd.it