Generating Commons Makes Cities Alive

Climate change, together with the pandemic and geopolitical crises (which requires us to reflect on the issue of food and energy autonomy) has brought back the focus on the cities on their ability to generate and regenerate public goods (for example, healthcare, school, and mobility) and commons in new forms. Cities are at the same time the first culprits and the first victims of climate change. They are the places where we can face past failures and errors, recognize resource-dissipative buildings and behaviors; or we can produce a deep discontinuity with the past, transforming them into workshops for real change. Due to their high concentration of assets, skills, technologies, and institutions, big cities can provide the resources for the most innovative solutions to these phenomena. Through their excesses, human variety, inequalities and contradictions, multiple languages, mixing and conflicting cultures, and natural biodiversity, cities will find a way for the survival of the planet. Cities are indeed the greatest and most complex human product—a commons that houses commons. They are frail goods, continuously undermined by the risk of consumption and abandon, tied to the civic culture of a community, to its capacity of regenerating itself from waste, abandoned places, and crises; however, they are also the place of rebirth, of social, cultural, and economic biodiversity, where every crisis can be turned into a chance for change.