Economic crisis, role of public authorities and the commons : Rome and the governance of urban resources

An historical analysis highlights in this part how such forms of management are the result of specific contextual factors - economic transformations and regulations; operating mechanisms of management and implementation of rules at the local level - which had a significant impact on distribution of urban resources, and on the socio-economic development of the city. This part shows how the deviation between the formal rules and operational rules in use supported the formation of self-organizing processes around such urban commons: it underlines how this passage has been catalyzed by the impact of the economic crisis on the level of quality of life and access to services for citizens, motivating radical forms of appropriation of empty and abandoned spaces of the city. The last part of this section attempts to extend the interpretative scheme of Ostrom's framework to analyze the socio-ecological systems to the case study of the city of Rome. This application highlights that the failure in urban resource management in Rome is representative of an institutional failure around the management of "common resources" characterized by the presence of very different actors who influence the formation and application of the rules, leading to large imbalances and over-exploitation of urban land. The variables that affected these outcomes seem here strongly connected to the lack of public authorities in supporting the needs of local communities: in this sense the issue of the Commons is connected to the analysis of the transformation of the public sector's role in facing the c