Crisi e condizioni di ricostruzione della sfera pubblica tra anti-istituzionalismo e neutralizzazione amministrativa: Il laboratorio Napoli

Abstract

This article interprets the contemporary crisis of the urban public sphere in advanced capitalist societies as a crisis of institutional capacity and, simultaneously, as a crisis in the production of public space. From this perspective, it argues that reconstructing the public sphere requires institutions to be conceived as commons: not merely as administrative apparatuses or objects of management, but as enduring infrastructures that make rights, cooperation, and democratic conflict practically possible. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, the effectiveness of rights depends upon institutional devices capable of materialising them in goods, rules, and places; from this standpoint, rights create commons, and institutional design becomes a question of translating fundamental rights into operational arrangements. Second, the empowerment of public space depends on a policy mix composed of legal-institutional, organisational, spatial, and cognitive devices capable of generating access, inclusion, and thirdness. Third, such a reconstruction must avoid two symmetrical failures: anti-institutionalism, which conflates institutions with bureaucratic apparatuses and thereby abandons the guarantees of durability, and administrative neutralisation, which absorbs social practices and political conflict into depoliticising procedures. The Naples case is presented as a policy laboratory: civic and collective use rights, through administrative recognition and forms of regulatory autonomy, demonstrate that the object of public policy is not merely the management of commons but the production of public space, the institutionalisation of thirdness, and the generative capacity of rights. The article concludes by identifying principles of institutional design and future research and policy directions centred on durability, contestability, and institutional learning.