Speaker
Description
In Naples' periurban fringe, the case of Parco Terranostra in via Boccaccio challenges conventional urban planning approaches by revealing how spaces beyond institutional control can become laboratories for socio-ecological justice. At the heart of this experience lies a three-hectare former aviation fuel depot that became an unexpected laboratory for alternative forms of urban space. In 2015, the Terranostra collective declared the abandoned site a "self-managed liberated green area," initiating an experiment in ecological co-existence. Through years of mutual interaction and repair, new relationships emerged between human and more-than-human inhabitants, creating a spontaneous and vibrant ecosystem where multiple species participated in the space's transformation. However, when the Municipality of Casoria included the site in its EU regional funds proposal, these existing relationships faced erasure. Through persistent dialogue initiated by the collective and supported by the Department of Architecture of the University of Naples Federico II and the Urban Permanent Observatory on the Commons of Naples, a new "Regulation for the care and regeneration of urban common goods" was approved, recognizing both human and more-than-human communities as legitimate stakeholders through "civic and collective use". Yet, despite this achievement, the community of Terranostra ("our land") is presently “Senza Terra” (“landless”), as the site is still fenced off even after the completion of works, leaving its potential as a laboratory for multispecies governance unrealized.
The Parco Terranostra-Boccaccio experience points us toward a radical reimagining of public space through the lens of more-than-human commoning. While authorities weaponize contamination and security concerns to justify the erasure of existing socio-ecological relationships, treating these spaces as technical problems to be solved through standardized interventions, these spaces are not problems to be resolved but active places where socio-ecological conflicts are continuously negotiated and reworked. Rather than seeking conflict elimination, urban space should embrace and foster productive tension between different forms of life, recognizing daily practices of care and emotional connections as legitimate forms of stewardship. This situation challenges us to consider socio-ecological justice as a framework for recognizing the voice and the political agency of more-than-human actors in urban space-making, pushing us beyond anthropocentric models toward generative governance and design systems that can respond to emerging forms of ecological relationships.
| Keywords | urban commoning; multispecies justice; more-than-human planning |
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