‘Publicus’ and ‘communis’ between today and yesterday (original) (raw)
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Common property represents a particularly topical and complex issue in Italy due to the widespread (10% of) Italian territory, with millions of buildings built on it and the lack of a clear legal status regarding their alienability and eliminability. Usually known as civic uses, these rights include various forms of collective enjoyment that are recognized by the Italian legal system, such as grazing; hunting; and the right to fell timber, gather firewood, and sow crops. A recent legislative initiative overcame the concept of “eliminating” civic use by introducing the concept of “exchange”, but the unique indication given by the law on how to operate the exchange established the equivalence of the environmental value of the land subject to exchange itself. In the present article, the characteristics of the environmental value or Environmental–Economic Civic Value of land subject to exchange are defined. Consequently, appropriate evaluation procedures/models that could be adopted for...
Diritti comparati, 2023
The expression rights of commons in Italy historically dates back to the feudal system and refers to the rights of enjoyment of one’s own property or those of others owned by a specific community, with the content including the use of specific benefits coming from the land, woods or waters. The Italian legislator has intervened several times, even recently, in order to provide a clear and complete discipline to these rights, the most important element of which is undoubtedly the shared model of land governance, as an alternative to those generally recognized (public property and private property). However, there are still many critical issues in this sector. First, this paper aims to examine the controversial legal nature of rights of commons – also in the light of their legislative assimilation to landscape assets – as well as the serious state of uncertainty that characterizes the regime for the legal transfer of land burdened by rights of commons. Lastly – also in the light of examining the experience of the English common lands – the author intends to envisage a partially innovative interpretation of rights of commons, as an intangible cultural asset, through the valorisation of the profile of shared use and the protection of local traditions.
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Physical spaces and assets vary in legal nature and as such can be subjected to both private and public ownership. Therefore, rights and obligations connected with the use and enjoyment of the different goods depends on the juridic nature of the good itself. In the Italian legal framework, private goods are subject to homogeneous regulation, whereas public goods might comprehend a plethora of heterogeneous categories each of them featuring a specific legal regulation. Among those, collective-owned goods present a complex case as they have the typical characteristics of common goods but might be the object of specific rival and exclusive rights that are guaranteed to certain communities with the system of “civic use rights” (usi civici). This peculiar legal regime is typical of rural areas, where, traditionally, common ownership of the land was pursued and encouraged resulting in the creation of a common agri-sylvan-pastoral heritage. As such, the areas susceptible to being left behi...
Public Goods and The Commons: some preliminary reflections
Starting from the economic debate about the notion of public and collective goods, the paper tries to illustrate part of the discussion on public goods and the defnitions of the commons, in order to provide some insights about this topic, and to give an overview of emerging processes related to facts, theories on governance of the commons, their potential limits and the related policies. The first part acknowledges that a conception of human beings’ nature and related intrinsic motivations is behind each defnition of collective goods and each solution to address the free-rider problem. From this standpoint, different defnitions of the commons and collective goods imply diverse understandings of democracy and of the role of the State and the market. Since both the Commons and the public goods share the feature of non-excludability, the next part lingers on the potential outcomes of the strengthening of property rights and the attribution of bundles of rights to common resources, as proposed by several authors. A second part is dedicated to the idea of the Commons within the threefold (economic, social and environmental) crisis. Nowadays this topic is crucial in Italy and many other countries, since an involvement of communities and civil society is increasing around the issue of the Commons, both as a theoretical and a practical issue. The second part of the work rises two points: (i) that Ostrom’s celebrated definition of common pool resources can’t contain the manifold experiences related to the commons and their management (and that new refections on this topic are required); (ii) that actual circumstances and the emphasis on the Commons are pushing for a change in human self-perception and the conception of identity and citizenship potentially leading to new social and economic outcomes.