Italian Property Outlaws: From the Theory of the Commons to the <i>Praxis</i> of Occupation

Abstract

Abstract Since the unsuccessful experiment of the Rodotà Commission, Italy has become a laboratory in the intellectual construction and practical defense of the beni comuni (common goods or commons). The interaction between a deeply rooted network of social movements and the innovative legal thinking generated in the academia led to the great success of the 2011 Referendum on water as a common good and became the theoretical background of multitude occupations of abandoned spaces that took place in the past years. This paper is about these latter experiences, and on the way in which ideology, activism, and legal practice interact in order to obtain the recognition of the occupied spaces as sources of common utility, and therefore external to the public/private binomial and excluded from the logic of commodification.