News

Paper accepted by Political Studies Association

Georgetown University EJP postdoctoral researcher Elena De Nictolis will present a paper on ‘The role of neighborhoods in experimenting with urban justice. Challenging political and legal theory from the margins of the State’, at the upcoming Political Studies Association Conference (PSA) in April, 2022. The PSA conference “Politics from the margins” is hosted by the University of York (April 11-13, 2022). The paper is focused on the conceptualization of neighborhoods within political theory’s debate on cities. It will analyze the capacity of neighborhoods to promote experimental processes of urban sustainable development and climate adaptation plans with a community-led approach. The neighborhood is on the margins of the academic and policy domain. Yet it is the closest dimension to residents when it comes to policy implementation, especially in the post-pandemic city. Moreover, the neighborhood level may have the capacity to structure opportunities for empowerment of vulnerable communities in relation to the cooperative governance of urban resources and infrastructures. The scholarship on the commons shows that cooperative arrangements might be able to overcome the short-termism afflicting urban politics and ensure sustainability (Ostrom, 1990; Smith, 2020). The paper will draw from the analysis of EU cities that are promoting experimentations of neighborhood-based commons institutions (drawing data from the H2020 projects Open Heritage and EUARENAS) to improve access to social, green, tech infrastructures and assess the implications these policies have on urban welfare.