Waste management and value extraction in Italy: Where is the citizen? Waste to worth

The chapter focuses on the role of citizens and how this role is framed in official reports about waste. The hypothesis advanced is that the “objectivity” of the win-win game of waste recycling, accounted for by the official national reports, neutralizes the political overlapping of the neoliberal logic of waste commodification with the logics of public utility and urban welfare. A documentary analysis of official reports released by three of the most important actors performing Italian governance of waste management and recycling, is presented. The findings show how different logics adopted in the institutional accounting strategy contribute towards enacting a particular identity and agency of citizens in the process of waste valorisation.

The foundational economy and the civil sphere

This chapter focuses on the relationship between FE, citizenship, democracy and social justice. We outline the scope of the Foundational Economy and proceed to focus on the importance of Foundational thinking for critiques of capitalist formations that involve financialization and extraction. We then discuss the relationship between the Foundational Economy and human needs and capabilities before developing an argument for a moral basis to the Foundational Economy and how this links to civil society, citizenship and the commons focusing in particular on the potential for developing democratic governance and public action. We conclude by arguing that Foundational thinking provides a means of linking citizenship to attempts to manage the commons and, if social relations and institutional arrangements vary contextually across space and time, this requires innovative solutions based on experimentation at different scales.

Introduction

Introduction chapter focuses on the principles of the modern foundational economy and its role in renewing citizenship nforming public policy are explored for the first time. Challenging mainstream social and economic thinking, the book shows how foundational economy experiments at different scales can foster radical social innovation through collective, rather than private, consumption.

Civil society and the movement for public water: Water management and its transformation in the UK1 and Italy

This chapter considers water supply within the general framework of the foundational economy. By highlighting the complex relationships in water governance between the public sector, the market and civil society, the chapter looks at the implications of the new financialised economy and the point value approach for universal access to drinking water. Moreover, it considers strengths but also limitations of the civic repair efforts toward social justice and sustainability in the water sector. First, the chapter provides an introduction to the evolution of the legal and regulatory framework for water supply in the UK and Italy. It then describes the devices of extraction and exploitation in water governance. Lastly, the chapter examines the most significant phases of the process for the remunicipalisation of water services in Italy.

Housing and the grounded city: Rent extraction and social innovations

This chapter questions the contemporary forms of civil society engagement with housing, starting from the assumption that the concrete importance of specific initiatives of social innovation should be assessed in relation to existing problems. Since the basis of housing problems is not only the decline of public housing policies, but the increasing strength of rent extraction on urban land, the contributions from communities and the civil society should be assessed on their ability to counter the extraction of unearned rents from urban land. Referring mainly to Italian cases, the chapter shows that many experiments tackle some symptoms or side effects of this trend while some alleged social innovations are even an integral part of the problem. However, some experiments can be considered as examples of a radical progressive vision on housing, as they switch from the idea of property to one of access, and prevent the capture of urban land value.