Title: Commoning practices in migrant communities in Piazza Garibaldi, Naples, Italy: informal economy, grassroots welfare, hacked urban space
~ by Cristina Trey ~
Keywords: Commoning space, Markets as commons, Informality, Migration studies, Urban studies, Welfare mix, Southern Europe, Piazza Garibaldi Commons
Abstract: Piazza Garibaldi in Naples, southern Italy is an area where it is possible to meet migrants from all over the world, due to the presence of the central station of Italy’s third largest city, which overlooks the square. Along a history rooted in the aftermath of World War II and witnessing several waves of migration in the following decades, this place has ended up becoming a multipotential urban space for the migrant communities that inhabit it. Through extensive ethnographic research consisting of repeated visits as well as interviews with privileged witnesses, I was able to identify some salient aspects of the survival organisation put in place by these communities. Piazza Garibaldi can be understood as an information hub based on a ‘commons of market knowledge’ that allows these communities to develop adaptive strategies both in terms of informal economic practices and in terms of grassroots welfare strategies. To understand the ‘Garibaldi Commons’ as an information hub is to prefigure a social system organised in nodes, held together by varying degrees of solidarity, more intense within each community of geographical origin, and more subtle, though binding, at the general level of the system. A knowledge commons is by its nature mutable and adaptive, and so are the informal practices it generates, capable of altering urban space and giving it a new identity.
Acknowledgements: The author Cristina Trey is a young social researcher that obtained her master’s degree in ‘Social Innovation’ at the Federico II University of Naples with a grade of 110 cum laude. This article is the exclusive result of the author’s fieldwork and intellectual elaboration. My heartfelt thanks go to Prof. Massimo De Angelis, a constant theoretical reference point, because without his work this research would not have been possible. My thanks also go to the lecturers who accompanied me in my research, Prof. Adam Erik Arvidsson and Prof. Ernesto Ramon Rispoli. I would like to thank the young researchers with whom I occasionally shared the fieldwork (in alphabetical order): Carmen Abagnato, Eugenia Santoro and Benedetta Toledo. Finally, I thank the privileged witnesses who dedicated their time and shared their personal stories with me.
Introduction: Piazza Garibaldi in Naples, southern Italy is an area where migrant communities live, mostly from North and West Africa, Eastern Europe, South-East Asia and China. These communities have found innovative ways to respond to the urban marginalisation to which current immigration laws would otherwise confine them. These communities, and their ways of relating to formal institutions, represent a significant case study for observing first-hand practices of bottom-up organisation of an economic, mutualistic and welferistic kind, capable of filling gaps left by institutions. They can therefore represent convincing models to be inspired by for the definition of policies more closely tailored to the needs of the so-called ‘beneficiaries’. The focus of my scientific interest is the commons knowledge shared in these communities, which allows for the generation of innovative economic and welferistic solutions that are extremely flexible and have the capacity to shape urban space to make it more responsive to the needs of its inhabitants.
The study of the theory of the commons, through the elements of analysis provided in particular by Elinor Ostrom and Massimo De Angelis, has been fundamental in framing the problem. Recalling the reflections of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, ‘commons’ is a general term referring to a resource shared by a group of people.
From the ‘Glossary’ proposed by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (Hess and Ostrom, 2007), a commons is a shared resource that is vulnerable to social dilemmas. Moreover, a commons does not have an intrinsic value: its outcome may be good or bad, sustainable or not depending on one’s point of view, which is why commons need cooperative management strategies in order to ensure durable and robust systems.
The resource in the commons may be small and useful to a small group, it may be a resource enjoyed at the community level, such as road infrastructure, urban greenery, or it may extend globally to have no clear boundaries, such as scientific knowledge or the ozone layer in the atmosphere. Elinor Ostrom suggests that the commons as systems of reproduction and enjoyment of shared resources must have: (1) clearly defined limits and boundaries, (2) the rules in use must accord well with locally experienced needs and conditions, and (3) the individuals affected by these rules must usually be able to take part in the process of changing these rules.
Furthermore, (4) authorities outside the community must respect the right of community members to design their own rules independently. (5) a system of self-monitoring of community members’ behaviour must be established, and (6) a system of progressive sanctions must be available, (7) community members must have access to affordable conflict resolution mechanisms. Finally, Ostrom argues that (8) these different governance activities must be organised into a structure of structures with different levels of activity (Ostrom 1990). This model suggests that the analysis of any kind of commons must involve the rules, decisions and behaviour that people collectively adopt in relation to ‘their’ shared resource.
Within the vast scientific production of Elinor Ostrom, the theoretical elaboration concerning the ‘knowledge commons’ is particularly relevant for framing the subject of this article. As explicated in ‘Understanding Knowledge as a Commons – From Theory to Practice’, Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (Hess and Ostrom 2007) recall the scientific views that grasp the contradictory nature of knowledge. It appears the be contextually framed as a consumer good and as a constitutive force of society, as an economic good and as a human need, a process that is both social and profoundly personal (Polanyi 1958).
The information commons made its appearance in scientific discourse in the mid-1990s, at the same time as the mainstream diffusion of the Internet and the creation of the first digital communities, within which there were shared behaviours and conditions. This new channel of information distribution was neither a private nor a strictly public resource. The information commons can consist of many different types of goods and regimes and still retain many of the characteristics of a commons. Anyway, it is an ongoing challenge to trace the similarities between information commons and traditional commons, such as public green spaces and wildlife, since in fact by its very nature knowledge is a fundamentally different resource from commons based on natural resources.
Collective action, self-governance and social capital are three founding elements of the knowledge commons. Viewing knowledge as a commons leads to identifying in it certain aspects shared with the traditional commons: joint use and management by groups of various sizes and stakeholders. Self-management of the commons requires strong collective action and self-governing mechanisms, as well as a high degree of social capital on the part of the stakeholders. Collective action appears relevant when the voluntary and joint efforts of two or more persons are required to achieve a certain outcome. Collective action is one of the prerequisites of self-governance mechanisms, which also contextually requires the sharing of knowledge, will and supporting institutional configurations. Social capital is a relational concept as it refers to the sphere of social and cooperative networks. It is a multidimensional concept since it embraces individuals and organisations, communities and it is a spatial concept since it has its extension in space, whether physical or virtual (think of all the virtual communities that animate the P2P economy and beyond).
The literature distinguishes between a perspective that grasps social capital on a micro level of analysis, as an attribute of the individual (Bourdieu 1980), and a perspective that instead conceptualises social capital on a macro level, essentially as an attribute of the context (Coleman 1990; Putnam 1993).
In the study of a knowledge commons such as the one I was able to observe in action, Elinor Ostrom emphasises how even knowledge commons, as well as the technologies that convey them, are human artefacts, bearers of rules, not least those of language. What emerges in this sense is the very strong cultural, economic and political component of knowledge, as well as its situated nature, strongly dependent on its human and non-human context, which it influences and is influenced by. This reflection will be particularly relevant in the analysis of some of the artefacts I mention in this article, in which I believe we can observe precisely the commons of market knowledge embedded in certain objects, such as the strollers used by street vendors.
Academic reflection on the commons sees in Elinor Ostrom’s reflections an inescapable pillar with which many researchers interested in contributing to the discipline have been in dialogue. This is also the case of Massimo De Angelis. In his ‘Omnia Sunt Communia’, (De Angelis 2017), the Author repeatedly converses with Ostrom. In fact, the study of the commons has continued over the years to be grafted onto the reflections afferent to the Italian school of Workerist Marxism. Massimo De Angelis has made a fundamental contribution to the debate and here I think it is useful to recall the reflection he conducts in relation to the commons as social systems and in relation to the concept of commoning.
In describing the commons as systems, De Angelis proposes a scheme of analysis that is able to identify the differences between social systems governed in a neo-liberal manner and the ‘commons as systems’.
He does so by looking at three of the factors that these have in common with all other social systems, namely: the form of their constituent elements in material, psychophysical and immaterial terms, their social and material relations, and their purpose or function. In this regard, De Angelis specifies that social relations and interactions within the community of commoners are developed through the practice of commoning, and not through exploitation for profit, typical of neoliberally administered social systems.
The possession of clearly defined limits and boundaries is the first of the eight ‘design principles’ formulated by Ostrom that are deemed necessary for the survival of the commons as systems of reproduction and use of shared resources. In this sense, De Angelis seems to enter into dialogue with the author when he argues that certainly every social system, to be properly considered a ‘system’, must possess boundaries that separate it from its surroundings, but this distinction should not be understood in a clear-cut and absolute way. The spaces where communication can flow are blurred spaces where these boundaries interact. In fact, the nature of boundaries is varied and depends on the social system in question; nevertheless, De Angelis emphasises the centrality of some kind of boundary as a prerequisite for the existence of the space of relations that underlies the commons and the process of commoning. A social system is also such because it is endowed with operational boundaries, which means that all the dynamics that occur within the social space thus delimited bind the system together and endow it with its own unity and individuality.
The author’s reflection goes beyond this consideration and relates a social system to other social systems, which constitute the environment in which each other operates. Considering the other social systems as the ‘environment’ for the single system should not lead us to think that the environment consists only of these elements. Each social system is understood as a system of integrated functions whose environment is also composed of non-social environments on which each system depends. It may seem obvious, but social systems depend on the bodies and minds of their constituent elements, and are part of larger ecological systems with their biophysical characteristics and dynamics. This leads the author to deduce that what constitutes an environment is always situated and relative to the social system under investigation, and it is misleading to think about an external or exogenous environment in absolute terms, for any social system. In this sense, De Angelis insists on the relations between system and environment as the probable origin of structural changes in the system, and not only as the result of internal dynamics. In analysing the commons as systems, De Angelis refers to the literature on the subject by explicating the seven constitutive principles of all systems, social as well as natural. First, all systems are composed of elements or nodes. In a commons as in an association, there is an assemblage of people and things, so every system has a structure that is defined by the parts and the way they are made up, and this is always true, in social systems that are for example multinational corporations as well as grassroots committees.
Systems are endowed with the characteristic of ‘interconnectivity’, which means that their different nodes relate to each other in a way that mimics the structure of the system. This is a peculiar characteristic of each system, on the basis of which systems can be distinguished from one another. In fact, the social relations that give rise to the system’s practices, (i.e. the way the components relate to each other, as well as their goals and ambitions), make explicit the value principles that guide the activities of the entire system.
These make it immediately obvious how, for example, an informal market and a voluntary association have very little in common. Thirdly, these relationships are formed according to a process of path dependency, i.e. based on the feedback received by each system component as a result of reciprocal interactions. These feedback loops constitute the cause-effect pathway that leads a signal to modify an event in a consequential manner. De Angelis specifies that feedbacks are to be understood as value-driven reactions and not just as communication circles. The author refers to ecologies of circuits and circles of action that are physical as well as cognitive and affective, which can also be suppressed in certain contexts of power. Consequential to this characteristic, systems and their components have a specific behaviour, a way of acting, which includes the specific mode of production and the consequent expenditure of energy and information. They have a strategy, understood as a selection of meanings and sequences of actions for each moment in each context. For example, resources in a capitalist system are understood as capital; in a commons they are understood as the common good: two entirely different social forms.
As already mentioned, systems have boundaries and a very composite environment. De Angelis dwells on the porosity of these boundaries with respect to the ‘outside world’ and emphasizes the importance of the nature of the exchanges between the two in order to identify the nature of the system. The commons are often small systems with strict boundaries, consisting of its own practices, the values on which it is based and those that develop through its existence, the sense it gives of itself and the world around it, and the solicitations it receives from the outside understood as the composition of other social systems. To analyse the commons it is necessary to focus on the human and non-human environment, with its relationships and interactions, what De Angelis calls ‘ecological relationships’ (ibid, 89)
The sixth constitutive principle of systems referred to by De Angelis resonates with the eighth constitutive principle of the commons identified by Ostrom: systems are located along a scale and can be ‘nested’ in one another. Ostrom actually refers to ‘structure of structures’: ‘Nested enterprises (…) are organised in a nested structure with multiple layers of activities’ – (Ostrom 1990, 90-102). By ‘nested’ De Angelis means that institutions or social systems are connected to each other through laws or cultural norms and recalls
Ostrom’s reflections when he argues that ‘what is whole system at one level is a part of a system at another level’ (De Angelis 2017, 90). Finally, De Angelis emphasises that social systems are complex systems, and are therefore something more than the mere sum of their parts. They therefore perform adaptive, dynamic, conservative or evolutionary behaviours, which can lead them to a phase of impasse, collapse or overcoming stalemate.
This premise is necessary to introduce what De Angelis means by ‘commons’. The author premises that one should not crush the definition of a commons on the collectively owned resource. Indeed, understanding the commons as a social system means grasping that resources are held together by a community or a subject that governs them also in order to guarantee their sustainability over time and at the same time allow the reproduction of the community that organises around that commons. This community is engaged in the process of ‘commoning’, i.e. a doing-in-common, directly connected to the needs, desires and aspirations of the commoners, i.e. the participants in the process. The community connected to the commons equips itself with a network of meanings that defines the value of the resource in common, with its own logic of value, different for instance from that validated by the capitalist system. Within the commons there is an independent, other, singular system of meanings, for which objects and things have a value in relation to the process of commoning, to the value regime and the goals that guide the community in its doing-in-common. Consequently, the value of goods, processes and information can only be grasped within the commons, taking on the lenses through which commoners view the world. This leads to a strong critique of the capitalist system of accumulation, which, as a social system, is endowed with its own assumptions, values and rules of operation in the process of capital accumulation, to which the measurement of the value of goods is linked, therefore not always valid, absolute and neutral, but also historically and geographically situated. The process of commoning is as physical as it is intellectual and encompasses all the social relations necessary to reproduce the commons itself. Through this process, subjects create the necessary conditions of resilience and self-organisation. The direction in which the ‘do-in-common’ process takes place is oriented by shared goals and values and, the author argues, is capable of translating the arena of power within the commons into an effective social force field, also transformative of the systems with which the commons enters into relation through that ‘porosity’ that characterizes the boundaries of all social systems. This insight is one of the most interesting outcomes of De Angelis’ analysis and opens up the transformative, even radical, potentialities of social reality inherent in the commons and the process of commoning.
Methodology
This article is based on fieldwork conducted in March-May 2022 and September-October 2023 in the area of Piazza Garibaldi (Naples, Italy) and surrounding streets. The people mentioned are presented with modified names in order to protect their identities. The surveys were conducted at different times of year, weather conditions and times of the day, providing a comprehensive view of community dynamics in the area. Most of the considerations and insights gained from the fieldwork came from the free flow of conversations with numerous traders, street vendors, with or without stalls. Extensive fieldwork was necessary to ascertain the validity of the information and establish relationships of trust by giving prominence to the past and present life stories of the people involved, clarifying the desire to bring out points of view excluded from the mainstream narrative. Each visit was combined with observation, and the conversations involved street vendors, workers and owners of small shops, and itinerant street vendors of different geographical origins. Each interlocutor is a potential access point to a broader network of relations that it is essential to reconstruct in order to study a very relevant dimension of the social capital present in the area, which in turn is a relevant aspect of the study of the commons. The study of the commons can only be intrinsically relational and situated, and so an attempt was made to bring out the point of view of the actors on the issues being analysed. For this purpose standardized tools such as questionnaires or highly structured interviews were not very adequate, the use of which was made even more complex by the frequent language barriers. I preferred tools such as participant observation, discursive and semi-structured interviews, and life narratives capable of providing room for a more articulate expression and reading of non-verbal language. Direct observation of exchange and mediation practices were also crucial for gathering information. Aware of ambivalences and tensions, my intention was not to force the construction of a unitary point of view, but to return an analysis that also accounts for ambivalences, without obscuring them, focusing primarily on the practices of mediation, cooperation and exchange of practical knowledge embedded in the community living around Piazza Garibaldi.
Garibaldi Commons – shared market knowledge
In reporting here the reflections and deductions deriving from the study of the commons, I will focus on the elements of a particular type of commons, the commons of knowledge, which seems to be at the basis of the preservation of the way of inhabiting space by the migrant groups living in the observation area. A commons contextually ‘constituted by’ and ‘constituent of’ alternative forms of exchange, of building social capital and sharing symbols and meanings.
Studying pooled resources in a context where there are, according to my fieldwork, five types of informal markets, (each with its own characteristics), may seem a challenge not to be taken for granted. Yet the resource that is capable of holding them together and reproducing them from decade to decade, going through economic crises and technological revolutions, always including new actors, is a very valuable and powerful resource: shared knowledge. A practical knowledge, embodied (‘embedded’, Karl Polanyi would say) in social relations and in the urban objects it generates and by which it is nourished. As a commons resource, in this kind of knowledge we can trace the three qualities that Elinor Ostrom considers indispensable for analysing any kind of commons, including the knowledge commons, namely: equity, efficiency and sustainability.
If equity is understood as the fair or equal appropriation of the resource and the proportional contribution of each to its maintenance, the knowledge shared among street vendors is disseminated in such a way that each market participant knows certain rules of behaviour essential to enter and remain a part of the market.
Some examples can be: how to set up one’s stall, where to position it and in which time slots and on which days depending on the type of market; where to buy or retrieve goods for resale, what price to set for each item sold so as not to have unfair competitive behaviour, where to store one’s stall when not working, how to behave with other vendors and what to do if the police arrive, and so on.
This shared knowledge allows for the creation and sharing of a standard of behaviour to which each participant in the system conforms. This results in a substantial homogeneity of the forms in which informal economic activities manifest in the area, to such an extent that it is possible to catalogue them according to common parameters, as I will do later in this dissertation.
What contribution, equally distributed, each seller makes to the maintenance of this pooled resource is difficult to say. This can perhaps be deduced by reflecting on what A. Portes argues with respect to the four paradoxes of the informal economy. In the first one, the author suggests that trust is a crucial point in the informal economy as it allows the whole system to function.
Even in the conformation assumed by the market knowledge commons under consideration in this study, mutual trust between actors turns out to be a nodal element. According to A. Portes and W. Haller (Portes and Haller 2005), trust is based on the sharing of identity, which is an extremely relevant element, especially in a context where the often dramatic experience of migration is shared, just as common is the condition of limitation to the rights of citizenship enjoyed. These are all elements that strongly contribute to building a shared sense of identity, even if often very much linked to the area/country of origin.
In addition to this, the trust between actors participating in informal activities according to Portes and Haller is also based on the expectation that fraudulent actions will result in the violator’s exclusion from key relationship networks and future transactions.
Thus, we can infer that behaving in a way that does not violate trust, coherence and belonging is the way in which each actor takes care of the shared resource, i.e. not violating the tacit agreement of mutual trust that allows the entire mechanism to function. This is expressed both on an internal level within the group of traders, e.g. by behaving loyally also through exchanges of gifts and favours. On an external level, this mechanism is clear in the common defence of informal activities from threats linked to the police, towards whom there is a strong cohesion in the dissemination of information about the imminent arrival of a police car, for example, and consequent organization in moving illegal stalls. This is also reflected in Benkler’s claim that production is commons-based when no one uses exclusive rights to organize the labour force or capture the value produced, and when cooperation is achieved through social mechanisms other than price signals or managerial directions (Benkler 2004, 1110). The different markets active in Piazza Garibaldi are not comparable to factories, they are not ‘productive’ of anything in the strict sense; nevertheless, we can detect a good degree of cooperation between actors, at least in some less hierarchical markets, determined by social mechanisms such as precisely the trust, solidarity and shared identity I have referred to so far.
Fig. 1 Degrees of solidarity among traders.
‘In your opinion, does solidarity or competitiveness between traders prevail more in Piazza Garibaldi and the surrounding area?’ is the first question I ask F., who is originally from the Ivory Coast and is engaged until November 2019 in a study for the International Organization for Migration precisely on Piazza Garibaldi. F. immediately emphasizes the sensitivity of the topic, since we are talking about money and survival, a context in which it is easy to slip into a war among the poor. The first important piece of information that F. confirms with respect to what she observed on the field is that solidarity develops between people from the same country or the same geographical area, who can also count on formalized associations and online chats organized by area.
Important in the creation and maintenance of solidarity according to F. is also individual job stability. Where everyone has his own stall or shop, she has not observed any particular disruption. Internal solidarity within a group organized on a geographical area or national basis is manifested externally in the division of urban space in such a way as to allow different populations to coexist. As F. also confirms, this division sees Piazza Garibaldi and Vasto area experienced by people from Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, while the Porta Capuana area is experienced more by people from Eastern Europe. A distribution of the Vasto and Porta Capuana areas according to geographical origin also emerges in ‘Tuff City: Urban Change and contested space in central Naples’ (Dines 2012, 211) and in Fabio Amato’s essay ‘The city as an image: the Piazza Garibaldi souk in Naples and poor integration’ (Amato 1997).
‘In Piazza Garibaldi everyone minds their own business, so there is a lot of solidarity as a result’. F. explains this apparently contradictory sentence to me in this way: the spatial distribution of the populations in the area between Vasto and Porta Capuana suggests a particular form of solidarity between different populations whereby each pursues its own interests while respecting the others, a form of solidarity sanctioned by a proper spatial distance, as F. also confirms.
To better understand how ‘widespread’ solidarity works, it is useful to recall an episode I witnessed during fieldwork, considering that this is a fundamental element for enabling the ‘Garibaldi Commons’ reproduction.
As the sun sets on an afternoon in March 2022, the pavement of the North side of Piazza Garibaldi is still occupied by the street vendors with their stalls when a certain tension spreads and the vendors begin to look around on alert and quickly return to the streets facing the square.
Shortly after, several municipal police cars pass by, and although they do not interact with any of the street vendors directly, their only presence is enough to clear the pavements and allow the gazebos and tables of the bars on that side of the square to open immediately. In a few minutes, the appearance of the pavement changes completely, where there was an informal market there are now tables and gazebos crowded with Italians and tourists.
Solidarity here was visible in the rapid and indiscriminate dissemination of information about the arrival of the local police and in the concrete outcome of preventing anyone from being fined or seized. One can see here the dimension of solidarity that I have called ‘widespread’, which is essential for the maintenance of the entire informal mechanism. Indeed, the inability to provide effective collective mechanisms to prevent seizures and arrests would lead to a loss of efficiency of the market as a source of revenue for its actors, and thus to the end of informal economic activity, a possibility that is thus averted.
To conclude the reflection on the triad ‘equity, efficiency and sustainability’, according to Elinor Ostrom, efficiency refers to the optimal production, management and use of the resource. Where does ‘optimal production’ fit in this case if the resource under investigation is a set of ‘common knowledge’? It helps to answer this question have observed that the extent of the group of actors participating in the shared information content (i.e. the knowledge-in-common of the informal economy) never exceeds a certain concentration in a certain area. There exists and is widespread an information concerning the saturation threshold that has not to be exceeded, avoiding generating an overcrowding of sellers that would lead to an excess of supply over demand for goods, with widespread losses and lower prices for all. It is interesting to note that while these economic activities as ‘informal’ are in some respects outside the Italian legal perimeters, they appear at the same time to be fully embedded in the global capitalist system and fully respect the law of supply and demand, with a geographical distribution of sellers that allows for a sufficiently profitable balance for all.
Furthermore, it is noteworthy to observe that part of the shared knowledge also concerns the price at which the different goods are sold, which appears to be uniform from stall to stall, with no cases detected of ‘free riding’, of excessive price reductions by individual sellers that would compromise the system’s resilience for all others. This is an example of good management of the shared knowledge resource as well as a new confirmation of the validity of the first paradox of the informal economy. All of these features can be attributed to the sustainability of the system.
‘Garibaldi Commons’ as a porous social system
With respect to the limits of the social space that define the inside and the outside of the commons, i.e. the membership or exclusion of a certain actor from the network, the reflection becomes more intricate for the analysis of a knowledge commons. In this case, in fact, the boundaries are established by the degree of assimilation of the information shared and co-produced within the commons and the degree of its contamination with its environment.
In fact, Massimo De Angelis specifies that what constitutes an environment is always situated in and relative to the social system in question, and for any social system it is misleading to think of an absolute external or exogenous environment. In short, the commons are complex and porous social systems, i.e. in constant relation with their environment, human and non-human, with which it interacts precisely because of its ‘porosity’, i.e. the permeability of its boundaries. An example in this sense that comes from fieldwork is given by the interaction of the social system ‘informal vendors’ with the social system ‘Italian legal system’, which interact, leading to modifications and readjustments of the commons under examination. The interaction between these two social systems has produced, for example, that the commons knowledge has changed and adapted to respond to the external threat (posed by the ‘Italian legal system’) by developing very rapid dynamics of market dismantling. These dynamics are both contingent and reactive to the single blitz by the police, and structural, as in the case of the permanent relocation of the night market from Piazza Garibaldi to the near Duchesca area.
As De Angelis himself points out, understanding the commons as social systems means grasping that resources are held together by a community that governs them also in order to guarantee their sustainability over time and at the same time allow the community to reproduce. In De Angelis’s reading, this community is engaged in the process of ‘commoning’, which is a concept that is perhaps better suited to contexts such as P2P communities and not to a context of knowledge in common underlying informal economic activities. Nevertheless, following the author’s reflection, within these social systems there exists an independent, other, singular system of meanings, for which objects and things have a value in relation to the process of commoning, to the regime of values and goals that orient the community in its doing-in-common. I have already pointed out how in general terms in the markets observed, knowledge in common is fundamental to the establishment and maintenance of markets, which are informal but fully embedded within capitalist criteria of value production. Thus, it is certainly not the members of the groups of sellers who establish the value of the goods sold as a consequence of the value, even ethical value, they give to their work as is the case, for example, in the various communities of practice and fab-labs. Perhaps an identity value to the products, which thus partly falls outside a typically capitalist value attribution mechanism, is found in the ‘legal’ market of Via Bologna, whose sellers rely heavily on the ‘ethnic’ authenticity of their products and their actual provenance from their homelands in North and West Africa.
A system of meanings embedded in a hacked stroller
Nevertheless, it is possible to find that ‘system of independent meanings’ peculiar to the Garibaldi Commons as a social system in the ‘hacking’ that street vendors do of everyday objects to ‘bend’ them to their needs. An interesting case is the modification of baby strollers, turned into stalls on wheels for faster movement in case of the arrival of the police. This photo shows a typical example of a stall forming part of the market on the north side of Piazza Garibaldi.
Fig. 2 Hacked stroller observed in Piazza Garibaldi.
The stroller is an extremely versatile tool, because not only it allows one to move around more quickly while being loaded with all the goods for sale, but it also allows one to organize different ways of displaying goods, in an orderly manner, allowing good visibility of the product. The stroller therefore for the sellers participating in the commons no longer has the meaning it has outside the commons and for which the object was conceived. The ‘commons knowledge’ shapes another meaning for this object, alters it and opens it up to new uses. These uses, as well as the way of ‘hacking’, of modifying, of forcing it away from its original purpose, are part of the information elements included in the ‘commons knowledge’ shared among street vendors, essential for the informal market. This ‘hacked’ stroller incorporates the need for security and clarity of display of goods, shared by the group of sellers, so it is modified and shaped accordingly. The new functions it acquires respond to these shared demands and the ways in which a stroller is ‘hacked’ for these purposes form part of the shared knowledge, as well as the stroller as an object in itself incorporates new uses and meanings located, shared and produced within the group of sellers. If the knowledge of how to hack a stroller, set up a stall, and escape from raids is directly connected to the needs experienced by the group of sellers, and also constitutes essential elements for the maintenance of the informal market, then we find similarities with the process of ‘commoning’, i.e. the doing-in-common, of the participants in the social system referred to by De Angelis.
The relevant outcome to which this process opens up is the ability, according to the author, to translate the arena of power within the commons into a social force capable, through the porosity of the ‘commons as a social system’, of exercising transformative power over the other social systems that constitute its environment.
In simple words, this reflection allows me to argue that the informal market has the power to modify the urban structure of the area where it operates. Also, it allow its migrant vendors to be less hostage to the marginality produced by the inefficiencies of the ‘Italian state’ social system and the shortcomings of its policies to regularize migrants, as well as other criminal social systems that speculate on the misery of people.
Informal markets based on ‘Garibaldi Commons’
I have so far referred tangentially to the various informal markets operating in and around Piazza Garibaldi, mentioning them in relation to other themes. This section focuses on the informal markets observed, tracing their characteristics according to common categories that was possible to identify precisely because the common knowledge underlying all these markets has made it possible to determine clearly traceable standards and limits. In this sense, echoing the distinction made between formal, informal and illegal economic activities, (Castells and Portes 2005, 14), I have elaborated a ‘Scale of Informality’ for the markets in and around Piazza Garibaldi, which ranges from ‘quasi-formal’ to ‘quasi-criminal’ economic activities.
Fig. 3 Scale of Informality of Vasto district and Piazza Garibaldi informal markets.
The shared categories along which I have studied the different types of informal markets and which make it possible to distinguish one from the other, are:
1. Which type of goods are sold in the market under study;
2. The supply chain from which they come from;
3. The legal status of the street vendors;
4. Who are the main customers;
5. What the conformation of the single stalls is;
6. What the opening hours are, if they are in any way known or formalised.
Following this outline, I placed the different markets at different levels of my aforementioned Scale of Informality.
In my exploration of the interethnic market on Via Bologna, I found a blend of formality and informality in the economic activities, which is why I place this market on the far left of the Scale of Informality, in the ‘quasi-formality’ side. The market primarily trades food, textiles, and cosmetics from North and West Africa.
In my investigation of the ‘Northern side stalls’ of Piazza Garibaldi, particularly along Via Torino and Via Bologna, I observed a dynamic market that exemplifies the concept of ‘moving market’. These stalls display the role of knowledge in action facilitated by shared information.
I refer to these informal activities as ‘group of stalls’ rather than a ‘market’ because they appear more as single entities with common traits than a collectively organised market.
This type of informal economic activity exhibits higher levels of informality compared to the market in Via Bologna. Doubts surrounding transactions, licensing, and the sale of illegal products contribute to a more complex and less regulated economic landscape.
I have placed the daytime and night-time ‘Garbage Market’ on the right half of my ‘Scale of Informality’.
These two informal markets operate during the day and night. The daytime market, characterised by its variable location, consists mainly of individual actors exhibiting similar behaviours. Items sold include stolen or used household goods, clothing, and accessories, often in suboptimal condition. The market setup involves sellers displaying goods on sheets on sidewalks, lacking proper licences. The market operates informally, making it challenging to define specific opening hours, as it appears and disappears based on police presence or goods availability.
Fig. 4 An example of daytime Garbage Market.
The night-time counterpart, held in a different configuration in the north-western area of Piazza Garibaldi, shares similarities with the daytime market. The range of items sold is even more diverse, with an abundance of second-hand or stolen goods. Legal status, customers, and market dynamics closely resemble the daytime market, with an additional layer of exclusion towards outsiders.
Fig. 5 An example of night time Garbage Market.
The opening hours of the night-time market are more defined, starting in the afternoon and becoming fully operational and crowded by around 10pm. The informality in this market lies in the sale of legally sound items, yet likely stolen and resold without proper licences. The strong solidarity between sellers can be seen in the degree of exclusion and threat experienced by those who enter the market and are not part of the community, who may be asked to leave.
‘Maddalena Market’ when operational creates a densely packed crowd, obstructing any vehicles due to the stalls lining the narrow spaces of the neighbourhood.
I define this market as ‘quasi-criminal’ and I place it at the extreme right of my ‘Scale of Informality’. The goods sold here include entire stocks of jackets, jeans, sweatshirts, t-shirts, shoes, watches, and original and counterfeit bags from renowned and expensive brands, all offered at remarkably low prices. This market serves as a gateway, particularly for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, to global lifestyles and consumption that would otherwise be unaffordable.
The source of goods sold there is likely through contacts with digital platforms and factories used by major brands for outsourcing production. Despite being the most underground market observed, it curiously attracts tourists, local families, and migrants. Market organisation members, to ensure they pose no threat, often monitor new or unfamiliar individuals. This defensive mechanism becomes evident when outsiders are stalked persistently, as witnessed by a colleague and me.
The market setup paradoxically mirrors the least informal market identified on the Scale of Informality, with sturdy metal stands, canopies for weather protection, and large blue bags for transporting goods. This suggests a lack of fear for sudden police interventions. The informality here surpasses other cases, with deviations from legality observed throughout the supply chain, involving factories supplying the products with significant economic agreements and entire stock transactions. The sold goods, counterfeit luxury-clothing items, are legally produced but diverted towards this informal market.
Fig. 6 One of the gateway of Maddalena Market.
Informal welfare based on ‘Garibaldi Commons’
Shared practical knowledge, i.e. the shared resource of the Garibaldi Commons, not only manifests itself in the different forms of markets and the related market dynamics, but also originates certain forms of grassroots informal welfare, i.e. elements of mutual aid and support in which solidarity manifests and which allow the entire informal economic system to reproduce itself. Without these tools, the vendors engaged in the various informal markets in the area would have much greater difficulties, as the earnings from sales would hardly be sufficient. Two examples among all are the informal mail service and informal kitchens.
Until the beginning of the 2000s, an informal, self-managed mail service took place in Piazza Garibaldi on Sunday mornings, which allowed people (mostly women) from Eastern Europe, and in particular from Ukraine and Poland, to send goods to their loved ones in a parallel and much cheaper way than the traditional shipping carriers, using small white vans. Nick Dines in ‘Tuff City: Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples’ reports that: ‘Until the beginning of 2000, informal delivery service with the Ukraine and Poland was run on Sunday mornings by an assortment of vans parked in the centre of the piazza’ (Dines 2012, 215).
With the great acceleration in the globalisation of shipping over the last twenty years, private and ‘formal’ carriers have also become more competitive and cheaper. The postal forwarding sector has changed in almost twenty-five years and today (mostly) Ukrainian and Polish women living and working in and around Naples still meet on Sunday mornings in the Piazza Garibaldi area to send goods to their families, but they do so near formal forwarding centres. Areal solidarity is still present, however, and the mutual help that women give to each other in preparing packages for dispatch persists. Especially when young women send their first packages home, it is easy to see that other, older women come and help them. This is the scene I witnessed on a Sunday morning in late October 2023 in one of the alleys of the Duchesca, in front of a dispatch centres, where the women use a ‘leftover’ space, left empty by the design of the building in question. This space turns out to be a very meaningful space to close parcels in an area sheltered from traffic, help each other and sit down to socialise.
Fig. 7 Some eastern European women chat and help each other close packages to be shipped.
A significant support tool to alleviate the daily expenses of street vendors are the self-organised kitchens that populate the ‘bassi’, i.e. the ground floors of the buildings in the Maddalena area, west side of Piazza Garibaldi.
As I have already pointed out with the graph ‘Degrees of solidarity between traders’, information on the existence and location of these kitchens is also spread according to areal origin: this support tool is mostly exercised and enjoyed within the group of actors from North and West Africa. Only people from Africa generally frequent these informal kitchens, just as Indian restaurants are generally enjoyed only by Indian people. Consistent with the degrees of solidarity, for the choice of these kitchens, vendors do not pay attention to the individual nationality of those who operate these activities; rather they look at the geographical area of origin. These kitchens function like small restaurants, with very low prices. Occasionally, the cost of food can be met through an exchange of gifts even several days after consumption. The kitchens are based in the homes of the women who cook and serve at the table, which is why they have very few seats.
These women invest money and time to prepare dishes and therefore ask for monetary compensation, albeit very little. Dwell times in these kitchens are very short, and those who run them prefer to optimise and reduce their dwell times in order to allow new customers to come in and accommodate enough of them to recoup their expenses and earn some money.
Information about the presence of these kitchens is spread by word-of-mouth in the areal ‘community’, although some of these women print and distribute flyers with the menu of the day, consisting of up to two or three dishes. The flyers are distributed in the small shops that face Piazza Garibaldi, like the small counters for intercontinental transfer of money. Over the years, some of these ladies have managed to open formal restaurants, making a transition from the informal economy to the formal economy, relying on all the technical knowledge they have acquired as well as the relationships built up in the piazza. This dynamic is also common for other professions, such as hairdressing: many women start by braiding hair in the street or at other shops and then, slowly or in partnership with other women, manage to start their own formal hairdressing business.
A new identity for the urban space based on ‘Garibaldi Commons’
It happens in Piazza Garibaldi, on a spatial dimension, what happens to strollers bent to unexpected uses, used to meet the needs of street vendors. The entire square becomes a place of performative production of new uses, based on knowledge-in-common, which in fact ‘bends’ urban space to the needs of those who live it.
David Harvey argues that: ‘Syntagma Square in Athens, Tahrir Square in Cairo, and the Plaza de Catalunya in Barcelona were public spaces that became an urban commons as people assembled there to express their political views and make demands’ (Harvey 2019, 72). The way in which Piazza Garibaldi can be considered an urban commons is less explicit. The street vendors (and others) who gather in this area do not meet in a public space to express their political views or make demands to the public decision- maker. It is their economic and social action, daily and performative, that corrodes the vertical claim embedded in architect Dominique Perrault’s redesign of the square and which prescribes only certain uses for certain areas, while excluding all others.
Lefebvre differentiates between the city and the urban, capturing the ever-changing and performative aspect of the urban, as a radical form of social space, simultaneously a stage and a product of collective action. (Lefebvre 1972). It is the practice of the city that establishes new uses and new meanings, that can transform a ‘non-place’ (Augé 1995) into a place. The informal traders of Piazza Garibaldi claim their right to exist with their informal economic activities and they do so by occupying public space and producing a new kind of square, based on shared market knowledge. ‘Garibaldi Commons’ in action transform a pavement into a merchandise display, a gap between two walls into a temporary storage space for a stall, a soulless arena into a meeting place or a spot where street vendors can be alone, away from the hustle and bustle. A discoloured flowerbed into a momentary storage for goods to be sold later or a place to sleep. It is with this constant effort that Piazza Garibaldi manages to be wrested from the impersonality of non-places to become a place once again, daily produced and redefined by its inhabitants. Urban practices, incorporating a shared, situated and mutually produced knowledge, challenge stereotypes about the city and the dominant homologising narrative as well as challenge and redefine the design idea of the square.
Conclusions
In the informal economic context of the Piazza Garibaldi area, the shared resource of market knowledge plays an essential role in allowing an informal economic system to reproduce, change and adapt over decades, thus rescuing thousands of migrants from a condition of severe marginality.
Different areal communities experience daily mechanisms for producing, disseminating and refining knowledge-in-common related to informal and market-based economic practices. This shared resource makes it possible to provide concrete answers to the widespread need for work and thus access to a dignified life. This set of self-organised and collective dynamics, which I define ‘Garibaldi Commons’, is an example of a process of elaborating an immediate as structural response to immediate as structural needs. A response that is deeply innovative because it is able to escape established a priori organisational modes, to which the people involved, must ‘conform’. The great versatility of these informal economic and organisational solutions represents their innovative nature. The informal economic actors adhere to a system of codified behaviour within the shared asset of information, which has been built up over the years through use and practice. At the same time, street vendors have the possibility of giving their own form to the specific selling and living solutions they adopt. The plurality of markets described is in itself representative of these informal possibilities of doing business.
In addition, within each of them it is important to capture a range of agency for each actor who has a relative freedom, proportional to the legal risks he or she runs, to inhabit the informal market according to his or her own needs, even straddling the illicit or formal sector of the economy.
Where the State is absent, in a context of a long-standing reduction of welfare instruments and increasingly restrictive migration policies, on the margins of the formal economy one can witness attempts to provide mutualistic and horizontal responses, mostly based on geographical origin, which introduce each new actor to the economic and social system. This is a response to the profound discomforts resulting from the reduction of rights and possibilities to access minimum resources to live with dignity. The areal communities can thus be understood as information nodes of the more general information hub that is the entire ‘Piazza Garibaldi social system’ or ‘Garibaldi Commons’. These nodes represent the first information transmission and processing centres. The innovation lies in the ability of these centres to present a concrete response to the needs experienced by those who come to Piazza Garibaldi as a destination or as a stage in their migration project. In this sense, the information system observed presents itself as an innovation, undoubtedly unconscious, but inspired by the desire to meet actual social needs neglected by the logic of the private market and State services.
The entire system is open to continuous innovations that respond to social, situated and changing needs, since ‘Garibaldi Commons’ is based on the sharing of a very special resource: knowledge. This shared knowledge is by its very nature mutable and potentially infinitely expandable, open to elaborating and incorporating ever-new solutions for ever new local needs as they are experienced: this is the greatest social innovation of the whole system, which is open to generating ever-new, potentially infinite social and innovative responses. Piazza Garibaldi and the Vasto district area are often the subject of important urban and social regeneration initiatives that are gradually learning to grasp the opportunity to consider the complexity and effectiveness of the ‘Garibaldi Commons’ information system in responding to the needs experienced by the local population. The policy maker who has the will to handle this complex area of regeneration may learn from what has already been experienced independently by these new city dwellers. The aim could be to define urban and social regeneration policies that are built on what already exists, reversing the often vertical and neo-colonial relationship with which even those with the best of intentions approach these migrant people.
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