When Women’s Lives Transform the City: Care and the Shared Governance of Commons in Turin

Over the past decade, Italy has been experiencing a genuine silent revolution, in which many residents have been putting into practice new ways of both owning and managing the commons. To date, more than 350 municipalities have adopted the “Regulation for the Shared Administration of the Commons,” which makes it possible to establish “Collaboration Pacts” for the care of spaces and services open to everyone. Through this instrument, local communities mobilize by signing these pacts, thereby forming alliances with local public administrators for the co-management of both material and immaterial commons. Two basic rules govern these agreements: first, public officials must act not as authorities but as equals; second, the agreement must always remain open to anyone wishing to join and contribute. Approximately 8,000 pacts are currently active throughout the country, each embodying the principle of horizontal subsidiarity introduced into the Italian Constitution in 2001, according to which public institutions must support the autonomous initiatives of citizens carrying out activities in the public interest. The most recent report by the Laboratory for Subsidiarity, whose vice president is one of the authors of this article, analyzes the gender dimension of these pacts for the first time in order to understand whether they are used equally by men and women. Data from 2023 reveal a clear predominance of male participation. Only 30% of the pacts were signed exclusively by women or by groups composed predominantly of women. A female majority appears only in the relatively rare pacts involving more than ten signatories. Male active citizens, by contrast, are more prevalent in smaller pacts with simpler governance structures, which constitute the vast majority of cases. Alongside this quantitative monitoring, qualitative analyses of these processes have also been advancing through studies and research projects, including the one at the center of this article, which focuses on the life stories of three women active in Turin over the last decade. Drawing on excerpts from life-history interviews collected through the architecture thesis of the article’s co-author, the study seeks to give voice to three female biographies shaped by the everyday care of three emblematic spaces of shared governance in one of Italy’s largest metropolitan cities. These spaces include a Collaboration Pact initiative, a community concierge center (which also activated a Collaboration Pact), and a neighborhood house, where the primary rule is the non-exclusive use of shared spaces, as in all Collaboration Pacts. To tell these stories, Daniela Ciaffi and Fernanda Ramalho focus on the experiences of Emanuela Saporito, Erika Mattarella, and Camilla Munno.