Naples between touristification and commoning: the production of the freed space in the heart of the tourist zone

The Southern European city of Naples (Italy) has been shaped by two opposite urban processes over the last decade. One is the phenomenon of touristification, which has entailed the financialisation of housing, the displacement of inhabitants and daily commerce, the privatisation of the public space, resulting in the exacerbation of the current crisis of social reproduction. The other is the proliferation of the practices of commoning by twelve Freed Spaces, and the parallel experimentation with the new municipalist experience. This work contributes to Critical Urban Studies providing a first socio-spatial analysis of the production of freed space by the Commons in relation to (and in the face of) the tourist city. An ethnography based on a Decolonial Feminist epistemological approach and embedded in the making of the Commons found that the freed space is constructed as opposed to, but intertwined with, the space of the tourist city. The everyday spatial practices of commoning give space back to the functions and subjectivities displaced by tourist zoning, remixing and recomposing them. Whereas the tourist city forms isolated subjectivities, the Commons construct new bonds of solidarity, building a social infrastructure capable of confronting the current crisis, and pushing back the new enclosures of touristification.