Informality and democratic innovation. The urban political laboratory

The essay reflects on the new, widespread urban practices of social self-organisation of citizenship, often of a non-legal nature, aimed both at recovering abandoned social spaces, at directly satisfying needs related to social rights, often due to the absence or lack of institutional public policies, and at constructing stable forms of collective participation; and it questions the way in which these experiences challenge and are able to innovate contemporary democracies.