Reimagining public governance through the commons: prefigurative legality at play?

Abstract

This article contributes to the emerging scholarship on prefigurative legality by prompting critical questions on the boundaries of prefigurative legality itself. The article does so by reviewing two selected experiments for creating urban commons in Italy. Both experiments have engaged creatively with the law, developing two different legal models. However, it is not clear whether such models can be considered examples of prefigurative legality. The uncertainty is due to the fact that the assessment depends on which features we, as analysts, emphasize when discussing prefigurative legality. This brings us to investigate how different features of prefigurative legality might connect with strands of existing socio‐legal scholarship, prompting more general reflections on prefigurative legality's place within the field of socio‐legal studies.