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La scuola residenziale ideata da Astra Zarina a Civita di Bagnoregio, a metà degli anni Settanta, è stata un laboratorio di apprendimento collettivo che, per oltre trent'anni, ha consentito di produrre cono- scenze approfondite sulla fragilità del territorio civitonico individuando, al tempo stesso, inedite visioni proget- tuali. Soprattutto ha contribuito a rivitalizzare un borgo che viveva sull'orlo dell'atrofizzazione sociale. Civita, in quegli anni, era infatti un borgo rurale che si era minacciosamente spopolato a seguito dei processi d'in- dustrializzazione e all'abbandono delle campagne, fonte vitale di sopravvivenza per la comunità civitonica. L'immaginazione politica e sociologica di Astra e il coinvolgimento attivo degli abitanti rimasti hanno progres- sivamente fatto entrare Civita all'interno di un nuovo ciclo di vita. ; The residential school imagined by Astra Zarina in Civita di Bagnoregio, in the mid seventies, has been a collective learning laboratory that, for more than 30 years, led to a massive knowledge production on the territorial fragility of Civita and, at the same time, to identify unprecedented planning visions. Most of all, it contributed to a revitalisation of a village that was on the brim of social atrophy. In those years Civita, in fact, was a rural village that had been threateningly abandoned because of the industrialisation processes and the consequent abandonment of countryside, primary source for the survival of its community. The political and sociological imagination of Astra and the active involvement of the dwellers who had not left the town, progressively, brought Civita into a new life cycle.

Cities are places where a renewed social activism is growing in unprecedented ways. Inside a wide spectrum of different urban collective movements, many practices are "informal" actions of re-appropriation: practices that challenge property and normative regimes in the attempt to recover a multiplicity of spaces that have been dismissed by modernity. These practices are islands of resistance but also incubators of new imageries: organizational experiments that are potentially able to build the city even out of an institutionally recognized framework; symbolic and material tactics of spatial sense-making; a net of molecular and minute writings that transgress the text of the planned city; the result of a capillary battle with power mechanisms. These forms of social mobilization can potentially increase the environmental and social quality of life in urbanized environments. But they need to be supported. In this perspective they represent a crucial challenge for institutions. What role could institutions play in this respect? What kind of tensions need to be explored between social practices and institutional powers? Can public policy promote urban inclusion by legitimizing these self-guiding society expressions?

In a growing number of small and large cities across Europe, citizens are engaging and mobilizing to demonstrate their ability in creating innovative solutions for important social and spatial challenges. We are witnessing a different set of micro-practices that are transforming cities 'from below', thus questioning not only the relation between active citizenship and the State (Uitermark, 2015) but also forms of urban activation themselves. In this paper we examine the politics of urban self organization with a particular focus on the implications for local governments and the transformative potential of these practices for local communities.

In this brief Introduction we would discuss powers and terrains of ambiguity in the field of urban self-organization in cities today, particularly as concern the relation with local governments as well as their transformative potential in local communities.