ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the response of activist citizens in one city, Rome, Italy, to the multiple crises confronting them. It illustrates and analyses a range of the activities recently and currently under way in Rome that may illuminate practices elsewhere. In Rome as in Italy and other northern Mediterranean cities and towns, youth are at the vanguard in recognizing that politics and institutional reform have not offered real change, and thus have not offered hope for a better future. Communia represents a collective response to the deterioration of material conditions of students and young people. The idea of mutual aid on which Communia activities are based turned into a wider national program of mutual aid and a laboratory for self-production "apart from the market" and spread into Communia Network, that includes various associations, groups, committees, individuals, squatters, and students.
