Urban Community and the Common Good Control over the Building Activities and Water Management in Southern Italy (Thirteenth-Fourteenth Centuries)

Many late medieval documents declare a pursuit of “Concordia” and “Harmony” among citizens, even between citizens and urban institutions. This wish clashes with the tendency (arrogance?) of individual citizens to maintain for themselves a larger piece of the public resources pie. Space, defined as a surface or as a volume, concerns the physical size of the house. In statutes and civic ordinances, especially in central and southern Italy between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many rules are dedicated to the relationship between the house of individual citizens and those of their neighbors. The dividing wall between two adjacent properties is in fact subject to disputes that can only be resolved through precise rules in the hands of public officials (boni homines). A further task of these diricadores dessas vias (those who control the correct shape of the streets) is to control the tendency of citizens to appropriate parts, even small parts, of the public space, i.e., public streets. Among the many public resources we see in this study of citizen claims to water, a fundamental good for daily life and for some work activities, first of all are those related to cultivation of vegetable gardens. Access to water - especially in cities far from rivers - is not the same for different social groups, for different neighborhoods or for different craft guilds. The rules of the division of available water dictate models that try to reach agreement among the various categories of suitors. Nine officials called partidores de abba (those who divide water) are elected in Sassari (Sardinia) every year since the end of 13th century to direct the control and maintenance of the water network. In many cities of Spain and North Africa the same tasks are entrusted to officials according to ancient traditions. Some articles of Statutes, documentations of disputes, as well as oral traditions, help us to recompose a frame that has only partially come through to the 21st century