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In contemporary cities, practices of occupation of neglected sites as well as collaborative management of urban commons are now widespread. They represent practices that question not only the agonistic dimension of space and its government, but also the renewed relationship to forms of power and democracy. This contribution aims to question the spatial dimension of these democratic experiments using two perspectives: the perspective of the democratic paths they open and the perspective of the legal innovations they produce, in particular in terms of law. The study of the case of the city of Naples and its 11 spaces managed by several collectives of inhabitants will allow us to show how the practices of civic management of these spaces have gone from a logic that could be described as squatting, occupation or conflict, to a logic of standing up, resistance and insurgency. These occupied and self-managed spaces were recognized by a municipal council deliberation which granted them the legal status of common goods “for civic use.” We will show that such legal institutionalization makes these spaces real “standards of recognition” allowing the legislator to identify the goods that are used for the exercise of fundamental rights and socially important needs. In this way, the legal norm is produced by the (liberated) spaces and their use (deliberation and self-management). The Neapolitan case was analysed from the twin perspectives of deliberative activism and legal experimentation. It allowed us to show that forms of protest action and thinking can be linked to ambitious and innovative deliberative practices.