human cities

Research from Milan
Sustainable Communities

The Politecnico will focus on “Social innovation and public spaces”. It starting point is how social innovation (and in particular the creative communities) may generate new and more sustainable ways of living in the city (and especially how the solutions they generates may inspire new collaborative services).

From this micro scale level we now consider how these many social initiatives may scale-up and reticulate at a territory level to generate new and more sustainable cities (or Human Cities...)

In this track of research we are looking for best conditions for these type of social innovations to diffuse and cross fertilize (enabling frameworks). The public space is a key issue in the urban context to enable (or disenable) these bottom-up innovations for a more sustainable city. Think only to the wide range of issues from rather technical ones (i.e. how public spaces may encourage the development of alternative mobility) to more social ones (i.e. how public space may facilitate socialisation and collaboration between individuals as pictures in the hypothesis of creative places).

Vice-versa, users are not only enabled by the context but they also enable the context. Social initiatives may influence public spaces (i.e. thinks to how streets markets, festivals and again creative places transform the public space...)

Cross fertilization of both phenomena may generate interesting virtuous cycles (i.e. how certain public spaces are facilitating socialisation that, in return, generates a more collaborative contexts that will then foster social initiatives between people. The history of "community gardens", "workers orchards" and "shared gardens" as both social and socialising places is certainly one of the best examples and an interesting focus for searching for cases...

More precise research questions could focus on a series of cases where the development of social innovations and the qualities of the space are influencing each other. Some promising categories of cases have already been quoted in this text (i.e. "street markets places"; "community gardens"; "street festivals"; "socialising neighbourhood"...). A choice should be made according availability of examples for Human Cities consortium participants interested to this theme.

In particular, a parallel investigation could compare the notion “capaciting/decapaciting“ elaborated by La Cambre and the related method of investigation of public spaces on the one hand, and the notion of enabling framework/platform/solution elaborated by Politecnico of Milan/SDS to describe contexts facilitating the development of creative communities on the other hand...

Final output of this collaboration could aim at developing an approach/toolkit to enable groups of citizens to start initiatives such as the one listed above and involving deeply public space and/or depending of it.