Innovation in strategic planning: Social innovation and co-production under a common analytical framework

The article is aimed at discussing social innovation and co-production under a common analytical framework in order to contribute, without attempts of comprehensiveness, to the debate on how to indicate new opportunities to foster innovation in strategic planning. In the Paper co-production and social innovation are considered as mutual supporting elements in the creation of ‘trading zones’: spaces of strong interaction for mobilizing varied (and also conflicting) collective intelligence; middle ground spaces of confrontation able to institutionalize co-production and scale-up social innovation, in a long-term process that might transform how local institutions and strategic planning operate. Within this framework, the case study of Bologna in Italy is discussed, highlighting criticalities and opportunities in a city that has invested in specific planning mechanisms aimed at linking coproduction and social innovation within a common policy effort

The who, the what, and the how of social innovation in inner peripheries: A systematic literature review

This article is a systematic literature review on social innovation in inner peripheries. It investigates what actors (who), processes (how), and topics (what) emerge from the literature on SI in marginalized rural areas. The aim is to understand under what conditions social innovation can be interpreted as a resource in inner peripheries and, at the same time, if inner peripheries offer a fertile ground for social innovation to emerge and develop. A focus on the role of planning in social innovation initiatives is also provided with the objective to recognize whether and how the literature mentions it in supporting or hindering the emergence of social innovation in inner peripheries. Results from the literature review show that social innovation in inner peripheries is frequently promoted by social enterprises and public-private partnerships that work synergically with a wide array of public and private actors, within multi-level and multi-actor governance arenas where different scales, sectors, and actors are connected and combined. The topics covered by social innovation initiatives mainly refer to rural development, with a specific emphasis on farmland and forestry management. In this strain of literature, social innovation is often viewed as a vital component of rural development policies and a means to strengthen collaboration and social learning in lagging communities. Findings suggest that social innovation can be interpreted as a resource in inner peripheries when the effort of the public sector is channeled into multi-level ‘middle-ground’ spaces and positively combined with the external and internal input of actors, and sources of innovation. In the conclusion, we argue the need to advance a ‘context-sensitive’ conceptualization of social innovation able to tackle path-dependent dynamics and address the specific problems and challenges of inner peripheries, preventing the risk that unreflexive innovative initiatives ‘borrowed’ from urban areas exacerbate existing socio-spatial inequalities

POTERI E TERRENI DI AMBIGUITÀ NELLE FORME DI AUTO-ORGANIZZAZIONE CONTEMPORANEE / POWERS AND TERRAINS OF AMBIGUITY IN SELF-ORGANIZATION TODAY

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 brief introduction we examine the politics of urban selforganization with a particular focus on the implications for local governments and the transformative potential of these practices for local communities. We argue that a focus on self-organization practices in contemporary city raises new questions around the relationship between active citizenship and local governments; this is particularly relevant under global neoliberal conditions where States’ retrenchment from social welfare has heightened since the 2008 financial crisis

Participation, culture, entrepreneurship : using public real estate assets to create new urban regeneration models

For years, public real estate assets were considered a reserve available to compensate limited financial resources of the central government. When demand ceased to exist, many public buildings were underused or abandoned. Sometimes with illegality forms of employment tolerated by the owner administrations, sometimes with the more or less support of public authorities, communities of various kinds have found in the public assets the place to create new forms of social and economic organization offering hospitality to new formations of urban life, associations and social entrepreneurs capable of economic and social innovation whose collective benefits concern the city as a whole. The paper aims to address the issue by focusing attention to many changes within the Italian context that, from a technical and cultural point of view, appear important in the broader reasoning on the forms of urban regeneration and policies to support it. Although the processes of enhancement of public real estate assets are a well-established procedure, the intrinsic fragility of the phenomenon requires adequate policies, certainly endowed with financial resources, but above all capable of a renewed cultural attitude