Opportunities and Challenges of Social Innovation Practices in Urban Development and Public Real Estate Management. Italy as a Case Study

Abstract

The reuse of public real estate assets has long been at the core of the political agendas of various governments, called upon to develop strategies to restore functionality to a substantial number of buildings and open spaces subjected to divestment phenomena. This is an arduous challenge because of the effects generated by the 2008 economic and financial crisis, but also because of the difficulty of public entities in identifying new uses that meet the needs of contemporary society. To deal with these issues, Italian politics has implemented a series of initiatives aimed at applying the principle of subsidiarity, introduced by the Constitution itself. Horizontal subsidiarity is the basis for testing new social innovation practices aimed at promoting social inclusion, creativity and youth employment. This contribution aims to demonstrate that public real estate can represent an extraordinary resource to support bottom-up initiatives and to redesign the urban geography of a new collaborative welfare system.

After examining the state of the art, the contribution analyzes the main tools adopted to regulate forms of care and collaborative management of urban common goods, which constitute the basis for supporting new social innovation practices. The QuxQu project represents an interesting experiment of applied design thinking that opens up new reflections on the possibility of guaranteeing an economic sustainability of the process and its diffusion in the local context, also in order to activate virtuous processes of reuse of public real estate assets and regeneration of entire neighborhoods (The paper derives from the join reflections of authors. However, Sects. 1 and 2 can be attributed to Ladu M.; Sects. 3 and 4 to Bernardini S.; Sects. 5 to Ladu M., Bernardini S.).