‘Social City Grounds’. Hybrid re-generation in social innovation processes [experiences and experimentations in Turin]

Thanks to its consolidated post-Enlightenment tradition, Torino, scientific city, is acknowledged as one with the oldest social vocation among the European cultural capitals. In the Savoy capital, laic institutions have supplemented – and quite often fully replaced – confessional subsidiarity. Nowadays, under current post-industrial circumstances, the city is discovering and consolidating aggregations grounds of that physical ‘social city’, that have been silently existing for centuries. Its urban and functional order – characterized by a sub-stantial closeness to external flows – has been perceived as a weak point vis-à-vis the need to establish references and dialogue within the social framework. Under unique conditions, new and ‘hybrid’ initiatives have recently started aiming at valorizing housing, community and training solutions by means of building and regeneration strategies supporting the identity and autonomy of the individual in a group. Places and functions, opens spaces, goods production, idea generation represent the turning point in a scenario of construction of grounds and hubs – which are autonomous but potentially aggregable. All that in a vision of re-sewing and re-densification of open and inclusive social relationships. In that framework, also consumer spaces are re-defined by analyzing how they are modified and modifying themselves while modifying our behavior, habits and language. Such analysis opens up to the awareness of how we all – while spending and buying - are actually consuming our space, changing our behavior, our language and, by doing so, we inherently modify our memories, our networks, our aspirations. In that respect, a “social innovation” approach can modify consumer experi-ence by triggering new awareness and hence new and more sustainable behaviours. The case study analyzes a kind of consumer space which changes from being a no-space into a space defined by users and consumers so becoming a space of appellation and identity; pur-chase actions overcome their pure economic value and project value for products, services, communities (GAS-Gruppi di Acquisto Sociale (Social Purchasing Groups); Social Consumption). In consumed spaces, building re-generation is the start point to design new contents generated and requested by users/consumers; in that way, their language is no more global-ized or sanitized but instead characterized in form and content to design participatory and open innovation scenarios (Social peripheries and new identities; Map of territorial behaviors).