Social Innovation: from practices to New Territorial Development Models

There is growing evidence that increasing complexity, environmental challenges, and fragmentation issues in contemporary territories, call for deep changes in urban and territorial development paradigm. The consequence of a series of long-term trends, undermining urban and welfare systems, the processes of social inclusion, and economic development are now clear, with the progressive weakening of social ties connecting individuals. The contraction of welfare policies and the introduction of new enabling technologies, opened up the way for new and old actors (city and urban makers, social enterprises, active communities, etc.) for the promotion of innovation practices addressing the diffuse need to build a new generation of more user-centred and collaborative services, as a possible approach to urban and territorial development. In this background, we are witnessing a multitude of collective interactions generating several initiatives of ‘disintermediation’ in the production of public services, assimilated under the ‘buzzword’ social innovation, defining an ecosystem of practices of civic origin, exploring and experimenting "new ideas and solutions to meet social needs and at the same time create new relationships of collaboration." They are described as new manifestations of participatory practices, which overcome the rhetoric of participation, able to achieve the power of a public policy 'de facto', where tangible bottom-up action replaces complex planning strategies and the role of public institutions is transformed into mutual learning and knowledge exchange. Social innovation is not a new concept: people have always been looking for new solutions to pressing social needs. Nevertheless, the growing number of civic initiatives along with the diffusion of new enabling technologies, is recently taking on such dimensions as to lead to the assumption that they are not only intervening in the resolution of their needs, but are laying the foundations for a new development paradigm. After several years of experiences and literature, it is time to promote the ‘up-scaling’ of the many urban innovation experiments and then reformulate patterns of action according to urban planning tools.