Social Innovation for New Urban Heritage

The recent growth of creative social innovations promoted by local actors, represents a precious opportunity to re-think heritage in a more dynamic, inclusive and sustainable way. Social innovations, as bottom-linked collective actions, are trying to address their issues while changing the traditional management and development models for the public good. They are therefore setting the bases for a new urban heritage, capable to merge creativity and knowledge with practices and policies. Within this scenario, the enabling role of heritage in the creation and protection of social values and collective public interests creates positive externalities and added value for the whole city. With these premises, the time has come to develop a new paradigm, which deepen the link between creative practices and urban and territorial development, able to answer to the on-going transition towards a new urban heritage. A fruitful starting point is to observe the phenomena through the places where innovation happens. Creative environments, in which practitioners and policy-makers work in a mutual learning perspective, are meant as triggering-places where knowledge becomes a design tool and a driver for innovation. These ‘intermediate’ environments transform citizens from users, to co-producers of collective knowledge and narratives. Intermediate places can pave the road to richer urban futures, by bringing together people, disciplines and different imaginations. Finally, they can establish circular and adaptive processes, with a flexible and dynamic involvement of the community being able to consolidate the many on-going urban innovation experiments, promote their ‘up-scaling’ and then reformulate patterns of action for a future vision of urban heritage.