INTERMEDIATE PLACES IN URBAN INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM Insights from Boston and Bologna

The aim of this paper is to highlight new American and Italian interpretation delivered by ‘intermediate places’ (IPs) between practices of social innovation and policies, identifying with the term intermediate both their role as mediators between levels and their scale and impact on the urban environment. Urban agencies, living labs, innovation and community hubs are emerging structures that can feed and orient urban planning towards processes, more likely to meet the socioeconomic, cultural and environmental needs. In order to analyse if and how IPs can be considered a new generation of ‘urban centres’, the authors seek to draw a framework of comparisons, contaminations and drawbacks arising from the assessment of some experiences, in the Boston area (MA, US) and in the city of Bologna (Italy). In the first section an operational definition of intermediate place as open innovation ecosystem is explored. Afterwards, the two cities’ case studies are analysed to highlight their potentiality in orienting and innovating public policies and up-scaling micro scale social innovation practices. The starting hypothesis is that social innovation - in the Deleuzian-inspired description - is strictly path-dependent and occurs in ‘opportunity places’, where local actors engage within the urban space. In this scenario, intermediate places as innovation centres are proving to be successful models because of their physical contiguity; the recovery of direct relationships between different actors can allow them to act as interactive playgrounds in which the practices can be managed together with visions and strategies with an evolutionary long-term perspective. The paper emphasizes the need for a stable global observatory where practices and different methodologies are collected, observed and evaluated, in order to enhance cross-fertilisation between the diverse experiences.