Speakers
Description
The contribution addresses questions of institutional learning within planning policies, proposing Social Innovation (SI) as a conceptual companion to investigate the region of Piedmont in Northern Italy. The term is extensively used and extremely hyped (Vigar et al., 2020). Yet, the project urges to examine the socio and spatial distribution of emerging inequalities and disadvantage patterns. It focuses on the importance of spatial infrastructures in addressing these issues with a local, pragmatic, and civic answer. Given this framework, the research investigates what institutions could learn from these social practices of cooperation by implementing analysed experiences in planning tools and policies. Thus, the public administrations could have a pivotal role in stabilising community-based activations, which may, otherwise, lose their momentum and effectiveness.
The paper focuses on the peculiar regional case with a specific zoom on the metropolitan area of Turin. During an initial mapping phase, the metropolitan context has shown a high-intensity concentration of civic activities, which partly sustain themselves thanks to philanthropic operations of private foundations and bank institutions and ad hoc alliances with public bodies. The analysed activities fall under a definition of SI that enhances territorial development and a general social value through everyday actions for the territory and its local communities. SI is always localised and grounded in a specific context, making the concept decline in its operative actions. In-depth interviews with emblematic actors carrying out these local activities have confirmed a first hypothesis: the Turin case works thanks to an endured cooperation fostered in twenty years of conciliated collaboration between strategic visions and “real-world projects” (Ponzini and Santangelo, 2018).
The research explores how these SI realities exist, work and sustain themselves by placing their operations in the broader network of formal and informal relations with different actors they have established throughout the years. Research shows that a wide and heterogeneous net is already established within the Turin territory and that, thanks to its recognition, the Municipality increasingly involves these emergent actors in its public strategies, generally proposing a collaborative cooperation model. Therefore, this contribution proposes focusing on the drifts during these encounters.
By shifting the question to ‘how and if public Institutions learn from SI projects?’ the research addresses the Social Innovation discourses towards enabling learning patterns that could be test ground for similar local realities and thus endure civic initiatives and let them become stabilised within normative planning frameworks. To do so, partial results from an ongoing institutional ethnography will be discussed. The role of ethnography affects the research on the epistemological and methodological levels since it will ground the research in the middle of things by proposing to exceed an a priori definition of Social Innovation. By drawing on STS (Science and Technology Studies) methods, the proposal aims to shift knowledge production in media res and grounds the research in practice. The ongoing institutional ethnography intersects social innovation practices with policy instruments that specifically address and form the issues. This grounded perspective would facilitate assessing how and if institutions learn from the practices. Moreover, the research inquires to what extent the processes of stabilisation of SI practices within planning tools are welcomed or not, becoming governmental tools. Combined with the previous collection of data retrieved from the mapping, the micro-social perspective given by the ethnographic account will thus sharpen the reconfiguration of social and planning innovation landscapes.
This contribution is part of the broader research project RESISTING - Reconnecting Social Innovation with Institutions in Urban Planning, funded under the National Research Program of National Interest (PRIN NRRP 2022), within Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan. RESISTING studies three different Italian regional contexts.
References
Ponzini, D., Santangelo, M., 2018. Spatial strategies through land-use plans, urban projects and metropolitan visions: twenty-five years of planning in Turin. Town Planning Review 89, 259–282. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2018.16
Vigar, G., Cowie, P., Healey, P., 2020. Innovation in planning: creating and securing public value. European Planning Studies 28, 521–540. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1639400
| Keywords | Social Innovation, Institutional Learning, Ethnography, Turin |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
