Speakers
Description
The newly emerging housing question is widely considered to be exclusively affecting large metropolitan regions. This is also true for Italy, where Milan – and its metropolitan region – have become the hotspot of a housing supply and affordability crisis that does not seem to mitigate in anyway. However, many peripheral areas in the region of Lombardy are experiencing high stress in their ability to answer housing demand.
Forms of loosely defined coproduction are widespread in area-based, integrated policies in the European space. National and regional governments – as well as local ones – increasingly recur to the mobilisation of external actors to define and implement strategies, both to confront a crisis of legitimacy that affects the political system and its executive apparatuses while exercising governance “at a distance” and to mine more profound and more extensive knowledge deposited with the social organisation. These processes are especially evident in large metropolitan areas, but they are making themselves more and more visible in rural or peripheral urban environments, i.e., left-behind places. National institutional design, governance, and participation legacies matter significantly in Europe. However, we can say that Such contexts are less used to this kind of exercise; therefore, reflecting on the conditions and challenges of their implementation there is of utmost scientific interest.
The paper intends to address this issue by presenting a long-term, comprehensive coproduction exercise conducted since 2022 by a working group of planners, geographers, sociologists and architects of the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in the framework of an agreement with the regional government of Lombardy. The agreement – framed as a coproduction accord between regional technical apparatuses and a research institution – is aimed at supporting regional offices and local actors in the design and implementation of area-based integrated strategies involving 14 areas deemed left-behind places. The group engaged in sustained exchanges with regional officers and in the organisation of local workshops with over 1400 participants. What forms of knowledge and labour are involved in the coproduction of place-based policy and their implications for the understanding of professionals and policy-makers? 2. What new organisational modes and institutional forms are emerging for the coproduction of place-based policy and the relative implications for researchers, universities and funders? 3. how does the coproduction of place-based policy relate to ideas and movements for foundational and everyday economies, just transition, degrowth, postextractivism and regenerative economies?
