The aim of this essay is to highlight new American and Italian interpretation styles delivered by ‘intermediate places’ (IPs) as ‘innovation centers’. These emerging structures can feed and orient urban planning towards co-produced services more likely to meet the socioeconomic, cultural and environmental needs.
Within the increasing impact of Covid-19, cities are becoming paradigmatic places where the density, accessibility and proximity of resources become crucial for rethinking governance models and reducing the distance between the institutional level and the dimension of civic, private, or hybrid activation.
Significant experiences have highlighted the Policy Labs idea and its interpretations as physical structures able to build a powerful nexus for social and institutional innovation in urban regeneration.
Across the advanced Western economies, the ‘Innovation Centers’ phenomenon is growing in importance for economic, institutional and social innovation within contemporary urban ecosystems. The article investigates the emerging models of ‘Innovation Centers’ arguing that their dynamic identity can be interpreted as an evolution of ‘Urban Centers’, traditional structures for the exercise of participatory democracy principles in urban strategies.
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