The research refers to the development of a multidisciplinary protocol to promote urban regeneration through actions to improve equity in health and wellbeing of the inhabitants of marginalized parts of a city through joint work on urban planning, architecture and health. The multidisciplinary research group focuses on the quality of living and investigates the strategical environmental actions as the articulation of networks and hubs, the regeneration through zero ground consumption, the environmental and energetic control of the urban metabolism - also managed with ICT for the efficient ecosystems, the global health approach, the enhancement of local resources and energies as community assets and the development of community businesses, the incentive of participatory processes and the introduction of green public procurement. The aim is to structure a tool to intervene on material and immaterial characters, which respond to a logic open to variation and adaptation on local scale, based on an evolutionary concept and widespread on large scale through distributed Cultural, Social, Health, Wellbeing. In that context, tools such as eco-innovation, urban health, green public procurement and financing 'typical of the green economy' will play a crucial role, setting into motion implemented measures at various levels and scale of urban regeneration as: intermediate places, urban agencies, living labs, innovation centers and community hubs, and grassroots activism against the urban segregation chains and tools to regenerate urban areas. For this reason we propose the operative protocol [TU] Tool Up which adopts a multidisciplinary approach methodology useful to investigate the relationships between environment, urban planning, architecture, technology, social vulnerability and health where urban regeneration is also a compelling key to activate durable forms of local resistance against the economic depression, the urban segregation or the degradation of urban areas.
Tool UP goes beyond the academic and theoretical boundaries to meet stakeholders and real problems and become a programmatic protocol, a manual for project interventions, underlining a high value of opportunities for sustainable growth and employment, as evidenced by several funding opportunities in the 2014-2020 period including: transferability and replicability.
The theme is also central to EU policies, aimed also at creating new
- Horizon 2020 - Work Program 2018-2020 Topic Societal Challenge: Health, demographic change and wellbeing forthcoming Call: Greening The Economy in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs);
- UIA - Urban Innovative Actions, urban innovative actions that foresee 'urban poverty' among the topics identified for the 2018 call.
They are expected to have an impact on the implementation of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals SDGs.
In almost all European and international literature there is not an approach able to anchor actions of sustainable recovery and resilience within the administrative governance of local authorities and within
appropriate visions and strategies that, immediately, produce repercussions on the main planning tools for controlling urban regeneration.
To achieve this, local best practices need to be supported by national and regional strategies that set strong objectives, measurable indicators and quantifiable results.
The recent popularity of intermediate places -(IPs) as urban agencies, living labs, innovation centers and community hubs, stems from their active role in becoming nexus for economical, institutional and social innovation in emerging urban ecosystems. Within the contemporary framework of innovation, IPs can become agents for urban regeneration processes more likely to address the actual needs and challenges. IPs are defined as `boundary-spanners', able to produce new value-oriented relationships. These innovation centers represent hybrid platforms linking internal networks to external players and resources in the city (Acuto at al. 2018). Inspired by classical, consolidated models like the so-called `urban centers', their aim is to develop, try out and test civic informal solutions, producing changes in different urban domains by bridging design-led approaches and social innovation.
The research program of an orderly cultivation of healthy and technological citizenship, intentionally promotes different forms of citizenship in action, and the role that the TU tool plays in them. The research would try to establish University in a context where people feel the strain of economic crisis, and increasingly question whose interests are truly being served by future visions of their city. Starting from the OECD domain (US and European countries in particular), the scientific literature has already distinguished a rich framework of strategies, models and styles, in which `fair', healthy, well being urban and territorial ecosystems can be virtuously conceived and supported by fostering and implementing IPs centers and their hyper-connected networks. In this sense, Greater Boston area (US) and some European municipal policies (Barcelona, Grenoble, Portsmouth, London, and Bologna) represent significant case studies. Such contexts already influence the relative ease and kinds of support available for putting tools to particular purposes. If communities are truly to be liberated to debate, use, and resist tools in a way that they see as appropriate (rather than those encapsulated in elite visions), one must engage with the politics of these contexts.
Deployed sensitively, the research program could provide important spaces for exploring urban form, technology, citizenship, health and urban governance in very practical ways, supporting diverse forms of neighbourhood-led development. The longer-term promise of the program rests with it becoming a community resource owned by the neighbourhoods in which it sits, rather than tied up with the patronage of local politicians. Bastogi, and wherever else public authorities become involved in community workshops should take note: bringing tools to people requires skilful community development. A controlled opening up of urban governance and experiments in cultivating particular forms of citizenship is not an easy task.