Urban regeneration and social innovation: The role of communitybased organisations in the railway station area in Padua, Italy

Abstract

Today we witness strengthened structural spatial divisions within city neighbourhoods, increased inequality and sharper lines of division.1 Neighbourhoods are increasingly hyper-diverse.2 In Europe, high rates of unemployment, austerity and poverty make hyper-diverse neighbourhoods and local communities increasingly complex and problematic. Traditional state-driven top-down revitalisation strategies have often resulted in new urban dynamics and heightened tensions, as well as gentrification processes and social exclusion. Given this backdrop, urban neighbourhoods have become a privileged unit of observation. Here, community-based initiatives have been experimented in dissimilar urban contexts both within and outside of Europe, in some cases producing social cohesion and transforming power relations and socio-spatial inequalities. This paper highlights the need to insert social innovation into urban regeneration practices in order to convey a different approach to socio-spatial change directed to ‘territorial development’. In this sense, urban regeneration is seen as a grounded process in ‘spatialised’ communities, able to take inequality into account within the spatial and social distribution of disadvantage.3 Path-dependency, citizenship mobilisation and the activation of local resources are all essential ingredients for urban regeneration practices. Community-based initiatives play an important role in both social and urban transformation, particularly when they foster forms of institutional learning able to promote an improvement in institutional arrangements and advance awareness of the social effect of micro-practices.4