Creative Places for Collaborative Cities

Abstract

This paper will focus in the urban territory and its social, cultural and economic dynamics, and in particular in the different manifestations of creativity that can be found here, namely in spaces in which spontaneous and diffuse forms of social innovation and creativity are emerging: Creative Places. It is in this urban context that Creative Places thrive, working as incubators of change, sustainable behaviours, bottom-up creativity and a subculture of collaboration. In this framework, Creative Places shape a Collaborative City, which in turn fosters the appearance of Creative Places. The assumption of design as a strategic instrument to operate in complex systems involving complex networks of actors and able to decode, combine and make sense of multidisciplinar knowledge; and in so doing, able to decline it into a coherent projectual, flexible and open-ended language in order to promote the diffusion of sustainable social innovations and widen their reach and impact through designing for sustainability and for radical systemic innovation.