Designing Proximity

This chapter discusses the importance of proximity in the growing trend among cities to adopt regenerative models that prioritise sustainability, inclusion, and participation. Collaborative and participatory practices have emerged as critical mechanisms for promoting well-being and prosperity in urban communities. Social innovations are often driven by local communities that can mobilise resources and expertise, helping to steer projects from ideation to realisation, and creating value for the city. Drawing on three case studies targeting different communities, this chapter emphasises proximity as an agent of change, capable of supporting regenerative and relational models that can transform and regenerate services and initiatives at the urban scale. This work underscores the essential role that individuals, communities and places play in advancing participatory and collaborative design practices that prioritise the well-being and prosperity of urban residents.

That to the city is a fundamental right that emphasises the importance of people’s access to the opportunities of urban life, including essential services and cultural activities. This contribution argues that mobility of proximity and walkability are essential components of spatial justice, with particular attention to enhancing elderly people’s quality of life. Different strategies to develop more walkable urban environments will be identified through the construction of design scenarios. Facing the challenges that elderly people encounter in walking throughout the city is crucial when urban infrastructural elements are taken into consideration, while solutions acting at a softer level (social and participatory activities), to be effective, should promote walkability for all members of society, regardless of their age or other specific conditions.

The phenomenon of digital acceleration we are currently experiencing must necessarily come to terms with what will be the level of acceptance of this infiltration. It is very important to understand the interaction between user, technology and space. Design has an important role to play in re-imagining projects by focusing on community participation and involvement, working on systems with a more beneficial impact, and building new services that dialogue with communities and the territory.

The economy of the proximity city should be based on the concept of social economy, which emphasises and embraces the visions emerging in ongoing discourses about proximity, being strictly related to the physical dimension, but whose relational dimension increases even more in value. Therefore, several authors are investigating and considering that physical proximity is inevitably related to relational proximity. Relationships are not designed, but it is essential to design a set of conditions, of platforms, of physical contexts, which create the conditions for certain relationships to happen. Considering the values and potentials of proximity relations, along with their multiple and hybrid dimensions, we should focus on the elements that allow these interactions, as well as the design approaches and methodologies that enable the systems that support them. In this sense, it is now more than ever necessary to untangle the underlying concepts implied by these phenomena, trends, and cultural and innovative forces. This chapter tries to offer a comprehensive review of the literature regarding the evolution of different types of economies, up to the point of defining the latest types that have emerged in recent years and have found fertile ground for debate and implementation, mainly due to the pandemic. The review concludes with research questions and further steps that should be taken inside and outside academia and by considering and involving the always-changing variety of actors that a city of proximity may contain.

The (social) innovations that are currently contributing to changing our cities are taking place in an increasingly diverse range of ways, generating a multifaceted phenomenon that originated from different actions, policies, and social partners. In this heterogeneous landscape, the traditional division between top-down and bottom-up actions seem to lose its meaning, at least in its most polarised sense. This chapter presents two applied research projects developed by Polimi DESIS Lab of Politecnico di Milano: Creative Citizens, which can be viewed as a community-based initiative from the ‘bottom-up’ and The School of the Neighbourhoods, a social innovation programme launched from the ‘top-down’ by the municipality of Milan. By describing these two projects, we discuss the role of design in connecting government and community-based initiatives especially by the adoption of co-design. We believe that co-design is key to empowering the actors of a social innovation ecosystem, public administrations included. Co-design can be an asset to build a more collaborative and human form of governance that combines multistakeholder, bottom-up and highly differentiated processes, especially compared to traditional governance models. More specifically, we highlight the opportunity to include university design’s research labs into the dynamics of a city government in a more established way and we propose the draft notion of ‘design-centred governance’, i.e., a way of steering public organisations by relying on the envisioning power of design to create public value, better connecting actions from the bottom-up and the top-down, and, by doing so, sustaining the whole social innovation ecosystem of a city.

The essay critically analyses the emergence of a “performative city”, in a dialogue between design and anthropology, by focusing on different typologies of projects that establish the urban environment and transform it, from time to time, into a “set” for large events, a “theatre” for activating local actions or a “backdrop” for bottom-up re-appropriation. Through the development of a “peripheral vision” from marginal areas, marked by hybrid identities that are constantly being reshaped, it becomes possible to think of semi-peripheries as a laboratory in which a different urban future can be experienced. The experiences analysed here are widespread virtuous practices in contemporary cities, designed to involve neighbourhoods and enhance territorial assets to create symbolic and economic value. These processes, imperfect, rhetorical, and “enchanting” at times, are not free of criticism but contribute to achieving inclusive participation and rethinking the uncertainty of the present as an opportunity. Moreover, these actions’ “superficiality” and ephemerality are meant to strengthen the social capacity of imagining and aspiring. Since the ability to imagine is a precondition for initiating any process of constructing the new, it is precisely the discipline of design that can act as a driver to define cities as more sustainable, open to otherness and scenographic: thanks to its inclination toward using narrative languages and inclusive tools, the eccentric is valued as a trigger for innovation and the creation of imaginative scenarios.

The essay aims to articulate an overview of contemporary approaches to urban public space design within the broader framework of the “City of Proximity”. Cities today are experiencing a great ferment of projects and reflections on the forms, use and valorisation of public space. This common resource is even more precious in the sustainable transition they are facing. Gathering stimuli from new models of development that are more sustainable and oriented towards innovation, the design process of urban spaces is increasingly characterised by multidisciplinary approaches and cooperation among multiple actors. Urban ecological sustainability is also social sustainability: the transformations of cities towards an ecological transition are processes of individual and collective learning of knowledge, behaviours, and lifestyles that feed each other. Urban public spaces play a crucial role not only in sustaining smart environmental development but above all because they represent the common platform for individuals and collectives in which experiences are shared, and mutual awareness is nurtured. Our essay explores the relationship between public space design and sustainable learning processes. We propose an interdisciplinary perspective that connects the fields of psychology and design. In the first part, we provide an overview of the conceptual frameworks related to environmental and social sustainability learning. The second part shows how these frameworks can be applied to analyse and transform urban spaces.

The article explores the concept of coexistence in public space, drawing parallels between urban environments and the ecosystems they inhabit, between the actions and tools that foster encounter and sharing. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this conceptual shift, emphasising public spaces as collective and shared domains crucial for social interaction, community building and democracy. Public spaces are seen as palimpsests, subject to constant rewriting and reorganisation, serving as reservoirs of cultural identity and social affiliation. The use of public space to undertake community-led neighbourhood actions can transform local neighbourhood services into open entities that directly involve the communities of place, increasingly fostering an environment of coexistence. The article explores the role of public participation as a tool of participatory democracy, emphasising the power of citizens to transform common interests into action. Through participatory processes, communities transform local neighbourhood services, fostering physical and relational proximity and creating design communities. Participatory processes in public space are explored as mechanisms to foster coexistence, with attention to the actors involved and the need to consider the socio-political and socio-economic dimensions of the context. This scenario emphasises the importance of designing spaces beyond mere accessibility to promote meaningful interactions and shared ownership, fostering a sense of belonging and shared responsibility within communities.

Rethinking territorial networks today is the task of a system of actors that includes not only city governance, but also local communities (associations, informal groups) and those public and private actors who consider public engagement an important leverage for their own role and function. Proximity means connecting, integrating and creating systems that make cities welcoming, safe, and pleasant: imagining human- and non-human-friendly spaces, organising actions around shared ideas, building short-, medium-, and long-term programmes and contributing their own resources to the redefinition of places and services. In a historic moment that brings with it an emerging social unease, it is necessary to take actions that look at knowledge sharing, democratisation and facilitation of access to resources. This is why, increasingly, universities, companies, and foundations today are protagonists in the transition to proximity living, working alongside city governance and the third sector in the creation of new territorial networks and services.