Design For Territorial Innovation. Participatory design process and good practices for socio-cultural sustainability

This article studies at length the role of design within territorial socio-cultural transformation. It investigates and describes the industriousness of projects/processes which are particularly effective for social and territorial innovation and are applied above all, to fragile and problematic urban contexts. It focuses on communities and its inhabitants who are often excluded from traditional narrative through some particularly significant projects, with an emphasis on concrete experiences of recent projects in southern Italy. Thus, the article, traverses topics and critical points of a more extensive and profound disciplinary refection, it explores innovative roles of design in the social transformation of places and resources and in the use of public spaces, through the description of participatory processes and of identity construction, addressing some relevant issues which are inter-connected (such as sustainability, innovation in fragile contexts, cultural identities) the article weaves the necessary interdisciplinary approach of Design for Territories and Design for Social. By attributing specifc attention to social impact and design applied to social policies, it is attainable to project and promote interactions which are capable of determining behaviour chancing experiences, thus creating a positive and sustainable impact, accompanying people in the design and development of a new SOCIETY (Manzini, 2015).