Thesis title: PAESAGGI URBANI DELL'INNOVAZIONE A ROTTERDAM, MARSEILLE E ROMA-OSTIENSE: LUOGHI E SCALE PER DELLE ECOLOGIE SENSIBILI DELLE TRANSIZIONI
The innovation hub refers to a specific type of space, defined within North American economic geography, whose function is to measure (and to increase) the business generated by technological innovation within a given territory. With the introduction of the concept of sustainability, greater complexity has been incorporated into the criteria for assessing the impact of innovation, extending beyond the mere economic parameter to include the planetary boundaries (environmental sustainability) and the living conditions of the human groups inhabiting this system (social sustainability). Within this framework, the literature has seen the emergence of a new typology of places, conceived to generate and disseminate within territories different forms of innovation, defined as “social”. In the French context, such spaces are referred to by a specific term: tiers-lieux. This thesis takes these considerations as a starting point to investigate the origins and contemporary implications, for the urban fabric, of the existence of these two definitions of place, each associated with a presumedly distinct understanding of the concept of innovation. Through the concept and practice of landscape project, and by means of a comparative analysis of situated experiences in three significant European cities, Rotterdam, Marseille, and Rome, the thesis seeks to demonstrate the importance of considering the situated perspectives of different actors in the relationship between the places that represent them and their territories, in order to advance the realisation of the shared transitions required by our planet. When innovation is associated, through place, with the urban or territorial context, can the dualism between technological and social innovation truly persist? If the term innovation originates within the realm of the hard sciences and the confined environment of the laboratory, in what sense can this concept be meaningful for the urban fabric, with its infinite openness and complexity? Conversely, how does the production and diffusion of innovation transform the very notion of place and its capacity to influence urban transformations across different scales? In what way does the relationship between place and innovation allow for a redefinition of the ambiguous and multifaceted concept of sustainability within the ongoing transformations of the urban fabric? In the contemporary context of a “world in transition”, acknowledging time as a constantly shifting variable within urban design calls for the definition of new shared interpretative categories, capable of reading the open systems of relations that constitute the city, and of orienting new design intentions, able to adapt to the transformation of the whole while determining one of its parts. Through the analysis of the nexus between innovation and place, mediated by the situated and complex concept of sustainability as expressed through landscape, this study opens a reflection on the very meaning of design, and on the social identity it represents for the ecology of territories, according to criteria of quality (in relation to different social groups) and quantity (across territorial scales), with the aim of activating forms of coexistence capable of supporting the realisation of the multiple transitions required on our planet. The interdisciplinary reassemblage of theories serves to define a methodology for analysing the multi-level relationship between places and their contexts up to the case-study city, in order to delineate the web of relations that identify different social groups (identities) within the urban fabric (ecologies). The landscapes of innovation thus explored in Rotterdam, Marseille, and Rome provide insights into the ongoing transformations, as well as into the transformative potential of the various groups and places involved, towards the construction of shared values in Europe and the achievement of common transitions.