INTERMEDIATE PLACES IN URBAN INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM. Insights from Boston and Bologna

The aim of this essay is to highlight new American and Italian interpretation styles delivered by ‘intermediate places’ (IPs) as ‘innovation centers’. These emerging structures can feed and orient urban planning towards co-produced services more likely to meet the socioeconomic, cultural and environmental needs. In order to analyse if and how IPs can be considered a new generation of ‘urban centers’, the authors seek to draw a framework of comparisons, contaminations and drawbacks arising from the assessment of some experiences, in the Boston area (MA, US) and in the city of Bologna (Italy). In the first section an operational definition of intermediate place, as open innovation ecosystem, is explored. Afterwards, the two cities’ case studies are analysed to highlight their potentiality in orienting and innovating public policies and up-scaling micro scale social innovation practices. The starting hypothesis is that social innovation - in the Deleuzian-inspired description - is strictly path-dependent and occurs in ‘opportunity places’, where local actors engage, facing various socio-economic issues within the urban space. In this scenario, intermediate places and innovation centers although strictly related to ICT virtual interactions, are proving to be successful models because of their physical contiguity; the recovery of direct relationships between different actors can allow them to act as interactive playgrounds in which the practices can be managed together with the visions and strategies with an evolutionary long-term perspective. The paper emphasizes the need for a stable global observatory where practices and different methodologies are collected, observed and evaluated, in order to enhance cross-fertilisation between the diverse experiences. Finally, authors highlight and argue about the steps to take in order to establish a more structured role of these places in bridging innovation from social practices to institutional policies, related to their virtuous implementation.