Making in Proximity: Design Policies for collaborative making cultures

The contribution reflects on how the proximity between the actors of originally bottom-up Making Culture and public administrations can stimulate a virtuous urban Culture of Making, that is economically sustainable and well distributed in the city. The article starts with an overview of the “economy of Making” today on a global and European scale, focusing then on the Italian context. In particular, making issues in the regional context was investigated with a general mapping and a series of interviews, highlighting misalignments between the makers’ initial objectives and the everyday reality of making. As a potential response, the contribution presents the partial findings of a European project that intervenes at the level of local policies to support the activities of design and distributed manufacturing manufacturing and proposes a format and toolkit that analyzes the ecosystem of makerspaces in a city / region, to then formulate operational proposals to support for innovative activities with an economic and social impact.