La dimensione urbana e le relazioni spaziali del welfare urbano

Today there is a need to create a strategic vision that is able to respond to the new city questions, to manage the urban transformations and the social changes; this need arises from the complexity of the issues that contemporary society must face, from the pressing environmental chellenges, from the technological and social challenges that urge pushes towards change, from the efficiency and the performance of the services that the city of the third millennium must guarantee. The link between welfare and urban transformation processes is evidently increasingly closer. The answers we have built up in the various researches undertaken, albeit extremely contaminated by the two aspects - welfare and governance - focus attention on issues related to the location/organizational/functional dimension of services, to innovative logics of redistribution of collective wealth, planning the reorganization of the offer of services through the construction/implementation of urban policies, identifying the new demand for tangible and intangible services. The reflection on welfare must explicitly invest the question of urban planning standards, inadequate both to the demand for urban and social transformation and to the instruments of transformation and management of the territory that already provide for performance and quality standards (in fact never taken off). The post 2007 period also sanctioned the “welfare” crisis; only efforts in the indicated direction are those made by the jurisprudence at the highest levels, which has almost constitutionalized the so-called urban planning standards, inserting them among the fundamental rights. Equally bankruptcy was relying on the “urban currency” to pay for the city; this perspective has also failed. Basically, we are where we were, nothing has changed in public programming. Are the recipes still the old ones? What are the innovations tested? How has the issue of urban welfare evolved in relation to social transformation?