Reinventing the city, they said? How an international call for innovative urban project is translated in Rome

What is behind the multiplication of calls for innovative urban projects such as the C40’s (Cities Climate Leadership Group) “Reinventing Cities” competitions? The contexts and subjects addressed by this same device have been constantly diversifying since their appearance in the mid-2010s, testifying the great plasticity of this urban project call and its use. Nonetheless, wherever utilized, its meaning and role has been contested. In fact, in Paris, where it was created and launched in 2014, it has been interpreted as a new form of delegation of public interest projects to the private sector (Behar et al. 2018 ; Gomes & Peres 2021); but a more or less similar critical interpretation emerged in Rome, where it has been presented as a state-driven strategic plan, which rely on private actors – as we can read in the previous call, for their capacity to provide creative solution in terms of content and forms, thus demonstrating that is possible to have high environmental performance, high-quality architecture and diffuse collective advantages. Do the different justifications and narratives which lie behind the idea of “innovation” really correspond to different tools and production processes? At which level do we actually find the claimed “reinvention”: is it a matter of results, processes or discourses? And, above all, what is really at stake? The contribution represents a first attempt to tackle this question systematically and in a comparative perspective (Adisson & Artioli 2019). After presenting an initial typology of calls for innovative urban projects in circulation, according to the contexts, subjects, and ambitions associated, we will provide a draft of the interpretive framework and a first explanation of the logic at play in the case of Rome.