Nicola Valentino Canessa

This paper explores the integration of Open Innovation (OI) methodologies in urban planning and its implementation within the RAISE Spoke 1 WP5.4 project. The approach aims to overcome top-down decision-making by promoting collaborative ecosystems involving citizens, public administrations and local stakeholders through the implementation of Urban Living Labs (ULLs). The pilot case in the municipality of Cogorno (Liguria) is identified to implement scalable and replicable co-design processes empowered by digital technologies. The project identifies a co-managed governance strategy that enables citizens to take active roles in the co-production and co-management of public services. Beginning with the definition of multi-city clusters, the project envisions collaborative processes as the answer to shared needs. The proposed framework articulates four rounds of Urban Living Labs - needs assessment, technology co-assessment, policy co-definition and solution co-design - aimed at incorporating Urban Dashboard into governance structures. The overall goal is to foster inclusive practices and promote socio-economic empowerment. The conceptualization is presented as a transferable tool for municipalities in the Innovation Ecosystem to support digital transition strategies in polycentric, low-density spatial contexts.

The RAISE project – Robotics and AI for Socio-economic Empowerment – funded by the MUR within the framework of the PNRR, strengthens innovation ecosystems by integrating research, industry, and local institutions. Leveraging robotic and AI technologies, it develops a citizen platform to enhance access to urban services and daily mobility. The methodological approach, based on integrating qualitative and quantitative analyses (user personas, journey maps, Urban Dashboard, and Multi Deprivation Index), is structured through co-design activities and the use of generative AI. This fosters active participation by citizens, public administration, and universities, providing replicable and scalable tools to create more inclusive urban environments oriented toward open and participatory governance.

In 1992 the cities of Barcelona and Genoa both began their recent transformation journey, the former with the Olympics and the latter with the Colombians. While the former capitalised on its transformations, beginning an extensive path of both public and private investments, the latter focused on processes related to major events, happenings or funding (G8, Genoa Capital of Culture, Morandi Viaduct collapse, the national resilience and recovery plan (NRRP), etc.). It is interesting to note that, to date, in both cities, citizen participation or activation largely depends on how much the city seeks consensus on transformation operations more than on design choices by adopting a top-down approach, which is similarly configured in all large and medium-sized European cities. They hardly give space or importance to bottom-up processes except when synergistic to an already planned strategy.

The new contemporary multi-city needs the landscape as a proactive eco-systemic infrastructure in order to rethink the whole food system, from the design of public spaces to domestic spaces. In this direction, Creative Food Cycles (CFC) is an EU project that, according to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), addresses the topic of food as a cross-cutting factor and powerful accelerator toward the co-design of sustainability in cities. Design culture today has begun to question and innovate production, distribution, and recycling models of food cycles. In the post-consumption and disposal phase illustrated herein, making the most of food means conceiving waste as a resource for the creation of new sustainable materials or prototypes. The concept of food waste and food losses has been shown to be not only a topic at the center of the debate but also a powerful tool for raising awareness of sustainable development at the community level. The CFC actions shown here were developed with the objective of persuading consumers to change their behaviors, while at the same time exploring cultural and social perceptions. With the aim of making cities more sustainable, this paper describes tools to engage different stakeholders, such as architects, product designers, and citizens, from a cultural point of view. The ongoing research has turned in the end into an educational campaign and an open platform where prototypes, new materials, and products are developed as inspiration for change.