CampUS: co-designing spaces for urban agriculture with local communities

This paper aims at gaining insights and reasoning on social innovation-based experimentations developed within the research project “campUS. Incubation and settings for social practices” – at the Politecnico di Milano. The project is acting for a virtuous relation between university spaces and competence, and the local context in which they are located. The authors start analysing the theoretical basis of participatory action research, its application in the research process and the re ective perspective of community-centered design approach supporting design activism for urban territories (social and spatial context). The paper focuses on the issues of urban agriculture developed speci cally within the research project and more widely by the research team in general. It examines the design strategy, methodologies and impact, in terms of social innovation, of two experiments carried out in a nursery school and a middle school in Milan - zone 9. These were project-based experiments connected to speci c contexts and goals; they were a step forward in a process working towards infrastructuring: “a more open-ended long term process where diverse stakeholders can innovate together”. (Hillgren, Seravalli, & Emilson, 2011). At the nal consideration stage, almost at the end of the project, the authors re ect upon future steps to take in terms of outcomes and in terms of process development, starting by analysing the achievements and failures of the experiments. How can the experience gained in this and in previous research-actions on community-centred design for social innovation lead to a more strategic approach to developing urban territories through di used hubs supporting communities?