Sustaining and enabling territorial resilience through making actions. The Make in Progress case study.

The recent evolution of production models within urban context shows a possible scenario characterized by new interactions between design-driven innovation, making, creativity and social innovation. The paper analyses this scenario combined with the idea of Territorial Capital as a model to study a specific territory (EU Leader Project; 1999)1 by looking at a case study : Make in Progress, which explores new models of interaction between creative industries, makers, DIY people, artisan and SMEs within urban area and industrial district. The goal of this paper is to analyze how the phenomenon of Open Creative Lab (Ibert, 2015)2 can contribute to the resilience of the territories and how unexpected localized creative communities could emerge. To answer this question the paper focuses on the relationship and the potential of social innovation and service design (Meroni-Sangiorgi,20113; Stickdorn-Schneider,20124) in the territorial enhancement processes, through the making. In this case, the making gets the role of enabler in development of the territorial capital (Arquilla-Bianchini-Maffei-Carelli,20145), becoming from a purpose, as it often happens in most of the process of creation of making places such as fablab and makerspaces (Walter,20146; Gershenfeld,20077), to a real opportunity to be used to make the most interesting characteristics of a territory emerge: people and their capabilities. In detail, the case study of MakeinProgress (MiP) will be analyzed as an applied case of this theory. MIP is born from a real opportunity from the territory: the architectural recovery of the space of a former Filanda, totally funded by local and supralocal authorities by a process of public financing, in the beginning started as incubator and later converted by the intervention of design. We analyzed the territory, defined possible scenario, verified the applicability of this scenario by isolating potential of the area, modified and adapted scenario to the real potential of territory coming to set up an experimental model of action (MiP as demo service). Thanks to this activities was demonstrate how a laboratory in the suburbs, a suburb that did not imagine a possible development in creativity, acts as empowering latent elements showing unexpected capabilities and resilience.