Dreams. The Cultural and Creative Conversion of Abandoned Buildings as a Driver of Urban Regeneration

The chapter investigates creativity as a driver for urban regeneration and social reactivation. In particular, buildings redevelopment mainly promoted by the public, often in synergy with the private sector, will be analyzed; these processes are aimed to reconquering abandoned buildings and returning them to sociality and collective use, making them representative of increasingly heterogeneous communities. The text focuses on social—and not only spatial—reactivation of some abandoned factories, which today are reintegrated into the urban economic and productive fabric. Thanks to reconversion processes, they are transformed into cultural and creative hubs, that respect the productive vocation of the places. Although in disuse for years, these spaces still belong to our collective memory; lost in a suspended time, thanks to reactivation processes based precisely on creativity (both analogical and digital, artistic collectives and digital craftsmen being the contemporary “creatives”) and sharing (typical of coworking as well as of creative workshops), they now find a sudden redemption and become drivers of urban regeneration. Specifically, some precise case studies of theMilanese context are analyzed, episodes that are no longer isolated and that can offer interesting food for thought for the design discipline.