Strengthening city resilience through the re-orientation of a social innovation incubation programme in Covid-19 time.The case of ‘The School of the Neighbourhoods’

This paper describes the impacts of Covid-19 on the social innovation incubation programme, ‘The School of the Neighbourhoods’, promoted by the Municipality of Milan, as a policy that aims to enable and empower prospective social innovators to transform ideas into prototypes and actions. The nature of the programme, intrinsically disruptive because focussed on up skilling people, on learning from the most interesting experiences, on providing solutions and generating social impact, has been regarded as an already potentially excellent answer to the pandemic in a ‘new normal’ perspective. The programme has now been adjusted to increase its capacity to activate a strategic conversation with and within local communities and to train the sense-making ability of the prospective innovators to design a ‘new normal’. It may be regarded as a living experiment to enhance the resilience of a city, part of a wider policy for the cultural and technical empowerment of communities before and beyond the pandemic circumstances.