Planning and designing universal access to social services. A pioneering local program on welfare spaces in Italy

The combined effect of socio-economic and demographic changes exerts pressure on the welfare systems and makes it more urgent to provide appropriate answers to increasing and diversifying needs with scanter resources. Local social services are strongly committed to such challenges. The physical features of the spaces of welfare, often neglected both by research and by implementation, play a fundamental role in the attempt to innovate and extend access to social assistance services. The article analyses how, at the urban level, the interplay between urban planning and welfare policies might contribute to reshaping the traditional physical structures of social welfare services and, through these, the patterns of access to local welfare. Building on an experimental project tested and then consolidated in Milan, the article analyses the role of the spatial dimensions of welfare places, namely the contexts, settings and artefacts, in increasing accessibility, lowering the threshold, reducing stigmatization, ensuring (or not) the coherence between policies and programmes’ objectives and approaches and the features of the spaces where such programmes and policies are implemented and where citizens experience them. Moreover, it discusses alternative planning strategies and tools in use to design the current spaces for welfare and to govern their distribution and organisation at the city level.