HOW SCENARIO BUILDING AND SERVICE DESIGN CAN CONTRIBUTE TO PLACEMAKING: THE CASE OF THE TOURIST HARBOUR CARLO RIVA IN ITALY.

This paper presents a case study: the design of future service scenarios for the Tourist Harbour Carlo Riva in Rapallo, the Italy's most important private marina destroyed by a storm in 2018. Historically, design has been viewed as a reflective practice aimed at creating futures to address complex challenges and this is why a group of design researchers and students from the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano were involved in an exploratory workshop to provide original solutions. The traditional urban planning approach has emphasized the consistency of the urban form of the built environment; however, such approach can be complemented by combining a service logic to the spatial planning perspective and this was precisely what was experimented during the workshop. The scenario building methodology and the service design discipline were employed to develop some scenarios to imagine the future of the harbour throughout the workshop, which encompassed three phases: a research stage to get in touch with the context, a concept generation to originate a great variety of ideas and a third phase to build final scenarios and their service solutions. The scenarios resulted from the workshop served as a basis not only to stimulate the conversation among stakeholders, but above all to enhance the quality of their conversation, providing originality, detail and specifics on space and time. This could be viewed as a part of a wider placemaking strategy aimed at creating an innovative harbour in which (service) designers can provide a valuable contribution to the existing work of urban planners, architects, and policymakers.