Bottom-Up and Top-Down Social Innovations for City Governance Transformation

The (social) innovations that are currently contributing to changing our cities are taking place in an increasingly diverse range of ways, generating a multifaceted phenomenon that originated from different actions, policies, and social partners. In this heterogeneous landscape, the traditional division between top-down and bottom-up actions seem to lose its meaning, at least in its most polarised sense. This chapter presents two applied research projects developed by Polimi DESIS Lab of Politecnico di Milano: Creative Citizens, which can be viewed as a community-based initiative from the ‘bottom-up’ and The School of the Neighbourhoods, a social innovation programme launched from the ‘top-down’ by the municipality of Milan. By describing these two projects, we discuss the role of design in connecting government and community-based initiatives especially by the adoption of co-design. We believe that co-design is key to empowering the actors of a social innovation ecosystem, public administrations included. Co-design can be an asset to build a more collaborative and human form of governance that combines multistakeholder, bottom-up and highly differentiated processes, especially compared to traditional governance models. More specifically, we highlight the opportunity to include university design’s research labs into the dynamics of a city government in a more established way and we propose the draft notion of ‘design-centred governance’, i.e., a way of steering public organisations by relying on the envisioning power of design to create public value, better connecting actions from the bottom-up and the top-down, and, by doing so, sustaining the whole social innovation ecosystem of a city.