GABRIELE PASQUI – DASTU, Politecnico di Milano, Head of Department of Architecture and Urban Studies
MARCO FACCHINETTI – DASTU, Politecnico di Milano, Professor of Urban Planning Department of Architecture and Urban Studies
PATRIZIA LOMBARDI – Politecnico di Torino, Head of Department , Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning
BRUCE KATZ – Brooking Institution, Metropolitan Policy Program
JULIE WAGNER – Brooking Institution, Metropolitan Policy Program
ALBERTO BRAMANTI – Università Bocconi Dipartimento di Analisi delle Politiche e Management Pubblico
DAVID BROWN – School of Architecture University of Illinois at Chicago, Associate Director
CECILIA LINDAHL – Stockholm County Council, Office of Growth an Regional Planning
NAOMIE VERSTRAETEN – Managing Director of Brainport International Program
PETER VINCENT KENTIE  – Managing Director of Eindhoven365
ELEANOR ESSER GORSKI – City of Chicago, Department of Planning and Development
PIERFRANCESCO MARAN – Comune di Milano, Assessore Urbanistica, Verde e Agricoltura
ROBERTO MARELLI – Kilometro Rosso, Relations & Marketing Specialist
DANIELA MALDINI – Comune di Novate Milanese ViceSindaco
ALESSIO COMAI – Politecnico di Milano Master Degree Thesis

The conference will highlight the most relevant and updated aspects of the impact of innovation on European and American cities.

Innovation will be investigated as paradigm of a new generation of urban transformations, a new way of putting together productive and creative forces with everyday life, translating into action the principles of being smart, sustainable, eco-friendly, and re-inventing scales and relations.

Many cities and many regions around the western world are changing themselves and their economic structure shifting from traditional to innovative economy. For many of them, it means being recognized as places of manufacturing of new products, with a rich and fertile research behind them and able to open and expand new markets. The conference will emphasize above all the ability to translate innovation and innovative approaches in more strategic attitudes, as a multi-disciplinary approach, able to change the boundaries of expertise putting
at the center the creation/manufacture of something real, and using already urbanized areas to re-invent new production and new economy, together with a new lifestyle;
A specific focus will be dedicated to inclusiveness, as method to have different vocations, different actors and players
with different interests sitting at the same table and harmonizing their different standpoints to reach a shared objective; and as a method to re-invent the consensus building processes working together at the same interest rather than defending each side their own;

Urbanity will be considered by the conference as revised paradigm to describe a specific condition of life, not necessarily within traditional city limits but assuming a contemporary regional post sub urban point of view. Urbanity as paradigm able to aggregate uses, players, vocations, to re-invent productive places.

From cheap to smart, from rust to brain is the motto that could keep together also Milan’s vital economic region, ready to move forward with innovation and research as engines to transform the economy of the city and to re-invent the urban region as main actor of the transformations. Case studies from the Netherlands, Sweden and US will be presented and compared to show progresses: so come and learn!

INNOVATION AS ENGINE FOR URBAN REGENERATION.pdf

Patrizia Lombardi “Innovation and the post carb perspectives”.pdf

Julie Wagner “The rise of innovation districts”.pdf

Alberto Bramanti “The Dynamics of an ‘Innovation Driven’ territorial system”.pdf

David Brown “The Available City: innovative approach to physical transformations of the existing city”.pdf

Cecilia Lindahl “Stockholm and the regional approach to innovation”.pdf

Naomi Verstraeten, Peter Kentie “Eindhoven: the innovative re birth of an industrial city”.pdf

PETER VINCENT KENTIE – Managing Director of Eindhoven365 .pdf

Roberto Marelli “Kilometro Rosso: pioneering innovation in the region”.pdf

Within the frame of the UR Urbanizing the Region international research exchange network, I met Bruce Katz at the Brookings Institution on Oct, 3rd in Washington, D.C. Bruce Katz is the inaugural Centennial Scholar at the Brookings Institution, where he focuses on the challenges and opportunities of global urbanization. Katz assumed this cross -institution role in January 2016 after 20 years as the vice president and co-director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, which he founded in 1996. Together with Julie Wagner, he wrote The Rise of Innovation Districts (https://www.brookings.edu/essay/rise-of-innovation-districts/). The aim of the meeting was to present the UR initiative and to involve the research Bruce is doing into the cultural backgrounds of the network.

Innovation districts emerged since decades as a new way of interpreting the role of some, specific research “anchors” and an occasion to see scientific and technological research into action within the boundaries of urban environments. Many things have been written about them and about the most successful districts around the US and Europe. Also, and following some successful cases, a trend emerged recently in many parts of the world, so strong to transform rust belts into brain belts, according to the authors of The Smartest Places on Earth, Antoine Van Agtmael and Fred Bakker
(http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/book/the-smartest-places-on-earth/9781610394352)

I asked to Bruce to discuss some specific topics and some questions that, working and studying these issues, came to my mind since months.
It looks more than evident that big universities, above all in the US, are the main anchors of the innovation districts, or, if we agree in not using this name that has been chosen to better and easier identify some specific transformations, they are the main engine behind some strong, recognizable processes of aggregation around their campuses. Start up, incubators, new companies, laboratories and to some extends, new lifestyle features, much more than a single coffee shop are now physically aggregated around some campuses or on a specific corridor close to campuses. Major universities, above all in the US, are acting as big actors in terms of transforming federal grants into built up boxes to host real innovation. The most interesting aspect is that during conversation with Bruce, the rhetoric used to describe these phenomena quickly shifted to a more traditional geographic language, using words such as downtowns, proximity, density, compactness. The most successful innovation districts are real clusters, around universities’ campuses, but there are at least two different models.

One model, more consolidated, shows a process of growth around the main university’s campus, as a way to expand the products of the research of the university, and at the same time a way to invest money (federal or private), to see big returns (also in terms of real estate investments) and to move up in the lead table of universities.
At the same time, and this is the second, more interesting model, universities close to downtown s are investing in creating around them an innovative environment, attracting once again start up, incubators and laboratories, using the advantages of being so close to existing downtowns. This model should be investigated, since it helps understanding how the innovative process needs to have strong roots in the local, instead of being something only ‘global’ oriented; it needs to works on the existing, maybe also historic structure of the city, it uses proximity and compactness as the backbone of a different way of aggregating uses and actors, and again of a different lifestyle for people, students, academics, researchers, scientists attracted by these places.

In these characteristics there are all the differences with other ‘popping up’ elements that we saw in the recent past. Nothing to do with the ‘edge cities’ phenomena: those places where walled off the rest of the city, just connected to the main highways network but with no connection to the local life; they hosted many times companies with a real ‘global’ way of occupying a part of the world, once again with nothing to do with the local environment.

Above all, the creation of agglomeration of uses with innovative productive processes behind them is something that cannot be repeated around the region in many ways; even if everything depends on the dimension of the region, and its attractiveness, it is evident that there could not be more than one big innovation anchor and there could be no more than one important local district, able to attract and combine these elements.

It is interesting to see what happens in terms of the architectural language that these areas decide to use. Once again, there are maybe two different models according to the two models just described. The creation of an innovation growth around a campus, or pushed by a major, big university usually takes the shape of a concentration of new buildings, with contemporary, campus-like language. Well different is the situation of the second model, with smaller scales anchors able to invest in existing downtowns or historical existing districts. This is the case of the Fulton-Randolph Market District in Chicago.

One of the most challenging question is about the role of innovation districts not only at a city scale, but comparing it with the trends occurring at the regional scale, having in mind a new way of describing the regions around the cities. Can we consider the creation of these transformations as a way to save or retrofit the suburbs? Very hard to say, considering that innovation districts are hardly more than one per region, their being different from financial districts or companies headquarters (walled) edge cities or again the need they have to be close, nearby already compact existing parts of the city. There is much more to say about that, perhaps, thinking at the transformation of existing science parks, or techno parks, into something more urban, with a different mix of uses. And maybe this can be considered a solution for some (more) European campuses, around the region, created in the past 30 years. Certainly we can consider the emphasis on traditional words such as proximity, compactness, downtowns as an important element that should show us the road to re compact, re center and re aggregate the suburbs. Innovation could just be ‘one’ of the elements that could push these processes.

The conversation ended finding a common interest in the UR Urbanising the region research network. Comparing four different cities evolved into regions into four different ways and having researchers and students involved into it is an interesting and innovative approach to research. The four regions will be investigated finding the way to study the different processes of urbanization that are changing the relations between their downtowns and the suburbs, the geography and the networks of what lies ‘within’ and what out, and above all the structure of behaviors of citizens, usersm inhabitants.

Brookings Institution will be involved in the development of the research and it will be in the loop of future developments.

Washington, D.C. October, 3rd 2016

 Download PDF: “UR Urbanizing the Region at Brookings Institution”

 Download PDF: “Fare urbanistica per regioni in transizione: tradizione, strumenti, innovazione per la produzione di luoghi”

This new book aims at understanding if recent transformations in our cities are creating new typologies of urban regeneration or transformation processes. New emphasis on downtown areas, extending the daily life of many central places, new ideas for the retrofitting the suburbs, some new attempts in regional planning and consolidated experiences in transportation networks are bringing to our attention a new way of interpreting the relations between cities and regions and some new geographies in the organization of urban regions.

The research published in this book investigates on the last 15 years of attention on cities, asking if it has produced new typologies of urban environments, linked to regeneration and transformation of some parts of the city. Can we say that downtown re birth or suburbs retrofitting are creating new typologies of urbanity so recognizable to become a specific chance for all consolidated cities?

It tries to understand if this process of re thinking some parts of the cities brings to a new way of reading and planning large cities: are relations between downtowns and suburbs so different from the past to be able to restructure the cities into regions, made by episodes of urbanity not necessarily in or close downtowns? Are recent transformations so structurally urban to be able to consider urbanity as main value and to spread it around less dense regions?

The book answers to these questions proposing a manifesto for better planning urban regeneration processes for those transformations able to reconnect differently urban characters to regional cities. The manifesto proudly starts from Italian culture and practice in place making and urban transformations planning, rediscovering some rules and ideas able to propose a different approach to space design. Reading some of the most well known principles and ideas, the manifesto proposes a way of understanding and planning regeneration processes finding a new way of considering “urbanity” as a value for all the transformations around a region.

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