ABSTRACT

The writing is part of the experimentation that the municipality of Bari is developing as part of the three-year National Program of Social Innovation referred to the dPCM December 21, 2018, aimed at developing innovative and resilient public policies for sustainable growth of urban territories.

The Covid-19 phase has exalted and exploded social, environmental, and economic issues that were often latent and has highlighted the urgency of actions aimed at developing, in the near future, public policies inspired by principles of social and cultural innovation and supporting a rethinking of urban territories based on creativity and participation. In this scenario, halfway between the need for a concrete response addressed to degraded urban territories (the mind) and the need for a reflection with people and their experiences (emotions) lies the experiment aimed at the re-birth and re-creation of the complex links that the Libertà neighborhood, in the heart of the metropolitan city of Bari, had assumed with its inhabitants and that it has inexorably lost in little more than acentury.

Creativity, young people, new cultural and evolutionary dynamics, the rapidly changing world of work, the multi-ethnicity, and the growing number and need of the elderly are mixed here in the search for a new social pact that brings together society, environment, and economy and that can imagine a new way of thinking about urban spaces (public and private) as the primary engine of this global rethinking of territories.