Digitally-enabled Social Innovation in the city: implications for urban spaces, societies and governance - Finanziamento dell’Unione Europea – NextGenerationEU – missione 4, componente 2, investimento 1.1.

One of the main challenges for contemporary society is to understand and govern the digital revolution and its sociopolitical consequences. It is important to step beyond the a-critical technology and optimism of digital capitalism and ponder the spatial, sociocultural, and political/economic impacts of the pervasive infiltration of digital technologies. These impacts are particularly felt in cities, which serve as hotbeds for the flourishing of digitally-enabled Social Innovation Initiatives (DSIs). DSI encompasses heterogeneous collaborative innovation practices (such as 'fab-labs', open software (co)creators, 'citizen scientists') in which communities of innovators - whose intentions range from strengthening, reforming or even subverting the neoliberal institutions - adopt digital technologies and internet connectivity to advance knowledge and solutions for a wide range of social needs. From enabling citizen participation, through providing services, to harnessing people’s creativity, DSI initiatives are proliferating and transforming the structural and the operational space of contemporary cities. However, geographical research has devoted limited attention to the relationship between DSI initiatives and urban space, thus preventing us from appreciating the deep sociopolitical implications of the 'Digital Turn', including threats for social justice and sustainability. The overall aim of the project is to establish a dedicated theoretical and analytical framework for a critical examination of DSI space and spatialities, to advance critical urban geography research. To this end, after (1) reviewing the existing research on DSI, the project (2) systematically maps existing processes in two selected cases (Turin and Rome) that allow a quantitative and qualitative investigation of the interaction between DSI practices and the city itself; (3) analyses the practices of innovators' communities in their making, with regard to the social, political, environmental, and cultural space of performance, above and beyond the generated characteristics of these spaces; and (4) identifies and deconstructs the principal issues determined by the digitalisation of urban reproduction processes, notably via the diffusion of DSI practices. To achieve a breakthrough on the above-described objectives, the project proposes a novel mixed-method approach which entails a combination of online and offline data collection techniques (e.g. web-mining, participant observation, and fieldwork), data analysis techniques (e.g. discourse analysis, multi-criteria analysis), and critical interpretation of the evidence generated. In terms of scientific impacts, the project delivers an entirely novel perspective on the nature, characteristics, and dynamics of DSI as a social technology that is shaping contemporary urban space and society; and contributes to the challenge of understanding and governing the vanguard of socio-technical innovation in contemporary cities.