Understanding the Dynamics of Social Cohesion and Bottom-linked Governance. Social Streets in Trento, Verona and Ferrara

Today’s urban public spaces are confronted with numerous issues, which are eroding solidarity, boosting social and political exclusion, and closing spaces of contestation, and negotiation. This research focuses on two criticalities: a) pressure on sociability and b) the lack of common places supporting public life and living together. In order to contribute to the current model of democracy, by re-signifying individuals’ social lives with collective political meanings, the research aims to understand the mutual dynamics of social cohesion and the governance of public space. The gaps found in the literature about social cohesion leads to bring in the concepts of commons, citizenship and governance, that contribute to fill the missing dimensions of collective care, politics and governance. Afterwards, the Social Innovation perspective analyzes social cohesion as a problèmatique and organizes the mobilized concepts under the same perspective. The importance of actors and institutions in triggering innovative and transformative power is then explained by the strategic-institutionalist approach. The latter allows to overcome the poor understanding of neoliberal politics, by shifting from a top-down normative approach to an analytical overall perspective that includes the complexity of dialectical dynamics between social cohesion and governance of public space. Using various qualitative research techniques, the project focuses on three cases of the Italian Social Streets, in the cities of Trento, Verona and Ferrara. The diverse developments of the Social Streets allow to zoom on different parts of the analytical framework, highlighting the dialectics of social cohesion, commons, citizenship and urban governance. The entire analysis, eventually, shows the inadequacy of the rationalist and structuralist approaches in addressing the pressure on sociability and the lack of common places supporting public life and living together. The real complexity of society is much more complex and both social cohesion and governance of public space are embedded in wider dynamics.