New bottom-up approaches to enhance public real/estate property

The economic enhancement of public real/estate property has become a central theme in Italy. In recent years, public policies have been focusing on the supply-side of the real estate market, assuming that investors and developers could handle the value creation process of the abandoned and underused public real/estate property. More recently, with the decline of the investors’ demand to develop public real-estate assets, new approaches to property-value creation have emerged. These new processes are focused on the demand side, through self-organized grass-roots participation using the assets for profit and not-for-profit purposes. The aim of the paper is to pinpoint some crucial conditions for these bottom-up processes to be effective through the analysis of fifteen bottom-up experiences in Italy. Five conditions emerged to reliably predict a fruitful outcome of bottom-up value-creation processes of abandoned or under- used public assets.