Re-activate the city, sharing spaces for research on design and humanities

This paper investigates the diversity of design/humanities through the designer’s role in the urban context. Public space, not only as physical territory, but also as relational and social space, is a potential field of action for the designer humanist. In urban systems, today the core of the debate regarding smart cities, not only involves more technical requirements, system interactions and new technologies, but also those activities related to knowledge and culture, to imagination and talent. It means to re-activate the city, set connections between best practices for the city, starting from its inhabitants, activating a chain reaction, fed through a system of actions at different levels. This paper analyses two kinds of experiences and defines two different professional figures in line with the session’s quest. The urban context, potentially a living hypertext, represents the ideal scenario to experiment the relationship between project and human behaviour and where design fulfills its different roles as a mediator of identities.