Participation, culture, entrepreneurship : using public real estate assets to create new urban regeneration models

For years, public real estate assets were considered a reserve available to compensate limited financial resources of the central government. When demand ceased to exist, many public buildings were underused or abandoned. Sometimes with illegality forms of employment tolerated by the owner administrations, sometimes with the more or less support of public authorities, communities of various kinds have found in the public assets the place to create new forms of social and economic organization offering hospitality to new formations of urban life, associations and social entrepreneurs capable of economic and social innovation whose collective benefits concern the city as a whole. The paper aims to address the issue by focusing attention to many changes within the Italian context that, from a technical and cultural point of view, appear important in the broader reasoning on the forms of urban regeneration and policies to support it. Although the processes of enhancement of public real estate assets are a well-established procedure, the intrinsic fragility of the phenomenon requires adequate policies, certainly endowed with financial resources, but above all capable of a renewed cultural attitude.