Mutating City: Designing Events as a Matter of Social Innovation

Contemporary European cities have become so large and complex that is extremely difficult, especially in times of economic crisis, to set up for them a top-down type of project. Cities can respond in a more efficient way to the inevitable ongoing change by continuously mutating, through a process of collective awareness about their real-time status. This condition can be achieved through a plethora of bottom-up, shared actions that are codesigned and implemented, and belong to a process that encompasses what is transient and temporary, what is ad-hoc and what relates to the digital sphere. Faced with this challenging premise, design comes into play and, by operating on services, events and analogical and digital communications, it can operate as a discipline that can mediate between continuous urban mutation and the need to govern it through an appropriate shape. In this article, the authors focus on the role of design within the processes of mutation that are occurring within several urban areas in Italy, where a culture of design is prevailing over grand projects of modern-day “urban mysticism”. This study will closely examine the type of events that form a process rather than its possible product. As such, they can adapt easily to a logic of continuous mutation that is feather-light, sustainable and engenders participation, both when design is their pretext (such as in the design weeks) and when design is the instrument to give events substance and a tangible form.


HISTORICAL TRACES OF A LATENT AND CONTINUOUS MUTATION
In February 1996, writing for the Italian magazine Casabella, the architectural historian Richard Ingersoll introduced the phenomenon of "The Internationale of the Tourist" (L'Internazionale del Turista), questioning the part played by global tourism. While not disparaging the service economy per se in any way, he anticipated the cultural and social risks of progressively transforming European cities into "postcard cities" (Ingersoll, 2004).
This debate occurred in the mid-1990s, in a decade that profoundly modified the relationship between uniformity and individuality within urban change. In those years, the metaphor of architecture as machine within the city, which ran throughout the historiography of the Modern Movement, was in part replaced by the metaphor of architecture as an esthetic and media event, mainstreaming the idea of "architourism" (Ockman, 2005) and "architainment" (Fernández-Galiano, 2005).
The legitimating letterheads of "archistars" -in the definition proposed by Gabriella Lo Ricco and Silvia Micheli (2003) -were incorporated into the economic strategies for cities and metropolis with their progressive transition towards outsourcing. The circumstances surrounding the city of Bilbao were emblematic of a globally perceived situation. In 1993, seven years after Spain had joined the European Union, it embarked upon a radical transformation from a manufacturing centre to a city of service industries and culture. The Swiss photographer Roger Wehrli (2017) has recently documented the revolutionary impact of this project, which has since become a model for many former industrial centres throughout Europe. Celebrated architects such as Santiago Calatrava and Norman Foster were commissioned to design public buildings that were to be icons of the reinvented city.
The stand-out piece was, however, the Guggenheim Museum, designed by the American architect Frank O' Ghery. Inaugurated in 1997, it embodies the logic of the architectural star system and the growing importance of museums within local policies and marketing operations. According to The Economist (2014), "Visitors' spending in Bilbao in the first three years after the museum opened raised over €100m ($110m) in taxes for the regional government, enough to recoup the construction costs and leave something over". Moreover, . Mutating City: Designing Events as a Matter of Social Innovation. Strategic Design Research Journal, volume 12, number 03, September -December 2019. 323-337. Doi: 10.4013/sdrj.2019.123.03 in 2014, "more than 1m people visited the museum, at least half of them from abroad. This was the third-highest number ever". Valorizing the idea of culture-led urban regeneration, cities were engaged in a competitive race to reinvent their destinies with architecture (Alaily-Mattar et al., 2017). The new cathedrals of culture and flagship star architectural projects (Freidenheim, 2010) apparently gave form to the prophetic vision expressed by Guy Debord (1967), playing a role at the intersection of education, consumption and spectacle.
Architecture became an event in its own right, regardless of bottom-up financing on the occasion of specific events. Needless to say, Grand Events, such as Expos, universal fairs and Olympic Games, have historically always acted -positively and negatively -as catalysts of change and key instruments of urban policy (Essex & Chakley, 2010), from London, Paris and Chicago in the 19th and 20th centuries, to Barcelona in 1992 -an oft-quoted example -and, more recently, Milan in 2015 and Rio de Janeiro in 2017.
The rhetoric of the "Bilbao effect" was replicated in global cities such as London, New York, Abu Dhabi, Paris and Tokyo (Ponzini & Nastasi, 2011), growing in parallel with a progressive recognition of the urban sprawl phenomenon, that emerged in the 1990s attracting the attention of academics, town planners, sociologists, economists, geographers, architects and tourism studies. Within such a heterogeneous panorama of definitions, there was a clearlyfelt common need for new analytic instruments for the methodologies and processes of urban research (Fassino, 2006). In those years, the crisis of city central spaces monopolised by the dynamics of the real estate sector, on one side, and the anonymous urban sprawl, on the other, animated the debate on urban transformation with the identification of its social, anthropological, economical traits (Augé, 1992;Sassen, 1994Sassen, , 2006Ghirardo, 1996;Boeri, 2003).
In the meanwhile, the signs of vitalities in the use of urban spaces were beginning to be recognised and studied, elevating the category of temporariness into a transformative factor (Haydn & Temel, 2006;Bishop & Williams, 2012;Reale et al., 2016).
In reality of course the city is four dimensional, and one needs to acknowledge the influence of time in planning and design strategies. Similarly, there has been relatively little analysis of the importance of interim, short-term or 'meanwhile' activities in urban areas. In an era of increasing pressure on scarce resources, we cannot wait for long-term solutions to vacancy or dereliction. Instead, we need to view temporary uses as increasingly legitimate and important in their own right. They can be a powerful tool through which we can drip-feed initiatives for incremental change -as and when we have the resources -while being guided by a loose-fit vision. (Bishop & Williams, 2012)  These researches have often looked back to the Situationist International (SI) and the creative performance, experiments, activities of the 1960s, which flourished worldwide within the social contestation of that time and linked the emergence of new collective and sustainable awareness: question[ing] existing urban conditions as did the Situationists. 'Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible!' Their wish to open the Paris metro stations at nights for events, inspired the London based 'Space Hijackers' to have a party on a tube train on the Circle Line -but only tunnels, an not for long, before the transport police arrived to turn it off. (Clarke, 2007, 90).
In the Italian context, it recalls to Riccardo Dalisi's project on Quartiere Traiano in Napoli (1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975) The last fifteen years have been riddled by a series of short-term, bottom up, collective, citizen-centred and design-driven initiatives to gradually re-appropriate and re-designate urban spaces. It is difficult to give an overarching picture of the contemporary phenomenon, but it can be summarised through its constant elements. Participation is one. Projects such as the German based "Urban Catalyst" (2013) demonstrates that small events can actively charge places with meaning and bring communities closer together by stimulating social networks and knowledge, which in turn may ultimately create a different urban practice.
Furthermore, the re-use of inactive spaces of the city is another recurring element (Robiglio, 2017). The concepts of "parasite" effect (Marini, 2008), "re-cycle", "informal", "stratified", "transition", "not-authorial" (Ciorra & Marini, 2011), "flexibility" (Bergevoet et al., 2016), appear repeatedly in the main narratives on this topic. On the other side, temporariness is becoming a social constrains in a cosmopolitan vision of citizenship, overcoming the idea of spaces for "emergency" and "provisional" use inherited from the great tragedies of the 20th century, and moving towards the concept of "passages" (Apel-Muller, 2018).
Services and events, and their intimate relationship with public spaces, thus, can play a social role in helping cities not to alienate their citizenship. They can be a generative factor for urban transformation. Quoting Bruno Zevi's speech at the 2000 Congress of Engineers and Architects (Congresso In/arch), Massimo Locci (2017) describes his Prophecy of a space determined by the event, outside the box, immaterial, capable of projecting itself into the new millennium in a political, social, philosophical, artistic, architectural and human key. A space no longer contained in a casing without thickness but free of any envelope. It is a dream and a goal.

HOW EVENTS PLAY OUT IN THE FUTURE CITY
Since the Renaissance, the great events in a city's history have been the occasion for artists, men and women of letters and rulers to depict the city (Baxandall, 2001), describe it and govern it, each according to their own sphere. The foundation of all this human activity lies in its two-fold capacity for projection, that is, of being able to translate reality synthetically into a particular language -which can be artistic or literary, the language of performance or letters, or even of another type altogether -as well as knowing how to invent and stage imaginary futures. Design, in its role as the enabler and mediator of knowledge, is both the basis and the process of planning visions that anticipate the future, new identities, cities, territories, and it gathers up and identifies the feeble signals of a future that can already be found in the present (Formia, 2017).
As well as its founding element (Heidegger, 2017), an event contains within itself other properties that are equally important for its very existence: temporality, experimentation and the dual relationship between content and container. Temporality is an essential but immaterial element. It provides the means to identify a moment on the timeline of existence when the ordinary is suspended and so contain the infinite flow of time within a defined limit, a flash when something happens, which the brain can contain, elaborate and put into a historical context. Furthermore, temporality in its material dimension by necessity sets physical boundaries and refers to a space that can be measured, is visible and so can be described. Revolutions, wars, coronations, carnivals, religious festivities, universal exhibitions, as well as the festivals and reviews of modern times, in their guise of grand temporary events, have always provided the occasion for combining and channelling creativity, project-making, production and the enjoyment of these into a given place and a precise time, introducing new practices and innovative tools. In reality, because an event is in itself experimental, a property granted by its very transience -another of its features -this means that it is potentially possible to err, produce different prototypes and put them into action, so that the culture of project-based knowledge can meet the "limiting" culture of human doing (Landry, 2006 for temporary solution, of a small grain, unexpected and shared (Bianchetti, 2014). And the same hiatus is present in the relationship established between the content that is channelled by an event and the receptacle that contains it, being this a town square, a palace courtyard, a theatre stage or a disused factory.
Any event, such as the accidental meeting and interaction between people and places, by its very nature transforms these places, it is experimental in its capacity to test new technical and/or technological discoveries, it is a performance as it attracts spectators and participants, it generates fresh relationships and it is the means to enable social innovation.

HOW DESIGN SHAPES THE MUTATING CITY
Up to about twenty years ago, traditionally cities were described only through well-tested material and contextual values -such as its wealth, its manufacturing sectors and industries and its infrastructural networks -without considering its material values embodied in the many cultures that best express a location's identity and determine its economic value, as well as its standing as a place to live in and the "humanity" of its inhabitants (La Cecla, 2015).
Containers are objects endorsed in literature on the post-modern city (Portoghesi, 1980), where the archistars have imagined and built skyscrapers and totems to their egos. From the emergence of the digital city at the end of last century to the networks of the second millennium and the plight of the modern city after the collapse of global techniques, the recurring topic was and remains that of distinguishing and planning new policies and practice-based tool kits that can return contemporary cities to places inhabited by their people, places that are conceived as a place where it is possible to express creativity and design commitment and truly lived in and experienced (Florida, 2002;Landry, 2008;Pon, 2015). Within the framework of the structural mutation of the past two decades, physical spaces are increasingly populated by digital networks that enable them to be connected, monitored and on view even when the viewers are not there. Within such a representation, reality blends and multiplies, influencing the relationships that blur the boundaries between reality and imagination. Paradoxically, "smart" cities, connected through internet and monitored by technology, are transformed into containers that are independent from their inhabitants, and have been flattened by the "cannibalistic" processes of globalisation. In cities shaped by immigration and gentrification, the authorities are progressively coming up against the need to draw city dwellers into taking on an active role in re-designing their city.
Inhabitants are encouraged to participate in processes that make their city more attractive, founded on the synergy between public and private institutions and associations, and recognising the value of the cultural heritage that is embedded in every territory (European Council, 2005 1 ). This call is starting to translate into designing small grain temporary actions that see the active involvement of city users in specific spaces and places. This social design process will gradually become the testing bench and the stage on which to try out new meeting points between the inhabitants' creativity, the enabling factors fielded by the authorities and the city containers, bringing into play new models of participation and new uses for the city (Evers et al., 2014).
The way in which the effects of these research-action events are communicated has become an integral part of these very events. Communication of this kind is also the consequence of the strategies to design services applied to the city. The outcome of participation and the tenders won by consortia of institutional bodies is one facet, and the other is the outcome of the initiatives promoted by private bodies, foundations and associations overall.
In both cases, communication is user-centred, and its purpose is to induce sense of belonging, of being cared about, of social well-being and of participating in the common good that is a city. Over the past twenty years, this concept has gradually become more abstract, virtual and elusive because of its ever-mutating identity.
These needs are emerging with greater force in active "post-global" institutions and inhabitants and we must attempt to launch challenges before giving answers. The design of temporary events, the way that the social involvement of city users is measured and their storytelling can be used to channel these values and help in transforming cities across the world (Ratti, 2016). The research projects carried out by Senseable City Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provide an umbrella illustration of this point. One of these, Friendly Cities, reveals how people use and share urban spaces, using geo-referencing data on smartphones about the flow of city users and the representation in maps. The peaks in concentration for social interaction during workdays and at weekends were configured to evaluate how likely it is that people will meet someone they already know or meet new people in Singapore, the metropolis of reference. Without doubt, great metropoles were chosen as big laboratory for their capacity to attract and concentrate spontaneous, bottomup sets of practices, and so analyse the fact that, although people can connect in an infinite number of ways through devices and social media, they still find that cities' physical spaces are the ideal place for social interaction. This research project provides a good example of how it is essential that people meet in physical spaces not merely for urban projects, but also as an indicator of the well-being of people and society.

A SPOTLIGHT ON THE CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN CITIES
In the first European report on cultural and creative cities (Montalto et al., 2017), cultural and creative cities are monitored by examining a series of measures that describe a city's "cultural vitality", its "creative economy" and its "favourable environment". Of the selected 168 cities in 30 European countries, Milan, Florence and Bologna are high on the list in categories XXL (cities with more than one million inhabitants) and L (cities with between 250,000 and 500,000 inhabitants) for their ability to catalyse creativity and tourism. These This is the first attempt to document the features of Italian design, the fact that it is systemwide, the place it plays in the manufacturing and production system and its dynamics of evolution. Milan is championed as the capital of design, in part because of the impact of one large-scale event, the Milan Design Week. The showcasing of a map of all the professional skills, the practices embedded within the production processes spread across the territory and the acknowledgment that they are an integral and indispensable part of Italian doing and knowing can be combined together into a set of features. Together, they launched and sanctioned a process of nation-wide analysis and research into new methods to spread information about the complex system of designing relationships that bond creative minds and designers to the system of production and city systems.
Examples can be found in the newly created national associations that underpin and promote design, Made-in-Italy clusters and the regional off shoots that, in Emilia-Romagna, focus on the emerging phenomenon of Cultural and Creative Industries. The objective in this case is to develop strategies for growth coordinated through the knowledge about projects found within these industries (Vai, 2017). fragrances -events in Italy, unless they are company-driven, are still not promoted sufficiently outside the country. They have, however, helped to entice an international audience over the past ten years, and have built relationships between public and private entities, with high impact in terms of social innovation, and so have enhanced the skills and vocations that identify a territory.
An example is the European Photography Festival of Reggio Emilia. Every year, it has been scattering the choicest output of international photography in cloisters, churches, galleries, private apartments and museums. As a consequence of the Festival, with its exhibitions, meetings and performances, the general public (57,832 visitors in the 13th edition of 2018) has also become more interested in the less known Italian photographers. It has also found synergy with Foto/Industria, a biennial event of photography on industry and work edited promoting social interaction. This is an important aspect and is even more challenging because is escapes from the position of merely measuring the data produced by individual city users.
All the cases we have referred to have a double matrix in common. Design is the occasion for celebrating an event organized around it and these events are implemented by applying design-driven and design-oriented processes and practice. Design cultures seem to be themself a subject matter in the relationship between city inhabitants and the methodology used to modify the city in a continuous manner, through enabling technology and opening potential expressive forms that can be both individual and/or collective.
Even more frequently, the contemporary designer can help to regenerate and revitalize urban settings. This can be the design of processes, of communication, of interaction and of services. Equally numerous are the academic programs that are opening up to these disciplines, creating in practice an area that closes the anomalous divide that took place in the 1990s in Europe between architectural practices, urban projects and design.
The temporal, sustainable and participatory facets of design, its co-design and recyclable elements, its collective component, the fact that it can be replicated, scaled up and down and is enabled through technology are all key words that guide the action of designers in the contemporary city.
The top-down, media-dependent project of "urban-mysticism" of the early 2000s is joinedand sometimes replaced -by a care for the city, seen as a living organism that needs constant attention and vitality. These can be achieved through a set of wide-spread and detailed projects that are both temporary and convertible and recall a mutation rather than a radical change.