Social and Institutional Innovation in Self-Organising Cities

Our daily lives are today marked by the myriad of digital connections that define the geographies of displacements, desires (through the punctual and scattered map of purchases), work activities, real and digital meetings. Cities are still the place where most of our digital lives land and transform into a body-to-body with space, creating inevitable friction between real lives, made of crossings and material stops in cities, and virtual geographies made of flows, temporality and unpublished impacts. The book investigates these aspects by exploring the potential of the new sciences of the city understood as an ecosystem of social innovation and wondering what the new mechanisms that generate real and virtual urbanity are. The book is organized into three parts (new sciences for cities, self-organization and institutional innovation, the city as an innovation ecosystem) anticipated by a critical essay that describes the theme, positions it in the international debate and enhances the specific contribution of the research (advancement in basic and strategic research). The book collects the research contributions of a strategic University project, funded by the University of Florence and entitled: Social Innovation in Practice: city regeneration through co-evolution and networking.