The crossings to which the experience of forced distancing has forced us in the last year, has led the contexts that made aggregation and structuring of empowering spaces the pivot of their mission to reorganize and redefine themselves more than others.

The propensity to change, which many social innovation spaces have always claimed to be inspired by, has found itself faced with a test of facts, useful for evolving into true pro-pulsion or resolving itself into total, partial or latent surrender.

The initial transfer of activities to platforms seemed to be enough to resist, but twelve months later there is a need to verify what this process is determining in the identity of places, in their relationship with the people who live there and the implications on the identity of one (spaces), on the others (inhabitants).

The idea of belonging, often rhetorically declared as a projection of collective identity, has proved to be one of the founding elements on which the ideality of inhabited space has been able to transcend from its physicality, to build equally significant and meaningful contexts in the network, perhaps managing not to dissociate the two dimensions.

Community hubs, aggregation centers, labs, creative workshops, co-working spaces, cultural centers, social libraries and all those contexts in which distance and impossibility to attend them in presence seemed to be in check, seem to have managed to find the key to open a further space, on the web, with unprecedented connections between online and on site, becoming, perhaps, Hybrid Spaces.

3 questions for an open space of analysis and reflection

 

On May 20th and 21st, experts, operators and inhabitants of these spaces will have the opportunity to dialogue with each other in a hybrid mode with workshops, laboratories and working groups mixed between network and spaces, connecting thought and experience.

There are three questions for reflection:

1. What identity and design implications, for spaces, in modifying experientiality in hybrid contexts?

2. What are the implications for the mission of the spaces, with the opening of the audience to the web and the possible decontextualization of the interventions?

3. What are the specific elements of the emerging profile of Hybrid Spaces?

The Research Meeting is part of the industrial research project on social innovation spaces that sees the collaboration between the University of Padua - Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Pedagogy and Applied Psychology (FISSPA) and coop. soc. Il Raggio Verde.

• March 23 (deadline April 7): release of call for candidacy of spaces with collection of motivational elements for participation and verification of basic requirements (technical and profile)

• March 30: opening of pre-registration

• April 8-15: definition of the in-depth sections with the scientific committee, together with the analysis of the applications

• April 16: publication of the final program

• May 20 and 21: realization of the meeting

• June-November: analysis of materials for publication of results

 

A Polycentric Meeting

 

From the methodological point of view, the event will be organized by connecting between 12 and 20 spaces with different profiles in which work groups can be accommodated in adequately spaced spaces of 8/12 people each. In this way, the event will be able to include working groups in presence alternating with assembly, conference and comparison moments. The intervention of experts, case studies and the definition of profiles will alternate with informal moments and suggestions from other contexts, allowing the analysis to be placed within a framework of general transformation.

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Organizing Committee

- Marina De Rossi Università di Padova (coordinator)

- Marina Santi Università di Padova

- Elisabetta Ghedin Università di Padova

- Stefano De Stefani Il Raggio Verde

- Michele Marmo AssociAnimAzione

​Organising Committee

- Stefano De Stefani 

- Serena Sterza

- Cassandra Baldini

- Alessandra Marzana