Incubators of Public Spaces (1): Grassroots Regeneration of Neighbourhoods

Incubators of Public Places Project aims to provide the means to grow and care for places. What makes a place is the integration of spatial forms, buildings and open spaces, that foster the interactions of people, as they inhabit those spaces. Inhabitants are asking for a better quality of life; this need is often expressed by even minute requests. The governance of these requests and their organization into a coherent city vision is one of the challenges of “grassroots planning”. IPP experiments linking agreed visions for the positive change of an urban area with the combination of individual self-interest driven actions on the same area. Given the budget constraints of most Municipalities and the conjunctural shortening of private partnerships, Incubators fosters self-organisation in the financial support to the transformations. Through the active co-creation, the Project encourages the stakeholders’ ability to orient dynamically towards shared objectives. Further self-organisation is in the financial support to the transformations, through incremental lending and co-investing. Incubators is defining new ways of producing credit to support regeneration on a variety of levels, and differentiating the financial assistance. Particular attention is devoted to activities with social value, those able to speed up the social impact on a neighbourhood.