Space for Rights. The School Between Planning Standard and Social Innovation

The paper straddles the boundary between urbanism and sociology, working on the common ground of rights: public services and facilities (‘planning standard,’ according to the Italian spatial planning legislation) on the one hand and the care of the commons on the other, in addition to attempting to grapple with a third dimension of rights that places space and society alongside law. This methodological hypothesis is practiced from the critical analysis of one of the basic public facilities: the school. In the national debate on public services and common goods, school spaces are one of the recurring examples of how they have functionality as public educational services during school time and how they can also have other functional profiles as common goods, i.e., as civic centers open to the urban community during out-of-school hours. The theme of the hybridization of spaces and functions emerges with ever-increasing theoretical and empirical force in the reflections on so-called social innovation. Even if, in several cases, many people ignored one of the most beautiful definitions of planning standards by Giovanni Astengo (1966). He stated that, besides being a minimum, standards represent a minimum of civilization. The paper intends to bring attention to the complex value of spatial and social resources related to schools.