Service design and suburbs

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Politecnico di Milano Scuola del Design A.A. 2017/18

Msc PSSD Service Design and Innovation Prof: Daniela Sangiorgi

Student: Martina Monelli 897203

Service design and suburbs How a participatory approach enhances building inclusion Abstract As 66% of the world’s population is projected to be living in urban areas by 2050 (United Nations, 2014), it is very urgent to think about how the flow of people has to be managed in order to create a more sustainable way of living. In order to prevent a chaotic sprawl of resources along the urban and, especially, the suburban areas, it’s becoming really urgent to “significantly influence sustainable urbanization through decision making at local, metropolitan, regional/sub-national and national levels”(Webb et al., 2018,1). The word “sustainable” in this paper will go along with the idea of how a participatory approach can help in the reconfiguration of existing spaces and add meaningful layers to the local community. “Neighborhood Technologies” is a Sweden example that will help in understanding the dynamics of the participatory design approach in suburbs and it will shed some lights on the idea of how to create a form of integration and inclusion using local resources. Keyword Community building, Urban suburbs, Participatory design Introduction It’s a given fact that the world population will focus on urban areas in the coming years, but how will the cities react to this event? Up to now the demographic growth of the last years has brought to a chaotic urbanization based on the widening of the urban borders encouraging the construction of new buildings and infrastructures without a real systemic plan. Both urban but, especially, suburban areas must not be faced just from an urbanist and architectural point of view. They also have sociological and design aspects that must be considered in order to achieve a sustainable way of living which sees a planned recovery of what is already existing without wasting more landscape and resources. It is becoming urgent, therefore, to “stop b u i l d i n g s u b u r b s” f o c u s i n g o n t h e intensification of “our urban centers by fertilizing and fertilizing the suburbs, instead of

continuing to expand them”, this because “if we do not succeed, it will be a disaster, not only urban but also social” (Piano, 2015). Going from the tangible space to its intangibility, the aim of this paper is to explain how service design can positively contribute to transforming suburbs from dormitory places into valuable spaces for their own inhabitants creating a sense of community-based on the local resources. Since “some forms of degradation of the districts are due to a low sense of belonging of the inhabitants of the community” (Paone, 2018, 212), the role of service designer is therefore that of a strategic promoter which enables “local design processes connecting competencies, know-how and creative resource in order to build new means of creating value for communities” (Maffei, Villari, 2006, 29).


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