Dynamics of Periphery

Figure 3. The representation of the city becomes a collective action transforming challenges
into opportunities. Graphic: author
The radical transformations occurring in urban arenas are helping to rewrite their representations
and maps. The meaning of space changes, because the way it is experienced by the community
that inhabits it mutates. We are facing the manifestation of an experienced-city idea (Deserti and
Rizzo, 2014): the city's potential for being read escalates when the point of view shifts towards
generative practices of new places of sociability.
In this vision, citizens are empowered to narrate the city through their innovative actions. The active
role of inhabitants contributes to the overcoming of implicit labelling; based on the postulate
of peripheries=degradation, it allows us to shift to a vision where challenges are opportunities,
giving the inhabitants the capacity to co-generate public arrangements. Within these processes,
the agency of individuals creates value through micro-actions and fosters the possibility of its
distribution. When dealing with urban systems, the importance of user-driven innovations is
crucial because it transforms citizens from users into co-producers of collective knowledge and
narratives. 4 The consequence of the enabling of those instances of change—which are already
creating communities—contributes to the definition of a new urban development paradigm. The
intertwining action between community, space, and public policies prefigures a new development
model in which envisioning and describing the future is a collective process that concerns scenarios
in which a variety of actors are committed and responsible.
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NARRATIVE