Informal Communities and Urban Development. Recognizing Urban Productivity in Neapolitan Social Centres

Purpose: A recent focus on the role played by informal communities in establishing new production specializations is emerging by the current urban development theories. The community of citizens, driven by the free membership, would be effective in the process of creating new job opportunities and innovative and responsible public procurement. At the same time, the social interaction modes, being specific characteristic of a place, do not lend themselves to an unambiguous and horizontal reading for encoding in development patterns. With regard to these problems, some researches adopt methodological choices that reverse the common horizontal perspective in defining the models of development of an area. Awareness of deep differences in acting collectively, indeed, explain the need to conduct, in depth investigations and selective collection of best practices. Based on some Neapolitans social centers' features, already recognized as best practices in the activity of urban decision-making, this study makes an analysis that extends the observation to all the others, trying to highlight the degree of evolution and possible needs to improve the productivity of the local economy. Methodology: Measuring the productivity of informal communities' actions in the traditional urban development model is challenging. Thus, following some theories in economic geography (Storper, 2013) ("we can only rarely use the characteristics of existing cities and urban systems to deduce 'what people want' or what they would 'prefer to prefer'") we adopt an inductive research logic. Drawing on the recent cultural theory on the importance of 'materiality' in the contemporary world (Bruno, 2014) - arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations - we have mapped the 'places' where some Neapolitan informal communities (largely known as social centers) actually act. In matching the declarative data about the informal communities' main tasks with the 12 EU Urban Agenda themes, the paper found the 'surface' describing the inherent results. Findings: The informal communities investigated enter the 'dead' urban system to vitalize it. They occupy 'abandoned stations' and strengthen bonds of trust elsewhere dehumanized. The evidence show that the local social centers' actions are moving to tackle the main EU Urban Agenda priority themes. Thus, the emerging social centers' critical ability is in making a bridge between their own (political) motivations/action strategies with the wider EU policy framework. JEL codes: O47; O43; O17