Participation, social networks and urban regeneration. New opportunities and challenges for liveable urban design projects

In the last twenty years, high tech infrastructures are always more and more used in a new culture of exchange, creating new possibilities of interaction within the communities. Indeed, the emergence of internet as a medium of communication in Europe and beyond has opened up spaces and their users to new meanings and uses, including different approach to citizen participation. Community hubs, network thinking and social networks are only some of the current relational modalities among web communities. On the other hand, nowadays, new tools are used in order to support the knowledge of places. The introduction of new technologies has had numerous hits on the deepening of the study of the territory. Indeed, the study on this topic is growing although not still framed in a systematic way in the framework of urban planning and design disciplines. To try to give a real opportunity for improve the success of urban design projects some demands have to be posed and relative answers to comprehend how traditional planning can be supported by the use of social networks in a suitable way to have a real tool of participation. Starting from these premises, the adaptation of an original method of analysis and design to an emblematic case study will be illustrated. Furthermore a new index to measure the participation will be proposed. The case study concerns the city of Pompeii - South of Italy - in the framework of both Smart@Pompei project and Civitates Pompeii asset as well as the IRISS CNR research project "Contemporary urban landscape design: place identity, happiness, liveability, health and sustainability" (with the author' s responsibility). First results and relative criticality will conclude the paper.