Questioning how social and health services can improve the material quality of urban spaces prompts us to rethink public policies and their use. In the face of the necessity to invest in community welfare, the paper discusses an initiative that has been working in the Italian province of Trieste for many years. Through the program Microareas, the creation of a territorialized system of services has not only improved the health conditions of a large part of the population; it has also involved institutions, inhabitants and the third sector in the spatial upgrading of a number of council housing districts. This experience shows the capacity of public policies to generate effective and integrated responses to today's pressing and plural demands for care of urban spaces and people.
