Integrating and putting into practice both extended communities’ usability of urban spaces and people’s effective participation in the construction of planning and design tools and solutions are longstanding quests. However, today, these pursuits are understood as even more challenging than in the past. Our cities and societies have become increasingly “pluralist”. A complex bundle of issues makes urban planning and the implementation of regeneration projects and processes highly intricate and slippery tasks: the presence and co-existence of a variety of cultures and habits; the clash of conflicting public and private, individual and collective interests; the difficult match between the call for the reuse of a large set of abandoned estates and the lack of shared ideas and perspectives to combine different material and immaterial resources; the gap among top-down policy-making and bottom-up behaviors, needs, understandings, and perceptions of common goods; the growing dramatic concerns about social and economic inequalities, territorial unbalances, and the uneven impacts of environmental and climate crises. Responsible innovation of planning and design cultural and technical approaches is, therefore, strongly needed. Since some years now, at the Università di Trieste, dealing with this integrated research field has brought to a fruitful collaboration between urban planning and technical architecture."
