Re-cycle practices in the city as political act: Design perspectives

The care of public spaces in urban environments has always been an indicator of a nation’s welfare, impacting greatly on people's behaviours. In these terms, design of public spaces performs a political action, related to common life, because it holdspeople’sideals.Designersneedtotellthestoryofhowdesign canplaya significant role in creating social change This paper reports on the activities of an alliance of academics, designers, architects, artists and activists in the development of a public campaign to speculate on how a city might act on its present and forecast its future: Superelevata Foot[prints]. It focuses on the topic of re-cycling and re-use of abandoned spaces, by testing resources and chances as prerequisites of an open working process through specific tools and design practices. Is it possible to delineate a method and an innovation process by reading again these new spontaneous attitudes defined by the urgency to act? Is it possible to improve the political dimension of design action, conceiving the project as performance, as experienced in the '60 by radical groups? If design comes out from the interaction between a practice, which requests to change the state of the things, and a culture, which makes sense of this change, how do the public design activities produce culture and behavioural change? How can this culture orientate and offer common horizons to the multiplicity of practices that take place in design activities?