Defining a Collaborative Infrastructure

Abstract

The research into ‘Creative Citizens’, and, to a lesser extent, into ‘Welcome to St. Gilles’, ‘Green Camden’ and ‘The NYC Office for Public Imagination’ represented the prototype for a possible collaborative infrastructure dedicated to the codesign of public-interest services in a specific neighbourhood and timeframe. In this chapter, building on our experimentations, we attempt to extract a working definition of collaborative infrastructure and to outline some key characteristics, by also connecting this notion to that of ‘enabling platform’. Finally, we introduce the notion of Public Innovation Places as a possible type of collaborative infrastructure, providing a general overview of the worldwide emergence of experimental spaces that aim to support innovation in the public realm.