The legacy of Italian psychiatry as a lever for innovating the governance model of care-led welfare space in fragile cities

If we apply urban fragility’s indicators, we can categorize Naples as a fragile city of the Global North where poverty and vulnerability are growing, governance gaps can be observed, and local authorities are unable to deliver basic services to citizens. In the meantime, while the decrease of resources and fundings for urban maintenance and management is causing the abandonment of public parks and open spaces, social-health policies from the cultural background of the Italian psychiatrist Basaglia are still alive in a few public health centers. What matters is that in experimenting ways for the recovery of vulnerable people, most of these policies focus on the care of space as a therapy to regenerate urbanity as a minor effect. Meaning that the more a community need to overcome a range of vulnerabilities, the more the place where they follow a therapy has the potential for triggering inclusive regenerative processes. The paper deconstructs a few practices through interpretative criteria coming from the experimental governance theory in order to understand how to enhance the care of public spaces by designing policies sophisticated enough to respond urban fragilities by leveraging the role of vulnerable people. The thesis is that collaborative planning processes aimed to involve multiple stakeholders, confront different knowledge, and cyclically reconsider achievements and metrics can allow innovative urban governance models to emerge. Questions to answer are: What preconditions make the care of places a way to enhance regenerative processes? Can planning methodologies decode such processes in order to design innovative socio-spatial welfare models?