Informal Communities as «Creative Places» and Urban Productivity Drivers. The Case of the Community Centres in Naples

Recent attention on the role played by informal communities in establishing new production specializations is being paid by current urban development theories. The communities of citizens, driven by free acceptance, would be more effective in the process of creating new job opportunities and innovative and responsible public procurement. At the same time, the social interaction modes, being a specific feature of a place, are not suitable for an unambiguous and horizontal interpretation to be encoded in development models. With regard to these problems, some research adopts methodological choices that reverse the common horizontal perspective in defining the development models of an area. The awareness of deep differences in acting collectively, indeed, explains the need to carry out in depth investigations and selective collections of best practices. Based on some Neapolitan community centres' features, already recognized as best practices in the activity of urban decision-making, this study makes an analysis that extends the observation to all other community centres, trying to highlight the degree of evolution and possible needs to improve the productivity of the local economy.