The Urban Innovation Plan began in December 2016 with the objective of tracing out a perspective of transverse innovation for the Administration and the City of Bologna. With an open document that can be implemented over time, the basic idea was to create a space for discussion and co-design open to everyone that connects opportunities, territorial potential, and public decisions, adopting community activation and accounting as a method.

The first edition (2016) ‘Verso il Piano innovazione urbana’, recounted the planning effort made by the Administration with a 2021 horizon, systematizing various design tools and funding programmes and favouring the emergence of some axes of priority development. The document concretely identified — with resources and times — the opportunities given by city, national, and European funding tools for a sustainable, welcoming, attractive, and collaborative city.

With the second edition (2019), it became a tool for various voices to talk about the future of the city thanks to a stable, widespread process of territorial engagement that began in 2017. In fact, the document was the result of two years of work in the District Labs and aimed to provide an exhaustive framework of the approach adopted by the Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana and the lines of action emerging from processes begun with organizations, communities, and citizens of Bologna. Interweaving data collected from about 280 meetings held in 2017 and 2018, the Administration’s perspective is accompanied by the bottom-up perspective, which suggests and identifies central elements to frame upcoming interventions on both the city and neighbourhood scales in the areas of society, education, the digital realm, culture, and public space.