Centro Sociale Leoncavallo

Abstract

In this article we analyse the bottom-up response to the lack of social and cultural services in a post-industrial area of Milan (Italy) as a revealing experience of social innovation. Leoncavallo, a self-managed and Leftist social, cultural and political centre established in 1975, represents a peculiar approach to the management of collective services in a participative and informal way, based on the principle of autogestione (self-management). Through an interesting process of `flexible institutionalization', this collective agent has been able to survive the post-1968 era, evolving nowadays into an important political actor in the national and international scenes. From an organizational point of view, the analysis shows how social innovation processes (Moulaert et al., 1990) are strongly related to the social enterprise logic and to the spatial dimension (at different scales): both the management of sense-making processes and the `enactment' of physical spaces (frames) by the activists and by the users of Leoncavallo provide the opportunity to combine the economic, political and social dimensions. This leads in the direction of a `glocal' development, focused on human needs and potentialities as fields for the building of an active citizenship.