Society and the City: The Dark Sides of Social Innovation

Is there a connection between the increasingly widespread concept of Social Innovation (SI) and the success of today’s model of capitalist regulation? According to most studies focusing on SI, the existing relation is restorative in nature: SI intervenes to fix some negative effects brought about by the neoliberal regime. This volume is based on a different assumption, namely that SI is a dispositif inscribed in neoliberal govern mentality, functional in supporting the new production forms of cognitive capitalism. In light of this assumption, the transition from a production mode to another generates a series of contradictions in social relations that change the space in which they are inevitably inscribed. In this regard, SI practices are an ideal research field to observe the modes of production of subjectivity, along with the spatial practices of the subjects interested in/affected by SI.