Over time, an increasing number of institutions, both public and private bodies, are investing in resilience of communities and territories, supporting local based practices and actions. Launched in April 2015 and promoted by a partnerships between Academic institutions (Politecnico di Milano as coordinator) and the REsilienceLAB association and funded by Fondazione Cariplo (Italian bank foundation), the Resilience Practices Observatory (RPO) takes as its overall strategic objective the enhancement of territorial resilience through the strengthening of resilience practices. This mainly by a integrated and incremental assets of activities including: collection and interpretation of practices; coproduction/co-desing activities, reframing activities for innovation in methods, tools and design criteria; capacity building and dissemination activities from a cultural and methodological perspective.
Inside the RPO activities, a specific working space has been devoted to three crosscutting issues (governance, knowledge co-production and economy) that are crucial in enhancing the feasibility and the stabilization of resilience practices and in contributing to social and territorial resilience in the long-run.
The essay first offers a brief introduction to the RPO working experience (engaging more than 100 practices), which, in these three years, based on a strong interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, proved to be successful and able to highlight strengths and weaknesses of the resilience implementation from the operational perspective and to envisage innovative tools to be applied in a new generation of multipurpose projects.
Then, a specific focus on the three crosscutting issues will be introduced, highlighting main conceptual reframings and toolboxes developed. In the final part of the essay, reframing frameworks, methodological and operational factors will hence be discussed (in particular on the concept of ecosystems of resilience practices), in order to highlight emerging trajectories for the improvement of resilience practices and policies to guarantee systemic and synergic benefits in resilience capabilities enhancement of complex territorial systems.
