The spatial organisation of social services has long been residual for both urban planning and social welfare policies in Italian cities. This often results in randomly chosen locations and poor design arrangements, which ignore the role that space might play in fostering social life and inclusion. The scarce relevance given to the topic both in research and implementation is connected to the historical evolution of social services in the country and the scant resources devoted to their provision. Basing itself on the debate on welfare spaces and social infrastructures and drawing on a collaborative-research experience within an experimental policy-innovation project developed in Milan, this article tackles the role of space in social services provision following three directions. Firstly, it analyses how, at the urban level, welfare innovations and the interplay between urban planning and welfare policies might contribute to reshaping the traditional physical structures of social services and their map to favour more inclusive patterns of access to local welfare. Secondly, it investigates the role of social services as social infrastructures in increasing accessibility, reducing stigmatisation, and interpreting in a more inclusive way the complex public-private partnerships that allow welfare implementation nowadays. Finally, it discusses how, in the face of contemporary trends in the activation of welfare spaces, traditional urban planning tools are challenged in monitoring their increasingly dynamic distribution in the city. This highlights the need to develop innovative urban planning strategies and tools to effectively support decision-making and design.

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The combined effect of socio-economic and demographic changes exerts pressure on the welfare systems and makes it more urgent to provide appropriate answers to increasing and diversifying needs with scanter resources. Local social services are strongly committed to such challenges. The physical features of the spaces of welfare, often neglected both by research and by implementation, play a fundamental role in the attempt to innovate and extend access to social assistance services. The article analyses how, at the urban level, the interplay between urban planning and welfare policies might contribute to reshaping the traditional physical structures of social welfare services and, through these, the patterns of access to local welfare. Building on an experimental project tested and then consolidated in Milan, the article analyses the role of the spatial dimensions of welfare places, namely the contexts, settings and artefacts, in increasing accessibility, lowering the threshold, reducing stigmatization, ensuring (or not) the coherence between policies and programmes’ objectives and approaches and the features of the spaces where such programmes and policies are implemented and where citizens experience them. Moreover, it discusses alternative planning strategies and tools in use to design the current spaces for welfare and to govern their distribution and organisation at the city level.