This study examines the creation and use of meaningful public spaces in community gardens through activities focusing on 'placemaking', a multifaceted approach to the design of urban spaces. As a process of adding value and meaning to the public sphere through community based revitalization projects, placemaking aims at creating an innovative vision around the spaces that people consider as important to their daily life and experience. The need for 'making better places for people' calls for a strong involvement of local communities and implies the rethinking of disciplinary paradigms, a critical reflection on the role of urban planning and the experimentation of innovative place-based approaches. The results from an investigation of two community gardens in Berlin outline how they help build cohesion and vitality in a community, contributing to the generation of bonding, bridging social capital. Community gardens and the involved placemaking processes, as the research in Berlin confirms, seem to have a potential for social urban development in practice and the creation of urban place quality.

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This chapter critically examines approaches and solutions developed by social housing to sustainably respond to the housing emergency plaguing contemporary cities and Italian cities in particular. In a broader perspective, we also investigate how housing has become 'difficult' in Europe and the poorest segments of the population run the risk of having their right to housing dramatically denied. Analysing housing in terms of its procedural dimension, we focus on two Italian case studies that evoke a new way of inhabiting the city, cases in which high standards characterised social housing and yet remain accessible to all. The Sharing hotel residence in Turin and Zoia social housing in Milan combine housing with other socially innovative measures in a framework of sustainability and avant-garde construction. These are significant examples that speak to issues such as temporariness, flexibility and the coordination of measures. These two cases both pursued objectives having to do with social, planning, architectural and environmental quality, albeit each in their own way. There are by now numerous examples of social housing in Europe and these have recently attracted growing interest in Italy as well; in this country, however, such projects represent valid instances of experimentation but are not at all widespread.

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