Society and the city. The dark sides of social innovation

Is there a connection between the increasingly widespread concept of social innovation and the success of today’s model of capitalist regulation? According to most studies focusing on social innovation, this is essentially a restorative relation: social innovation intervenes to fix negative effects brought about by the neoliberal regime. This volume is based on a different claim, namely that social innovation is a dispositif inscribed within neoliberal governmentality, and effectively supports cognitive capitalism’s new forms of production. In light of this claim, the transition from one mode of production to another generates a series of contradictions in social relations that changes the space in which they are inevitably inscribed. In this way, social innovation practices provide an ideal field of research to observe modes of production of subjectivity, along with the spatial practices of subjects involved in and affected by social innovation.