Incuria – A Radical Innovation Model @La Scuola Open Source

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What lies around the potholes on Rome’s streets?
What strange energy emanates from the dirt of its sidewalks?
From a distance, the concepts of incuria (neglect) and degrado (decay) could be confused.
Actually they belong to two universes of meaning that diverge and can generate opposite outcomes.

On Thursday, December 16th, from 6 to 8 pm (UTC+01), SOS – La Scuola Open Source hosted an online presentation of the book “Incuria” with the authors and artists Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico.

The event was introduced by Federico Fred Fumagalli (SOS) and moderated by me as a member of the research center HER: She Loves Data and a co-founder of the newborn organization Nuovo Abitare.

We discussed the potential for a radical innovation model inspired by Rome, a city renowned for its beauty and history, but equally famous for its unwillingness to be governed.

The question “How could we manage Rome?”, often posed rhetorically to express a resigned acceptance of the status quo, conceals a broader inquiry into how to manage complexity. Every day, we witness the failure of solutionist models in facing global challenges, such as the climate crisis, migration, pandemics, terrorism and gender-based violence. These approaches not only fail in their stated aims but also contribute to false dichotomies and social polarization.

The model proposed by the book, instead, seeks to engage with other human dimensions, such as sensitivity and imagination.

In this different framework, a new question emerges: “What can we learn from Rome?”. Suddenly, its most problematic traits – its unmappability and the unexpected as a core element of everyday life – reveal themselves as opportunities. The two authors connect this idea to Gilles Clement’s concept of Third Landscape, referring to residual spaces that serve as the ultimate territory of refuge and expression of diversity.

This condition allows us to build a new ecology of urban space, guided by art, liberated technology and an anthropology capable of transforming apparent decadence into a renewed idea of ‘open source nobility’. As in few other places in the world, in Rome it is still possible to be human rather than a consumer, through an economy based on relationships and care. This concept is closely linked to a “proto-political awareness of non-work”, often dismissed or misunderstood as unpolitical, yet widely prevalent in the city as a pop philosophy.