Universities as platforms for urban renewal and collective mobilization: reinventing Venice's social fabric, economy and lagoon

Universities’ role in technology transfer has been widely recognized. The concept of university engagement with the external world has evolved in the past twenty years. First named technology transfer, then entrepreneurial university, a tension towards an active and proficient interaction with the external world sustained the transformation of higher education institutions. The notion of impact, for a long time, has focused on the avenues to contribute to industry advancement and the economy at large. More recently, the notion of universities as change agents transcended the sole economic dimension, pointing more explicitly to their nature of platforms interacting with – and engaging – the complex local environments they are part of (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000). A kaleidoscopic set of new activities and responsibilities were therefore introduced to develop the liaison between academia and society. The present paper aims at elucidating a specific function universities might have in dense but fragmented local networks: that of platform bridging a variety of constituencies aiming at the renewal of the social, economic, and environmental fabric of a city. We show how universities are strategically placed to enable the convergence of efforts and projects and thus allow a less departmentalized and segregated view of progress and advancement. The overall role of the university should overthrow the idea that a project must be built from scratch every time, and in fact the aim of the project is to Map the results that have already been achieved in the field and to link them to a pre-existing community of different audiences and external stakeholders through the Higher education institutions.