Urban disruptions as laboratories for innovation. Some explorations in Rome

Urban disruption permeates our everyday experience, whether we are travelling across the planetary urban space or listening to the often sensationalist media reports of the day's events. Disruption is boredom, sometimes catastrophe, a violent, unexpected event, an unintended, rarely desired transformation. It is the result of the tangle of forces in the world we live in, to which we add extra forces. It is, we might say, a sign of the vitality of the world and its endless transformation. In this paper we propose Rotturaforma's point of view, that is, to see urban disruption as a unique potential for the urbanistic project of transition, a discontinuity with which to work through a deep understanding of the forces at work and a difficult, unpredictable effort to reweave, to rewrite the relationship with these same forces. Alongside the practices of prompt repair and replacement that characterise the problemsolving project, Rotturaforma flanks (perhaps opposes) other, less obvious directions of work, such as the inhabitation of disruption or the transformative repair. In short, projects that integrate actions that do not try to hide or deny the forces, but rather attempt to inhabit them or bend them into forms of reciprocity, exchange and continuous learning.Interpreted in this way, urban disruption seems capable of becoming an urban laboratory for innovation. But there is no shortage of technical limitations and cultural resistance, perhaps the same resistance that opposes the ecological transition.