Make Public Spaces Great Again Using Social Innovation Reflections from the Context of Downtown San Diego as a Cultural District

This paper investigates the role of public spaces in spurring innovation and promoting entrepreneurial activities in Downtown San Diego urban context as a distinguished “cultural district”. The idea that in creative cities, flourishing human capital, when coupled with incremental quality of life, could be the driving vehicle to social innovation and economic prosperity. On that public spaces are a cross cutting phenomenon in a lifetime cycle, through which their success could be evaluated contextually based on their formation and implementation policies, and how they work-out to be social innovation catalysts. Hence, this paper studies contextually the Downtown San Diego Partnership (DSDP) and their role to activate and regenerate different public spaces in downtown area to foster economic development. Two successful exemplar cases are studied; to better understand the dynamics by which the cultural programming in urban parks through events occurrence in Downtown as vibrant cultural hub; as well as the focus on a co-working and incubator space as a successful case to explain the human capital attraction to the Downtown area. The conclusions draw on an evaluation matrix of analysis that investigates the Catchment area/Sphere of influence falling in San Diego Downtown area, and helps to reach the envisioned opportunities and the policy measures applied to foster social innovation in those public spaces, and evaluate the success or failure of the Downtown San Diego Partnership to boost the innovation ecosystem