The “Scuola dei Quartieri – SdQ” (translated as The School of the Neighbourhoods) is a free civic school of social innovation and entrepreneurship open to all citizens and spread throughout the city of Milano. Conceived as a capability-building multidisciplinary programme that continues the tradition of Milan's "civic schools", it contributes to the transformation of some disadvantaged neighbourhoods, spreading the ability to design social impact solutions that respond to the desires, needs and propensities of the inhabitants. Without classrooms, it takes place where people live and work and aims at supporting citizens in making things happen, so as to make neighborhoods more inclusive, lively and sustainable.

Promoted by the Municipality of Milano - Council for Labour Policies and Economic Development, and co-financed by the European Union - National Operational Programme Metropolitan Cities 2014-2020, it is implemented by a consortium composed of partners divided into two levels of action:

• a|cube, Politecnico di Milano - Polimi DESIS Lab, Spazio Aperto Servizi, Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, Kilowatt mainly active on advanced training and experimentation;
• Avanzi, Comunità del Giambellino, Dynamoscopio, Gruppo Cooperativo Cgm, PerMicro, active on the project start-up phase for scouting and community engagement.

The SdQ is organised into 4 main cycles of scouting and incubation, each one of 3 phases:

1. Scouting and participation to the SdQ call: citizens are called to participation through ‘on site’ initiatives organised as an open programme of encounters to match needs and opportunities of neighbourhoods with prospective social innovators, and then to guide them in submitting their ideas to the call.
2. Advanced training: selected participants attend an intensive training programme in which they learn how to transform their idea into an actual solution. Co-designing and prototyping are key-expertise, because engaging multi-stakeholder communities is part of the process as well as the ability to transform a solution into a prototype.
3. Prototyping and personalised support: selected participants receive personalized support and a project grant up to 25000 euros to co-finance the first year of activity.

The SdQ aims to sustain the community’s adaptability and resilience in times of transition. Its very idea is leveraging the people's capability of becoming social innovators to trigger a systemic transformation in neighbourhoods and cities towards inclusivity and sustainability. This objective originates in the awareness that changes in citizen’s behaviour towards more sustainable patterns can happen also through education, activation and civic involvement, and it is being pursued through mechanisms both operating at the process and result levels. Thus, the SdQ can be regarded as ‘civic’ for both the nature of the promoter and the learning outcomes. 

At the process level, i.e. how the initiative operates, SdQ embraces the concept that the transition to sustainability must take place fairly, leaving no-one behind, thus producing value for the whole population and practising solidarity with less fortunate situations. Thus, the action has focussed on disadvantaged areas of the cities and on the systematic use of existing assets (neighbourhood, places and infrastructures) to conduct the activities.

At the result level, i.e. what the initiative produces, the SdQ trained the participants to a product-service system design approach to innovation, in which behaviour change, eco-design and business model innovation are combined to achieve sustainability.