Hybrid Organisations and Activist Planning. A SROI analysis observing RIO's change theory in Plymouth (UK)

The crisis of planning and the 2008 economic crisis could be considered as parallel phenomena, which affect but do not depend on each other. The lecture presents two resisting shapes of these phenomena: "activism planning" that resists neoliberal policies and emerges as an alternative to top-down approaches, and "social enterprise" as new form of value production, which seems directed towards a hybrid model where the social dimension is overlapped with economic. By analysing the relations between activist planning and social enterprise, the research seeks to understand how top-down and bottom-up approaches could be combined. The case of a cultural social enterprise in UK, the Real Ideas Organisation (RIO) engaged in the regeneration process of Devonport (Plymouth), has been explored in order to reflect on the social impact that social enterprises are producing in terms of circular process and synergy between existent social and cultural resources. The methodology combined the case study approach with the Social Return On Investment (SROI) method, which permits to explore and then co-evaluate the socio-economic context of the social enterprise also by including entrepreneurs, operators, institutions, voluntaries and people.