For some years, the School of Architecture, Urban Planning and Construction Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano has offered students, enrolled in the various Bachelor's and Master's Degree courses, the opportunity to follow design workshops, independent of institutional classes, with the primary aim of promoting the full achievement of educational objectives by each student. These educational experiences, approved by the School Board and with recognition of university credits, are designed and directly proposed by internal professors, for whom they also represent stimulating opportunities for comparison, field verification, and development of some content of their research activity.

This contribution aims to disseminate some of the results of the didactic and research project that the authors have shared in recent years on the themes of urban regeneration, with specific reference to the three editions (2023, 2024, 2025 in the start-up phase) of the Workshop “Memory, the Enchanted City” which has included design activities on the field in Sicily (Italy) in the territory of Agrigento, Capital of Culture 2025, with the involvement of the public administration, local institutions and citizens. In this project, in particular, it was chosen that research and education would find in the Workshops a concrete opportunity to explore ways of reactivating collective urban spaces, inside buildings or outdoors, in conditions of environmental or social fragility, through the design and participatory implementation of small, specific interventions.

This choice is coherent, on the one hand, with what the so-called “third mission” of the university entails, therefore the dialogue with civil society, and, on the other, with the specificity of the department to which the authors belong (Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of Politecnico di Milano), involved by the Ministry of University and Research in the initiative “Departments of Excellence for studies and research applied to the theme of territorial fragility”. Among the drivers of the synergy between researchers, teachers, and students, one of the thoughts of the architect Giancarlo De Carlo has proven effective and current, even if expressed more than twenty years ago: "A place is an inhabited space. Without space, there can be no place, but space in itself is not enough to make a place because space becomes a place if and when it is experienced, used, consumed, and perpetually transformed by human life". This is the framework of meaning of creative micro-actions in collective urban spaces, supported by research and then designed and co-created with students and local communities during the Workshops: they can trigger transformation processes that make these spaces immediately usable, they can stimulate those who inhabit them toward a process of knowledge, identification, desire for re-appropriation and care and they can suggest new uses and further developments.

The paper clarifies some theoretical assumptions of these experiences of intertwining research and education, defines their objectives and methodology, and reports the most significant results; in the conclusions, it tries, finally, to summarize the exemplary characteristics of the actions, investigated and experimentally proposed by the research and replicable in good practices of urban regeneration of fragile fragments in contemporary cities.

Keywords: Urban activation micro-actions, participatory actions, public open spaces, urban regeneration, territorial fragility.