Four universities and an urban living lab. Problematising community engagement in a public housing neighbourhood in Milan

Public and community engagement (Terza Missione in Italian) encompasses the various ways in which higher education institutions interact with and contribute to their surrounding communities. This engagement operates within a complex and often ambiguous landscape, shaped by both top-down institutional imperatives that seek to standardise and measure territorial activities and bottom-up practices that resist such categorisation. However, public and community engagement also creates an intermediate space for negotiation – one that enables a critical perspective capable of addressing social issues that frequently remain inadequately addressed by institutional frameworks. Our contribution describes a process of collective reflection that spanned over a year (from December 2023 to February 2025), undertaken by four research groups from four Milanese universities currently involved in the ‘Off Campus San Siro’ urban living lab. The main result of this process is a Manifesto that describes our detailed idea of academic work in marginalised contexts, and tries to problematise, both epistemologically and methodologically, some elements traditionally linked to an extractivist and objectifying approach to teaching and research.