An itinerant laboratory that designs solutions for the sustainable development of rural communities
Liminal Lab is a research laboratory spread across rural Italy that aims to transform small municipalities, their historical heritage, and underutilized infrastructure, into places of learning and research in order to develop strategic projects for the territories concerned. The initiative is a time of participatory brainstorming on the critical issues of small towns and the potentials through which they can be repositioned as active agents in the creation of tomorrow's culture.
National
Italy
Municipalities:
Sulmona, Abruzzo
Pettorano sul Gizio, Abruzzo
Roccaraso, Abruzzo
Castel di Sangro, Abruzzo
Castel del Giudice, Molise
Castel San Pietro Romano, Lazio
Rocca di Cave, Lazio
Capranica Prenestina, Lazio
Carsi, Liguria
Centuripe, Sicilia
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Liminal A.P.S. Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Ginevra Last name of representative: D'Agostino Gender: Female Nationality: Italy If relevant, please select your other nationality: Italy Function: President/Co-Founder Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via del Seminari 113 Town: Rome Postal code: 00186 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 333 771 8502 E-mail:ginevra.dagostino@liminalweb.com Website:https://liminalweb.com/
Approximately 70 percent of Italy's municipalities consists of small and medium-sized municipalities with fewer than 6,000 inhabitants which have been grappling with depopulation, disinvestment, degrading infrastructure, and mounting environmental stresses. As a result, their rich cultural, historical, and natural heritage has remained on the margins, neglected, and deteriorated over time.
Liminal Lab is changing this paradigm by implementing research laboratories across the Italian territory that leverage small municipalities’ historical and natural heritage to transform their underutilized infrastructure into places of learning and research. Liminal Lab’s Pilot project, Rebuilding the Edge, was the result of a collaboration between Liminal, Fondazione FS, MIT-Italy Program, Urban Risk Lab, Digital Structures, and several municipalities in the Valle Peligna. The initiative allowed MIT students to join the members of Liminal on the ground for three weeks in Abruzzo and Molise.
This first iteration focused on developing strategic visions for the territory around the Ferrovia dei Parchi, a rail line rehabilitated in the last decade by Fondazione FS. Students were invited to think about mobility challenges in the region, opportunities for ecotourism in natural reserves, adaptive reuse strategies for underpopulated towns, land use strategies to recover agricultural districts, and migrant integration models. Participants lived in the depopulated town of Pettorano sul Gizio and worked from the Roccaraso railway station, transformed into a co-working for the occasion.
Liminal Lab is now in the process of replication, with Labs planned in Lazio and Liguria for 2023.
By creating synergies with a broad range of stakeholders and employing a multi-disciplinary approach grounded on the spatial and material realities of these places, we are offering a unique contribution to the decision-making processes that are shaping the future of rural Italy.
*Enabling* moments of cultural exchange and social innovation through a participatory brainstorming between local communities and an international network of students and researchers.
*Transforming* inner and Southern rural areas of Italy into learning hubs that allow students and researchers to witness first-hand the criticalities and opportunities present on a specific territory thanks to an intensive dialogue with local stakeholders
*Restoring* protagonism and vitality to the natural and cultural heritage of small and medium size municipalities and the communities they are made up of.
*Experimenting* with strategic solutions and visions necessary to turn challenging situations into solid opportunities that can be implemented by local communities and governmental authorities.
*Incentivizing* an interdisciplinary network of young professionals and students to tackle the pressing infrastructural, social and climatic challenges brought by rural disinvestment and depopulation in Europe.
The consequences of the depopulation of rural areas in the European context are multiple and interconnected. Some of these include soil erosion, deterioration of infrastructure, weakened response to environmental changes, social disenfranchisement, loss of basic urban services, and more. Liminal Lab’s goal is to address this phenomenon through an intensive presence on the ground. Together with interested stakeholders, students and researchers develop territorial strategies focused on catalyzing a socio-economic transformation of these areas that is grounded on the stewardship of cultural and environmental resources.
Based on the results of the pilot, Liminal has developed a toolkit and methodology for future Labs, centered around the reuse of abandoned infrastructure, the management of natural resources, and model migrant integration models.
The objective of the methodology is to achieve the following:
1) Map occupancy and the structural integrity of real estate assets in towns to identify current abandonment patterns as well as possible measures that can contrast the phenomenon. For more info check out booklet 04 on https://liminalweb.com/liminal-lab-2022-results
2) Map existing sustainable farming and food initiatives, as well as routes and itineraries for territorial discovery, to envision proposals that incentivize long-term stay and sustainable tourism. For more info check out booklet 02
3) Envision strategies to integrate services essential for remote workers into towns to incentivize the stay of a nomadic workforce, decongest metropolitan areas and contribute to a circular economy that directly connects producers and consumers.For more info check out booklet 03
4) Identify local communities that are open to hosting reception centers and integration programs for refugees. Assist these in identifying and structuring the necessary social/physical infrastructure, and preparing them to become hosts. For more info check out booklet 06
The rural Italian landscape has historically been an expression of a way of life where a careful balance between the natural and the manmade is paramount. It is not just made up of forests and fields, but also an intricately woven network of historical cities and towns, each with a direct connection to its surrounding territory. In a moment of mounting social and environmental crises, there is a beauty in these places which becomes evident. This is not just related to its built environments, which are important pieces of cultural and artistic heritage, but also the traces of a way of life that gave rise to them.
Liminal Lab is a way of transforming these sites into places for learning and onsite exploration that can allow us to reimagine a future where a new, beautiful balance between ourselves and our environment can be crafted. Social interaction, contact with nature, creative processes and cultural exchange are crucial components of the Liminal Lab experience. This is why being on the ground is so important; because it is only by living as part of a small community in a rural historic center that students can truly understand the cultural, aesthetic, and environmental values that lay within rural territories.
During Liminal Lab, students rehearse first hand a beautiful future that they are imagining. Local stakeholders on the other hand inform this process of imaging, but also discover ways in which they can reinvigorate their communities with inputs, ideas and lived experiences that come from beyond. Student feedback we have received highlights the importance of cultural exchange and cross collaboration between different discipline groups and stakeholders, and how these trigger adrenaline, excitement and a sense of purpose that is critical to overcome many of the challenges ahead for rural communities.
Italy's inner and southern regions are amidst a major depopulation event with real social and spatial consequences. In Italy, 70% of small municipalities have less than 5,000 people; 17% of Italians live in those small municipalities with diminishing essential services and economic opportunities; and 73% of small municipalities continue to experience exodus, particularly of the younger generation. One of Liminal Lab's main objectives is to incentivize the transfer of human capital in terms of time, energy, and know-how to rethink the role marginalized areas of Italy can play in the future. Liminal Lab's action is twofold. On the one hand, it encourages professionals and a younger generation to invest in rural areas currently experiencing brain drainage and marginalization. On the other hand, Liminal Lab brings together people with different social, racial, and class backgrounds to work together toward solving a common problem of interest.
This initiative is a time of participatory brainstorming on the critical issues faced by rural areas and small municipalities, and experimentation with cross-functional solutions that have the potential to generate social and economic impact in disenfranchised communities. Liminal Lab in itself is an experiment of a new way of living in depopulated territories by redefining how international publics coexist with local stakeholders, and rethinking what it means to belong to small communities in the 21st century. The brainstorming that takes place between local communities and the international network of students and researchers, allows for the creation of moments of cultural exchange and social innovation that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.
The organization of a Liminal Lab means finding committed institutional partners, mapping and performing multiscalar research and, above all, the intensive involvement of local stakeholders in the process. Often, the diagnosis of the main criticalities of a given territory is achieved through research. However, many of the solutions are usually already envisioned by its citizens at a preliminary level. Before the students' onsite arrival, members of Liminal must carry out qualitative and quantitative surveys with local government, entrepreneurs, non-profits, civil protection services, exemplary citizens, and small business owners. This allows the team to understand where the main issues and opportunities lie, as well as a hypothesis about what the best way to tackle them might be. This allows for the creation of a well-structured program, designed around the real conditions of a given area.
The results of the work carried out in 2022 in the region of Abruzzo and Molise, are exemplary of the involvement of local communities in both the preliminary research and the three-week experience on the ground. Countless stakeholder engagements were the main reason for the project's success, as well as why local communities and national institutions were interested in participating. Students' engagement with the territory and its citizens allowed for a clear understanding of how to envision/design for the areas of interest, as well as how to identify which local beneficiaries would actually be able to carry forward the projects proposed. The involvement of citizens is a crucial part not only of the ideation of the project proposal but also of its later implementation. To learn more about the way local stakeholders have been involved we invite you to take a look at our publication on liminal lab 2022 results — liminal (liminalweb.com)
Liminal Lab brings together local communities, regional authorities, international universities, and national and international entities. Our 2022 initiative created synergies between the state-owned railway foundation–Fondazione Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane–the municipalities of Abruzzo and Molise, as well as students and professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
While preparing the workshop, Liminal repeatedly met with the Fondazione Ferrovie dello State staff and director to better understand the role of the railway in the area. At the governmental level, we gathered information from regional and local authorities to identify the criticalities present on the territory, but also funding opportunities and ongoing infrastructural initiatives.
During the workshop, students visited the Railway foundation archives; they met with high-level regional entities who walked them through the EU Recovery and Resiliency policies for the territory of interest; and they had a web conference with representatives from the European Commission’s Smart Villages project (ESVF).
Multi-level stakeholder engagement is an integral part of both the preparation of the initiative as its implementation on the ground. Students are asked to engage locally but maintain a global understanding of the problem at hand and identify the resources available at the national and European levels to address it. The premise of Liminal Lab is that tangible change is catalyzed by ambitious visions that are grounded on realistic constraints, that include national and international stakeholders, and enjoy broad community consensus.
Liminal Lab is an applied research program that brings together universities and local stakeholders to tackle intractable problems faced by communities through a multi-disciplinary approach. Students, researchers and professors from the fields of architecture, urbanism, landscape, computer science, finance, digital humanities and economics come together to address some of the most critical challenges that rural areas are faced with today.
Rebuilding the Edge was a program through which a multidisciplinary team of MIT students and faculty collaborated with Liminal on a vision for towns along a rehabilitated railway atop the Apennines. Students were divided into six multidisciplinary groups and worked together to develop proposals for the area. Students were given the opportunity to use a disused railway station as their own personal studio where they could brainstorm together and discuss their findings with the faculty. They also had direct contact with local community members and interested stakeholders. They had repeated visits to the sites they were analyzing and the community members they were working with.
The perspective and skills of students coming from varied disciplines, and the facilitated interaction with local stakeholders, allowed them to develop well rounded projects, such as:
1) Develop a territorial strategy for neighboring towns connected through a trail network that students mapped and geolocated on GIS, and identified its target user and their spending capacity.
2) Identify agricultural challenges in the Valle Peligna by mapping out the relative sizes and location of farms and their distribution patterns to develop a strategy that can potentiate small-scale agri-tourism based on poly-cultural regenerative practices.
3) Document existing connections between stations and towns in order to develop a kit of parts able to address the disconnection spectrum along the railway line.
High-level global academic research or policy-making, usually, is carried out from afar without a robust presence on the ground. This often leads to initiatives that lack the granularity needed to ensure success in the implementation phases. At the same time, activities carried out exclusively locally, at times, lack a broader perspective that enables them to be situated within a larger context. In recent years, the belief has been that a project is either top-down or bottom-up, often creating an either-or situation that hinders the resolution of a given problem.
Liminal Lab is a bridge that connects both approaches to generate measurable results that address a global problem locally. This allows us to develop projects able to tap into regional, national, and European resources needed to succeed. We achieve this by:
1) Incentivizing cross-collaboration between different sectors to envision an all-encompassing and well-rounded solution;
2) Investing in preliminary research that addresses the global, national, regional, territorial and urban scale;
3) Creating synergies between top-down and bottom-up stakeholders and entities;
4) Guiding students through the whole process and fieldwork while on site, which includes intensive engagement with multiple types of stakeholders
5) Developing project proposals that tap into regional national or European funding (EU Recovery and Resiliency Funds, for example) and are implemented by local individuals and/or municipalities.
Liminal believes that the synergistic approach that connects local, national and international institutions, our methodology of research, and the intensive presence of human capital on the ground allow us to build that much-needed bridge that can catalyze the social, environmental, and economic transition needed in rural areas of Italy.
Liminal is developing a toolkit based on both our onsite activities and the academic research we are conducting at the territorial, national, and European scales. Liminal Lab will already be replicated in other areas of Italy by its partners and new members. For example, based on the 2022 iteration, we handed out a Liminal Lab guide to young architects from Chile of Italian descent in order for them to carry out a Liminal Lab in their ancestor’s town in Liguria. Based on the guide and tools we provided them, they have been able to construct a precise project proposal for the territory of Valbrevenna.
The criticalities Liminal Lab is addressing are some of the most pressing challenges we are facing at a Global and European level. Although globally the issues brought forward by the depopulation of rural areas are shared, in the European context they are even more alike. Similar territorial, climactic, and cultural conditions make it so that Liminal lab is highly replicable in other countries of Europe.
We are creating an innovative methodology and toolkit that is precise enough to be implemented by other entities and individuals interested in pursuing Liminal’s mission in other countries. Liminal is receiving requests for collaboration not only in Italy but also in other European countries. Some of these entities have reached out to the organization through the New European Bauhaus network, since Liminal is one of its official partners. We strongly believe in knowledge transfer and it is our goal to equip a whole generation with the critical thinking and tools necessary to tackle the most pressing issues of the century.
Liminal operates through three mutually reinforcing lines of action that allow the organization to go from the development of scientific research to the generation of concrete, measurable impact for territories:
DATA: mapping and scholarly research that informs our advocacy at the policy levelLAB: fieldwork that allows Liminal and its collaborators to envision tangible solutions for a territory based on intense stakeholder engagement
ACT: implementation of strategies and catalytic services with measurable social, environmental or economic output for local communities-. (for more info visit www.liminalweb.com)
Liminal Lab is one of the most important initiatives the association is pushing forward as it is highly oriented towards the engagement of different communities and stakeholders on a given territory. The goal of the methodology is that any given member, independent of their skills or work experience, can follow the steps to organize both the initiative and the pedagogy of the workshop.
Liminal Lab is divided into three phases. The first phase is focused on identifying a town or territory of interest, conducting preliminary research, developing a project proposal and securing fundings as well as partners agreements. The second phase is centered on engaging with the local community to identify the areas students will focus on and develop a detailed set of outputs that will be generated while on site. This is organized around the three part nature of the workshop: document on site condition; analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data collected; develop proposals for a territorial strategy. The third phase involves the Liminal team developing structured projects based on the onsite activity that can be handed to local community members for their implementation.
These phases are a summarized depiction of a detailed “wikihow” we hand out to individuals interested in pursuing a Liminal Lab.
In Europe alone, 22% of the population is at risk of poverty and social exclusion, and 11% of agricultural land will be abandoned by 2030. Globally, the rural population is relocating to urban areas at an unprecedented speed, making it so that 60% of the global population will live in cities by 2030. The issues leading to the depopulation of rural areas are some of the main challenges of this century, such as: land abandonment, the migration crisis, degraded infrastructure, soil erosion, desertification, hydrological risk, higher intensity of climate events and social disenfranchisement. These issues are highly interconnected and, as such, require cross-collaboration between different fields to be effectively tackled.
At Liminal, we strive to create the best practices needed to address the criticalities and opportunities present in rural areas. Liminal Lab is a clear representation of the theory-practice model we seek to pursue. This initiative’s methodology of research, as well as its outputs, provides a framework on how to rethink areas affected by rural depopulation, as well as a clear articulation of what is the potential present in these areas. We firmly believe Liminal Lab is an important contribution to the efforts needed to address the challenges brought forward by global rural depopulation because it focuses directly on how to come up with tangible proposals.
The scalability of the initiative is one of the main strengths we found Liminal Lab brings to the table. We are committed to making our guidelines, tools, and methods everyday more accessible to members from different countries.
The 2022 initiative Rebuilding the Edge is Liminal Lab’s pilot project that enabled us to show tangible results on the ground that are now on the way to getting implemented by local communities.
Some of the results we have achieved through this initiative are:
1) Construction of synergies between Liminal and diverse stakeholders such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fondazione FS, and the municipalities along the Ferrovia dei Parchi;
2) Pop-up transformation and outfitting of the unused Roccaraso station into a co-working space;
3)Transformation of Pettorano sul Gizio’s disused Baroque palace into a co-living, now in the process of undergoing a permanent renovation;
4) 3D digitization of the railways stations, geolocalized mapping of trails and unmapped streets;
5) Documentary on the research workshop (https://youtu.be/XBp1-_YFHuk);
6) Final proposal, in the process of implementation, for a territorial identity and service design project in the Valle Peligna;
7) Design of a traveling exhibition that will first open at MIT’s Architecture headquarters in February 2023;
8) Promotion of the workshop in national and international publications such as:
a. Fast Company - How MIT students are helping revitalize a tiny Italian village
b. Il Salone del Mobile - Il progetto di MIT, Liminal e Fondazione Ferrovie dello Stato che ripensa i territori italiani
c. National TV broadcast news TG5 (https://youtu.be/tjjtkQNDsgY)
Liminal has already fundraised for the next iteration of Liminal Lab atop the Prenestini Mountains, in the region of Lazio, and is currently working towards finalizing two other initiatives in Liguria and Lazio. However, our objective is to organize multi-year Liminal Lab funding packages with committed partners and institutions. The funding Liminal would receive from the NEB prize would be a significant opportunity and contribution to Liminal’s ability to create multi-year and well-structured Liminal Labs.
The majority of Italian human capital is concentrated in metropolitan areas and oriented towards favoring the economic growth of cities and companies. At Liminal, we are creating incentive systems to engage a young generation of professionals in solving problems related to the socio-economic and sustainable development of inner and southern rural areas.
Local communities and students brainstorm together to ideate sustainable practices for land and territorial management that can be compatible with the creation of new economic opportunities for the areas at hand.
One of the main objectives of Liminal Lab is to teach students how to map and document conditions on the ground in order to analyze qualitative and quantitative data and come up with innovative solutions. We equip them with the technical and digital tools and knowhow that Liminal has developed, to tackle the intractable challenges present on the sites they are engaging with.
Volunteers and students often become part of the Liminal network and contribute to the advancement of Liminal’s mission. We believe that we are making an important contribution to the creation of a sense of belonging for marginalized areas, as well as the development of new knowledge and data that is not kept in isolation, but is rather made accessible to all.
