Alimentiamo aims to create a gathering space in order to break down cultural barriers among the inhabitants of Turin. Food becomes a universal communication tool capable of generating new jobs for the inhabitants of the large Porta Palazzo market area. The market will have a new face and new functions: redeveloped and better looking during the day, inclusive and functional in the evening, where unsold food will find new life in ethnic dishes.
Local
Italy
Torino
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
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In the day Porta Palazzo, an intermediate zone between the developed historical center of Turin and sectors affected by urban decay, is an open-air market, visited every year by more than 100.000 people and 20% of them are foreigners. It is a crucial meeting point between citizens, merchants, producers, food, and space. However, when the market day ends and night falls, it becomes a decadent place, where there is a high waste of food, and a desert environment conducive to low security. Our "Alimentiamo" project consists of a system that allows a transformation and transition of the space, that guarantees the functions of the market during the day, thus allowing new dynamics of that same space in the evening, focused on cultural exchange, and awareness, using food as the axis of integration and social and economic transformation. Knowing that a large volume of food waste is generated every day (in good conditions), we propose, a series of services, starting with the live cooking of ethnic dishes (to include different ethnic and local groups) that uses the unsold food and provides job opportunities for the community. On the other hand, it allows the development of workshops to sensitize and educate the community on food and sustainability issues. Specifically, "Alimentiamo" is a product/service system for redevelopment made up of multifunctional structures, characterized in the first place by a main nucleus for the collection, transformation, and sale of food for the live kitchen service. Secondly, we redesigned permanent stalls to add aesthetic and functional value, allowing the performance of the exhibition, organization, and sale of food. When their use ends, they become art galleries, since today the stalls have deteriorated, they limit the distribution and do not allow new uses of the space. Finally, we also propose a series of chairs-benches located around the main nucleus for social exchange and use of the service.
Urban transformation
Multifunctional spaces
Cultural aggregation
Food waste
Food Market system
Every day tons of food are wasted on food banks, ending up in landfills, because they are unsold or because they are no longer aesthetically pleasing despite still having optimal organoleptic properties. This leads to negative impacts from the perspective of environmental, social and and economic sustainability.
Wasting food means not only wasting good and edible food, but also wasting the resources used to produce it, such as energy, water resources, labor, land, and fuels, which contribute to exponentially increasing impacts on the environment.
The project, in line with the ONU's 2030 agenda, aims to curb food waste as much as possible by acting locally, in this case from the largest market in the city of Turin, Porta Palazzo.
The goal is to start from the roots of the problem, seeking to prevent and positively impact it with education on a more sustainable food ethic. Workshops, organized food-themed debates and especially the declared recovery of unsold food for the creation of ethnic streetfood, highlighting the multiculturality of the neighborhood, will help curb food waste, where citizens will learn by touching the problem firsthand.
The project also, following the principles of the Circular Economy, commits to designing and building the new modules of the fruit and vegetable stalls, thanks to the recovery of materials from the old disused stalls and from the wood of the hundreds of crates dispersed daily within the market.
Every day 100.000 people enliven the Porta Palazzo market, including street vendors, traders, citizens of all ethnicities and curious onlookers. The market is painted with a thousand colors, citrus scents and spicy flavors. It becomes a center of commercial, cultural and ethnic exchange. The daytime warmth, fervor and security, however, fade away in the evening, leaving room for darkness, decay and desolation, encouraging criminal acts and undisturbed drug dealing.
All that remains of the stalls are the bones, now old and rusty, and the rest of the square becomes a huge open-air illegal parking lot.
The appearance and beauty of this immense market, in the night hours bring out the insecurities and fears of those who live in these places or find themselves passing through. And it is precisely from here that our project starts, from the hour when the sun begins to set on the square, setting the goal of bringing beauty, safety and illuminating it with the same light present during daylight hours.
The intervention aims to create aesthetic value by upgrading the stalls, replacing them with new ones, in order to achieve an overall urban regeneration. In the evening, the square comes alive with events and street food, attracting a diverse audience from both the suburbs and the city center, becoming the new multicultural and sustainable beating heart by breaking through a wall of prejudice and skepticism.
The stalls once emptied of fruit and vegetable boxes by traders during the daily fruit and vegetable market close and take on new life by becoming the canvas of local and non-local artists. These are called upon to represent the theme of food and sustainability with their own style directly on the stall in order to generate an open-air art gallery that can be visited totally freely when the market ends. Art and design become a means of spreading the values and principles of sustainability and generate beauty.
The area in which the project is thought to be developed, is a strategic point in the city, which serves as a gateway between the city's historic and more affluent center to Turin's first suburbs. It is a rich and lively area where life, during the day, never stops and manifests itself in a thousand different characters. This particularity comes from the very large multicultural presence, about 20% of the area's residents. Often this aspect is not valued, rather it becomes a victim of prejudice and discrimination without reflecting on the enormous resource it possesses for the entire citizenry.
The goal of the project is to break down this gate and open the doors of multiculturalism to the city of Turin, aiming to increasingly include foreign communities in everyday life by generating inclusiveness and a sense of belonging.
Social inclusion through the coming together of different cultures requires mediation of no small amount. The identification of this cultural mediator falls on food. Bringing people together around the table is a perfect theme for mediation.
Especially for those who are immigrants, food is a way to keep their traditions alive outside their country of origin. Having the opportunity to access the ingredients, flavors, textures, and gestures that a culinary culture brings is an extremely popular way to not feel completely lost in the host country. At the same time these foreign values and traditions are transmitted and shared with the citizens of Turin, who will be delighted with flavors and scents from around the world.
The project starts from the bottom, making citizens and users from different backgrounds the protagonists in a participatory co-design process. Alimentiamo aims to involve citizens in all its design phases: concept with questionnaires and interviews in order to understand needs, requirements and get down inside the different realities, realization and construction of the project with the support of associations and cooperatives on the territory, that will contribute in the creation of new job opportunities for citizens belonging to more difficult socio-economic contexts, and finally the delivery of services managed by the inhabitants in order to transmit their multi-ethnic culinary traditions to the whole citizenship of Turin.
Co-Design's main purpose is to create a very strong sense of belonging and bonding between citizens and the project that will be grafted into their territory, so as to incite them to preserve and care for the project from any external factors, especially vandalism.
The project thus becomes a mouthpiece for the citizens of the neighborhood and opens up to the city of Turin, including the foreign community in its activities and at the same time encouraging them to visit the square even when it ends its main function.
Our project relates with numerous stakeholders, among which we find the ethnic restaurants in the neighborhood, and more generally in the city, which provide as a contribution the processing of the raw material and sale of the derived product and, as a secondary service, carry out themed live cooking in rotation in order to raise awareness on the issue of sustainability and inclusion of foreign communities.
From the financial point of view, the municipality of Turin can be mentioned as the main stakeholder, which, through funds, would finance the project in the embryonic phase in order to redevelop an urban area, Porta Palazzo, which to date is underutilized, unsafe and lacking in attractiveness for citizens in the evening phase.
As for the construction of the central module and related stalls with wood salvaged from old structures, the project would rely on Rilegno, a local company specializing in the rehabilitation of wooden structures.
In order to find the labor force to provide ancillary services, such as table service or cleaning the sites, the project would rely on young people from volunteer associations. They would also work with the restaurateurs to create educational workshops aimed at children to educate them about the circular economy.
In addition, reconnecting with the "beauty" theme, local artists would be given the opportunity to decorate the spaces by displaying their works on the showcases placed on top of the module, which, at the end of the working day, would become exhibition spaces.
To ensure the most comprehensive project possible, during the development of the concept, we considered disciplines like sociology, systemic design, circular economy, and project management, always ensuring Co-design. We started with an ethnographic observation, which allowed us to visualize and analyze the daily life and social practices existing in Porta Palazzo, to understand the needs, challenges, and problems that coexist. We visualized an important cultural fabric, made up of multiple ethnic groups, diverse economic situations, and also the transformation and diverse use of the territory depending on the time of day. From there we laid the foundations for further development with the methodology of systemic design, in which we captured a systemic and holistic understanding, and we realized that the current system that develops around the P.Palazzo market is linear, in other words, food is produced, transported, then marketed, and sold, while the unsold is discarded in perfect condition in the bins, or on the ground. Therefore, our Alimentiamo system dares to turn this system into a circularity in which those wasted food and raw materials from the stalls, give life to an integral and systemic product/service. The latter was linked to the discipline of the circular economy because although there is economic sustainability in the market, it leaves a high balance in terms of food waste when it is not sold after a while. Therefore, we took into account the management/use of waste from the circular economy, and for the development of Alimentiamo we specifically used the reuse of food (fruits, vegetables, among others) and recycling of raw materials from the stalls to produce the new multifunctional stalls. Also, more than benefits from an environmental point of view, it favors socio-economic sustainability, offering ethnic foods at low prices while generating income and work for those who participate in the service.
To highlight the innovative aspects of the project, we wanted to compare ourselves with two realities from this area, which operate in similar areas.
The first is the "Mercato Centrale di Torino," located in Piazza della Repubblica, whose main problem was the lack of involvement of the local community both in the design phase and in the operational activity. This resulted in a feeling of a redevelopment imposed from above and not really apreciated by the neighborhood.
In addition, the products offered within the structure are, on average, priced high compared to the possibilities of most market-goers, excluding them more. Our project, on the contrary, wants to include local people in an active way, both in the development and in the actual main activity.
Another similar but different reality is the "Circular Bank," a stand located inside the central market that deals with, cooking and distributing to the needy, part of the vegetables recovered by the "Repopp" project from the "Porta Palazzo" market.
In this case, the main differences lie in the time of service and the ultimate purpose.
The work would take place in the evening time slot, trying to help make the Porta Palazzo market area safer.
Talking about the purpose instead, its like "Repopp" seeks to decrease food waste and bring the various local communities together, but it also seeks to raise awareness of circular economy issues among the younger generation with its workshops.
Food markets are a reality that is not only evident in Porta Palazzo but is replicated in different parts of the city, nation, and worldwide. They are an essential meeting point between territory, community, and food, where many dynamics are born, such as social activities, socialization of recipes, customs, and above all, the opportunity to interact with new people from different religious and cultural backgrounds, always under the same central theme: food.
Broadly speaking, the "Alimentiamo" project aims to promote and raise awareness of the linear dynamics of markets today, towards circularity, urban transformation, and economic, social, and environmental sustainability. It is becoming recurrent in different parts of the world, the need to make the most of the spaces, and the phenomena of how multi-functional spaces are increasingly seen and acclaimed by the population. Market areas can be so much more than just market areas, and can be the opening for proposals such as Alimentiamo. That is why our Alimentiamo project can be replicated in different realities, contexts, and territories. Going into detail, depending on the scale of the market, the product/physical part of Alimentiamo can be reduced, i.e., you can have the main core for cooking and collecting, and reduce the number of benches and stalls, or even leave only the main module and the benches. In addition, the services provided, live cooking and workshop, will not only empower and offer job opportunities to the community, but can certainly be adapted to the different gastronomic heritages of the territory, and also to the food collected in the market days. What makes "Alimentiamo" unique is the fact that each time the service is provided, it will always be different due to its adaptive and flexible character.
The project was designed and developed based on the principles of sustainability, taking into consideration the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs. It aims to "Ensure healthy living and promote well-being for all at all ages" (Goal 3) through the dissemination of issues such as healthy eating and distribution of high-quality products. It also wants to "Promote quality, inclusive and equal education and ensure lifelong learning opportunities for all" (Goal 4) through "doing to learn" that brings the neighborhood community together and makes inclusive an issue that unites all cultures of the world. New jobs are created by directly engaging the neediest in the neighborhood while also bringing economic value (Goal 8). It also commits to "Make the city and urban settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable" (Goal 11) but more specifically the Porta Palazzo neighborhood of Turin through redevelopment work. Finally, the project wants to "Ensure sustainable patterns of production and consumption" (Goal 12) through specific services that aim to avoid all kinds of waste, especially from a food perspective.
