Precollinear Park — A placemaking experience in Turin
Precollinear Park: a Turin-based placemaking project transforming a former tramway bed into an urban linear park ー a new community hub as a response to Covid-19. The project was born out of participatory planning and generated a community of over 120 volunteers that develop and upkeep the reconquered public space. Furnished with reused co-designed materials, it has become a focal point for the local community, hosting gatherings, cultural events and even lessons partnering with nearby schools.
National
Italy
Piedmont, Turin
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-12-18
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Associazione Torino Stratosferica Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Luca Last name of representative: Ballarini Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: Founder & Creative Director Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Giuseppe Regaldi 7 int. 12/a Town: Torino Postal code: 10154 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 011 247 8137 E-mail:info@torinostratosferica.it Website:https://torinostratosferica.it/en/
URL:https://www.instagram.com/torinostratosferica/ Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): @torinostratosferica / hashtags: #placemaking #urbanecology #citiesarementalweapons #torinostratosferica #citymaking #citiyimaging #urbanism #urbanplanningdesign
Precollinear Park is an urban linear park in Turin, Italy. Stretching for over 800-metres, the park is structured on a disregarded portion of the city, divided in two by an old and unused tramline. This new green public space, by opening up the enclosures set up for the previous infrastructure, unites four bordering districts generating both a common public area and a swifter crossing route. The project was initiated by the local non-profit organisation Stratosferica and supported through a crowdfunding campaign, open calls and private donations. The Park was inaugurated in June 2020, as a strong response to a general post-lockdown need for public space and the association’s desire to act on the city in a meaningful and positive way.. An over 100-member strong volunteer team was established later that year which was key to the many transformations implemented since and still is today, meeting every Saturday morning to upkeep and enhance the project. the Park, originally stretching just on Gabetti avenue, extended on Regina Margherita bridge creating a new landmark area with a great view on the river and the surrounding hills. Working with the volunteers, Stratosferica was able to gradually add: the iconic container-info point, the open air exhibition area, the gravel walkway, the bookcrossing, the enclosed dog area, and numerous new flowerbeds and pieces of urban furniture. A rich cultural event programme, which spans over 2020, 2021 and 2022, gave new life to this urban area contributing to the creation of a new community strongly linked to the space. In March 2022, thanks to the partnership with Cities4Forests —an international organisation that connects cities with forests all around the world— Stratosferica created a new open air study hall & polyfunctional space through a self-construction workshop with students, families and many supporters. Nowadays Precollinear Park is not just a new public space, but a landmark for an engaged and vast community.
Community making
Placemaking
Civic Engagement
Adaptive Reuse
Urban Ecology
The pandemic highlighted the importance of green spaces for cities: open, equipped and safe. Places where nature offers new possibilities for different kinds of social and physical activities. Precollinear Park was created with this specific purpose: to provide the adjacent neighbourhoods with public space where greenery becomes the central element of urban design. From the environmental perspective, the “green corridor” envisioned and implemented by Stratosferica is today a fundamental resource to reduce the negative impact of the intense car traffic and air pollution affecting this area of Turin.
Thanks to the supervision of an expert in urban botany, the space has gradually been enriched with new green elements: flowers and plants started to populate the park, thus not only increasing the variety of plant life but radically transforming the general perception of the place. With the new planting activities —especially during the summer— the park became a cool and sheltered place, effective also for mitigating the heat island effect. The varieties of plants and flowers were chosen with purpose: in fact, due to the peculiarity of the context, we selected strong and resilient species that contribute both to the aesthetic and the biodiversity value of the space. We also reserved a special attention to the creation of urban furniture. Thanks to the previously described partnership with Cities4Forests, many of the park's tables and seats were built using timber from a sustainable supply chain that respects forest’s ecosystems and supports local communities. Our efforts to face the environmental challenges go along with the involvement of people and local communities. Through activities based on civic engagement and many free cultural events, Stratosferica has promoted its own vision of urban regeneration: an integrated strategy that encourages dialogue and exchange between cultures, disciplines and generations.
At Stratosferica, we believe that the concepts of beauty and urban functionality must be promoted and shared. That’s how we can accelerate the change and increase the livability of our cities. One of the main assumptions of our project: a beautiful and well-kept place stimulates people's involvement. Precollinear Park is an intervention countering urban decay, a new meaning to an abandoned space with a great hidden potential. In order to do this, we chose a design approach that —in addition to being thoughtful, sustainable, and with a low economic impact— takes into great consideration the people who live in the area.
Over the past two years and a half, the improvements have responded to different widespread needs and desires: the dog area, the new study hall, the bookcrossing, the lights, the furniture, and the water connections. Each one has been designed to offer new opportunities, making the users’ everyday life more pleasant and comfortable. These simple but significant services have generated an impact also from a socio-economic point of view, stimulating the opening of new commercial activities nearby. The strength of this project, and what makes it stand out, is of course the community engagement. Through campaigns and calls-to-action Stratosferica involved whoever had the desire to participate. During this placemaking experience, friendships and bonds were born, providing an opportunity for socialisation also during the difficult Italian Covid restrictions. This has led to the birth of a strong sense of community: volunteers and supporters are fully aware that they are the main activators of a collaborative transformation process.
The concepts of inclusiveness and participation are essential elements for the project. A well-done placemaking intervention must start with the involvement of a wide community: residents, vulnerable people and those who express the sincere desire to care for a part of the city. Since the beginning, in 2020, Stratosferica has paid great attention to civic engagement activities, developing different programmes for a large range of local stakeholders: schools, associations, neighborhood committees, and citizens have been involved and motivated to play an active role in defining the space and the cultural contents. From this point of view, the space's management strategy embraces a “communitarian” dimension, confirmed by the solid group of volunteers active on the project. The team of volunteers also represents the specific needs of many different social categories: in fact, the group welcomes people from 18 to 70 years old, involving students, workers, retirees and families. One of Stratosferica's main priorities is to provide free access to all activities —especially those of cultural nature— allowing a wide range of public to participate in the initiatives. As regards to the aspects related to design and urban furniture, Stratosferica realised —as far as possible— suitable solutions for people with physical disabilities and disabilities, allowing them to participate in some simple gardening and green maintenance activities led by local experts. As evidence of the strongly inclusivity-oriented approach, we would also like to mention that the Precollinear Park community has spontaneously welcomed some members of the homeless community, who decided to join the group and take part in the weekly maintenance activities.
Precollinear Park is also a space that welcomes a large number of foreign students, offering a great opportunity for socialisation and integration for those young students and workers who are still poorly integrated within the city’s social context.
Precollinear Park is a multifunctional space that blends civic engagement strategies in order to maintain and upkeep a new public green space while promoting cultural and social activities. The project was immediately conceived as a collective process with the involvement of different stakeholders, from the public and private sector and from the civil society. Citizen’s involvement —which continues to be one of the main assets of the project— concerns different areas: the space’s co-design through workshops and public events, neighbourhood meetings to discuss needs and opportunities and specific focuses on the co-creation of the cultural programme. The impact of the project can be evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively. Since the creation of Precollinear Park, the area has increased its daily footfall from a few people to an average of 500 footsteps per day, fostering the opening of local shops and restaurants (from 5 to 11 in just over two years). In terms of infrastructure, Stratosferica’s intervention brought:
5 new water points and 500 metres of irrigation systems
16 new trash bins
240 new public light bulbs
3 new electricity points
40 wooden benches
30 chairs
6 tables
45 flower pots
1 arena for performances and concerts
In general, Stratosferica's intervention has profoundly changed the perception of a place that had been abandoned for a long time, increasing the sense of safety —especially during the night time— and contrasting the phenomena of urban decay. One of the main tools to achieve this goal is a large investment in greenery: in fact, Stratosferica has significantly increased the presence of green elements by planting flower beds and placing numerous pots with different species of flowers and plants which are suitable for the urban environment. Thanks to this effort, the Park became a space in which the natural element helps to absorb the intense anthropic activity of the surrounding areas — mainly related to vehicular traffic.
Precollinear Park gathered a solid group of partners and stakeholders who have contributed significantly to the evolution of the project. On a local scale Stratosferica started a very productive dialogue with the institutions, in particular with the City Council and its many departments, also involving the “circoscrizioni” — the governing authorities acting at an hyper-local level.The collaboration with the administration, which among other aspects provided the necessary legal instrument to start the intervention, is a central element in this project, because it enables the design of solutions consistent with the envisioned general urban development plans. The community’s commitment is also demonstrated by the fact that many local companies have voluntarily taken part in the project, providing materials and services for the infrastructural implementation of the park. From a national perspective, in 2021 Precollinear Park won the Turin edition of Segnali d’Italia, a national competition funded by Edison and IGPDecaux aiming to support urban innovation projects and the sustainable development of cities. Stratosferica used the grant to increase the park's accessibility and the safety perception of the space. The project's impact has also been significant at the international level, gaining a general appreciation and creating new partnerships with important third sector entities. In 2022 Stratosferica signed an agreement with Cities4Forests, an international organisation that works to integrate tropical forests into cities, promoting the use of timber from sustainable supply chains that respect ecosystems and local communities. Thanks to this collaboration, Stratosferica was able to create an open-air study area and to build many other units of urban furniture ー while promoting a positive message of urban and global ecology. In 2022 Precollinear Park was also among the 52 finalists at the New European Bauhaus Prize, thus entering a vast community of best practices.
The Precollinear Park experiment started with a question: is it possible to improve a part of the city with great potential by designing affordable and low-impact interventions? This question produces a challenge: to imagine solutions that are effective, durable, and coherent with the context. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, Stratosferica immediately involved a number of experts engaged in different fields: professionals whose experience contributed to the growth of a project designed to embrace the complexity expressed by an urban space. Botany, architecture, design, communication, education: these are the areas of our project but also the subjects that we constantly refer to when we talk about urban innovation. A specialist in the field of urban botany is in charge of green care, new plantings and botanical experiments in order to foster the biodiversity of the place. Since the beginning of the project, the “Urban Botanist” has led the group of volunteers (over 120 people) in the maintenance and implementation of the park, becoming a central figure in the management of this new public space. Architecture and design also play a crucial role: urban furniture and layouts of the space were designed by professionals who also managed the co-design process by following the Design Unit’s activities — a team of young university students supporting the design activities. Precollinear Park is also conceived as a space for communication and storytelling. Any urban transformation should be explained widely and clearly in order to engage communities in the paths of change that are never just infrastructural. For this reason, several communication designers, editors, copywriters and educators contributed to produce an inspiring narrative of the whole project through exhibitions, information boards but also through meetings and activities with schools and neighbourhood committees.
The experience of the Park can be viewed through different lenses: social, cultural, environmental and economic. The intervention’s most evident results are the renovation of a previously neglected area and the strengthening of the community living around it. These concrete changes brought significant outcomes and impacts on the city. The Parks’ community, composed by a multicultural & intergenerational group of residents, national & international students, business owners and other stakeholders not only uses the space for different social purposes (lunches, meetings, open-air lessons, fitness, etc.), but also feels responsible for its maintenance and sustainability. Local cultural and artistic groups are a strong part of this community who animated the Park with dozens of cultural events (open-air cinema, talks & panels, exhibitions, concerts, book presentations). The experience of the Design Unit made the Park a learning opportunity for many students (see below). This intimate union of social and sustainability practices, connected with the upkeep of green spaces, is a unique characteristic of our project. In line with NEB values, the two must go together. With the maintenance of the regenerated green areas came the creation of new gathering spaces, new urban furniture made by recycled materials, planting of greenery and flowers to increase biodiversity and installation of new garbage collectors, as well as many activities on the themes of nature and environment. We can also mention the economic impact of the initiative: the businesses around the area benefitted from the urban regeneration process and many local private companies decided to invest in the initiative financially or in kind. The project resulted as a successful example of sustainable placemaking, being powered mainly by auto-generated resources. The space now known with the name of Precollinear Park conveys a clear message of sustainability, belonging and creativity.
The innovative features of the Park are mainly related to the bottom-up process of the initiative:
1. The conceptualisation of the project, developed through an original participatory approach based on a series of focus groups called Visioning Sessions, in which the area and the future vision for it have been identified. Citizens, elders, youths & local creatives also identified criticalities and potential of the place. This collaborative process ignited the start of the physical project.
2. The community has been involved also during the operative phase through self-building workshops with citizens, a group of volunteers, students from all ages, local craft and universities. This process led to the creation of a specific Design Unit, dedicated to the collective design and construction of different furniture of the Park.
3. The reclaiming of an abandoned infrastructure to transform it into a beautiful common space focusing on ecology and accessible culture through the intervention of an intermediary actor, a non-profit organisation, who had the role to gather a community and to facilitate the communications between the City and the community. This exemplifies an innovative approach to the use of neglected public space for Turin: the possibility for an association to upkeep a public area with the support of the citizens, without the direct intervention of the public actor.
4. The economic sustainability of the project developed through Stratosferica’s ability to create an inclusive network of local, national and international partners which led to effective resourcing strategies towards public, private and civil society sponsorships. We can mention, as an example, the collaboration established with Cities4Forests, an international network that provides sustainable forestry products to cities. Many others felt touched by the project and supported it according to their possibilities, not only financially, but also with tools, expertise, instruments.
Precollinear Park experimented with new methods of community making, stimulating the care of public space. The Visioning sessions are focus groups with the citizens and the creative community in which the imaginative effort is led towards a more concrete project for specific areas of the city. Visioning sessions start from the vision of the final product, the objective, and they develop from there a strategy to reach this vision. This methodology allows to establish an intimate connection between the place and the community: people are involved since the identification of the project’s idea, they are the authors of it, and they are therefore more than willing to participate in the more operative phases, such as the cleaning, maintenance and building of the Park, supported by local experts. The place becomes their place. This implies a collective approach that involves all relevant actors: apart from the citizens, other local associations, non-profits, businesses and the municipality. The numerous cultural events promoted by Stratoferica have been often co-produced with other associations, creating a new network among creatives and keeping the space open to other associations — in coherence with its public nature. The support of the municipality, crucial to the legal implementation of the project. Finally, local businesses have been involved too, important stakeholders for the local fabric around the Park. Stratosferica managed to find a common ground between all these players: the shared necessity to make the city more liveable, citizen-friendly and green. This approach created a large consensus around the project, assuring its sustainability. This approach works thanks to a certain level of flexibility and the capacity to adapt to new needs, actors and priorities: this elasticity is an implicit characteristic of a living project, especially as the “spirit of places” evolves with the communities animating it.
Before Stratosferica’s intervention, the area where Precollinear Park stands today had similar features to many contemporary urban areas: abandoned and underused places resulting from the disposal of infrastructure, buildings and production hubs. In this case it was a former tramline, but similar examples in different contexts can be found in cities around the world. The result achieved with Precollinear Park can be replicated because it is based on a versatile method that can adapt to different conditions. This approach is based on two main principles. We strongly believe that urban greenery —in its various forms— is the primary asset to improve wellness in public spaces. Urban ecology activities and greening actions implemented in the Precollinear Park —from the simplest one to the most complex— had an immediate effect in the perception of this place. We are confident that these urban and landscape design actions can be easily replicated (at low cost) in many other urban settings. The role of community is crucial as well. The great challenge of a placemaking project lies in rebuilding the social fabric of a place even before intervening on its physical form. That’s what “regaining a sense of belonging” means to us: leveraging the existing potential to build an appealing narrative able to engage and call to action. In order to reach this goal, Stratosferica —in its 9 years of activity— has developed a method called city imaging. It is an innovative approach that through the involvement of cultural and creative organisations manages to imagine solutions and new uses for neglected areas of cities. The method — already applied in other local and national contexts— stems from the idea that the creation of an engaging narrative is the first, fundamental step to engage residents and citizens.
Precollinear Park tackles, at its own scale, an urgent global challenge, that is to design and manage a more sustainable, resilient and climate-friendly city. To do this, we focused on building a new sense of belonging between the spaces and the communities. In this, nature and green spaces played an important role. We can consider the Precollinear Park as an experiment of contemporary urban ecology. The effects produced locally follow in the steps of global goals, inspired by the SDGs. Among the small-scale actions we promoted to this aim we can mention:
— The co-development of a renovated sense of citizenship, in which each of us is called to participate in the collective care of the public space, and when necessary, lobbying the relevant stakeholders and pushing them to meet the communities’ necessities, especially the youth, who is now reclaiming a more bold action against climate change.
— The improvement of this green space inside the city, through new plants and flowers and its collective upkeep.
— Awareness-raising and sensitization actions that involve different targets, from schools to university students, promoting a more sustainable way of living the city.
— The adaptive reuse of the existing infrastructure for a sustainable urban regeneration through the rejuvenation of the place and the choice to readapt the space rather than completely transform it.
— The choice of using reclaimed materials and the involvement of the local community for the development of the project – such as the local crafts or the volunteers during the self-building phases – as an attempt to reduce the carbon footprint of the project, activate circular micro-economies and ignite new solidarity networks.
