CREATIVE LIVING PLACES. Orizzonti di rinascita tra arte e partecipazione
CREATIVE LIVING PLACES is a cultural-led, place and people-centered initiative aimed to regenerate the Fontanelle district, a suburb of public housing, located in a historical Italian village. The project deals with arts, tactical urbanism, and community visioning. It aims to promote a dynamic setting (in other words, a place!) to trigger a transformative change at the local level using culture as driver of community engagement to build, physically and symbolically, a common and bright future.
Local
Italy
Municipality of Sezze
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Passepartout APS Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Salvatore Last name of representative: Rosella Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: President Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Roccagorga 39 Town: Sezze Postal code: 04018 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 347 826 6850 E-mail:aps.passepartout@gmail.com Website:https://aps-passepartout.it/
Name of the organisation(s): IACS - Istruzione, Animazione, Cultura, Servizi APS Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Silvia Last name of representative: De Nardis Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: President Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Umberto I 15 Town: Sezze Postal code: 04018 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 329 007 1507 E-mail:associazione.iacs@gmail.com Website:https://iacs-associazione.metafoxhub.com/
Name of the organisation(s): Municipality of Sezze Type of organisation: Public authority (European/national/regional/local) First name of representative: Lidano Last name of representative: Lucidi Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: Mayor Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Diaz 1 Town: Sezze Postal code: 04018 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 338 309 8332 E-mail:sindaco@comune.sezze.lt.it Website:https://www.comune.sezze.lt.it
Name of the organisation(s): ASSOCIAZIONE CULTURALE MATUTATEATRO Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Giovan Battista Last name of representative: Ceccano Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: President Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Piagge Marine 117 Town: Sezze Postal code: 04018 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 328 611 5020 E-mail:organizzazione@matutateatro.it Website:https://www.matutateatro.it/
Name of the organisation(s): Associazione Comunità Giovanile Ettituxia Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Mattia Last name of representative: Balestrieri Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: Vice-president Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Bassiano 46 Town: Sezze Postal code: 04018 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 333 327 7132 E-mail:comunitagiovanilesezze@gmail.com
CREATIVE LIVING PLACES is a common path that directly affects the Fontanelle district, a vulnerable neighborhood on the edge of Sezze. It involves inhabitants, associations, citizens, small local businesses, young artists, schools, the Municipality, and the ATER (Territorial agency for residential buildings). The initiative covers three phases deployed over three years, at different levels of achievement:
1. RE-POPULART Festival was realized in September 2022 through self-financing and crowdfunding. It concerned several micro actions of tactical urbanism, artistic performances, and territorial animation that together played a crucial role in turning on a light on the area;
2. ARTISTICO (Artists for Sustainable Inclusive Territorial Regeneration and Innovative Co-design Trajectories) is financed by Lazio Region. It will develop over nine months during 2023, promoting two main activities. The first is a city-wide ideas contest integrated with some community street art workshops with inhabitants and students from the nearby primary school. The second refers to two murals depicting historical, cultural, landscape and architectural beauties of the village. The murals will be made with ecological materials and will capture the vision of the community through the creative re-elaboration of the artists;
3. CREATIVE LIVING PLACES, which we will realize in 2024, aims to develop a participatory urban design process drawing on collaborative methodology, community maps and visual sociology (combining sociology, art, digital, planning and architecture). The objective is to create a concrete proposal for regeneration with high levels of feasibility involving the inhabitants. We will cooperate with the Europe Desk of the Municipality, which recently incorporated the energy of an informal group called Re-gen Sezze composed of young university students of architecture and engineering. They have already proposed to the community some exciting ideas of regeneration.
urban art
tactical urbanism
collaborative design
community engagement
citizen empowerment
The initiative pursues sustainability goals in different ways, integrating soft but concrete actions with educational activities. In line with the European GreenComp 2022, we intend sustainability as a multidimensional concept that needs a cooperative approach. RE-POPULART wanted to promote a “collective care” of the environment, with community gardening, playground recovery interventions, and recycling laboratories for waste materials based on the idea that “one man's trash is another man's treasure”. Also, we focused on the promotion of local production, organizing a handcraft market and a food and wine stand of local products. Besides, in the ARTISTICO project, street art works will be made using a mixed technique that consists of painting and aerosol art. The technique of Poster Art, also called Paste Up, will be adopted. It involves the use of ecological and organic glue aimed at promoting an art with low environmental impact. The project aims to promote “Slow Art”, related to a type of responsible and environmentally friendly tourism, through a colorful space that favors a pleasant experience of the place. Activating a culture-led regeneration process in a suburb also means promoting a multi-modal and polycentric approach to tourism. That is why our third phase, CREATIVE LIVING PLACES, will include, beside the co-design process, a plurality of cultural initiatives that should be complementary to the development program of the Municipality. In addition, with regard to the role of art, there is the purpose of favoring the principle that even beauty can encourage the care of space (as the “broken windows theory” teaches us, whereby “degradation generates other degradation”. We must therefore reverse this trend and make sure that “beauty generates other beauty”). Last but not least, the final output expected from 2024 is a low environmental impact urban regeneration project, considering energy efficiency, recycling of materials and use of renewable resources.
The crucial role is played by culture, intended as a driver to activate a sensorial and collective experience around the target place. The power of art is to arouse emotions, perceptions, and creative imagination. The objective of RE-POPULAR was a socio-cultural animation aimed to stimulate a cognitive and symbolic response in the population. We are deeply excited by the idea proposed by Lydon and Garcia of “short term actions and long-term change”: temporary (re)uses of spaces, micro-initiatives at the local level, and community know-how are useful tools and strategies to create or reinforce social capital. We wanted to capture a wide participation by connecting people around cultural and creative activities (bench painting, community gardening), as well as music and rhymes (concerts, poetry readings). ARTISTICO wants to pursue a form of socio-educational animation through the direct involvement of inhabitants and students of the neighborhood in the street art project. It is crucial for us to capture participants’ suggestions, ideas, and desires. At the same time, they will be involved in a concrete experimentation on murals. It aims to provide an alternative to vandalism, while street art workshops point on some key concepts such as tradition, history, landscape and local heritage. CREATIVE LIVING PLACES will keep the local vitality through a program of events planned together with the inhabitants, such as theater performances, film screenings, games for children, figurative workshops, sports initiatives, exhibitions. The proposed participatory design project is based on the Sennet 's “open urbanism”: rethink functions, ways and materials to design and build the spaces in which we live, in which to meet or distance oneself as needed, spaces to cross or spaces in which to entertain, spaces to live and above all to share. We want our project to be an incubator for a community building process based on emerging needs and desires: this makes our project exemplary.
The whole project proposes a “mosaic” of different actions to improve an area characterized by the presence of crime and marginalization, with a low education level for most of the people. Inspired by the Dolci’s “mutual maieutics”, we believe that different points of view can contaminate each other and create a virtuous development process, promoting cooperation instead of competitiveness.
In CREATIVE LIVING PLACES we will have a co-design phase where carry out all the principles of an “open city”, by promoting a sincere interaction between inhabitants, architects and engineers, artists, sociologists and territorial animators, with the support of the Municipality’s technical team, involving people from other neighborhoods to promote inclusion and social mix. We want to create a genuine ecosystem as a small-scale trial for future planning activities.
We want to use a socio-spatial approach, focusing on identifying needs and desires of the inhabitants, crossing them with the opportunities offered by space, aware that the provision of essential services is crucial for a vulnerable neighborhood. We intend to create new meeting places and opportunities, where developing citizenship, promoting integration, gender equality and participation. We’ve already found some empty or underused spaces and a portion of a public parking area that could be released for common use and could be re-signified. This process will be led by inhabitants' voices, with the help of associations and people from the civil society, creating connections and public engagement. In these areas we plan to remove architectural barriers with the help of a group of young architects to make places affordable for everybody.
Apart from this, we created a synergetic partnership with two other associations focused on helping people with disabilities to have an autonomous life. They will be involved in the art laboratories and will entirely organize the inauguration day for the street art project.
The overall objective is to create a creative and innovative ecosystem based on collaboration between different organizations and the local community, to make concrete the motto «building the world we want to live in together».
In the first phase, RE-POPULART, we promoted, at the neighborhood level, a laboratory whose output was the installation of a community library, the planting of a flower bed, small actions of restyling of a playground and painted benches. During the festival we made a cooperative action with:
• volunteers of Catholic Action and the AGESCI Scout Group, who conducted street game for children from three to ten years;
• voluntary teachers, who organized a creative laboratory creating colorful masks with recycled materials;
• young local artists, who promoted a moment of painting en plein air;
• the Comunità Giovanile Ettituxia associacion, who supported some organizational aspects.
Moreover, a dynamic chain of actors demonstrated a wave of solidarity through individual donations, small sponsorships (from 15 local businesses) and voluntary work.
A similar participative system gave life to the ARTISTICO project, formalizing a partnership composed by the Municipality of Sezze, the primary schools IC Caio Valerio Flacco and IS Crocevecchia, the associations Amici del Centro Diurno Carla Tamantini ONLUS and AIPD Latina.
As regards CREATIVE LIVING PLACES, Municipality of Sezze (with its Europa Desk and Ri-Gen Sezze), Matuta Teatro, IACS Istruzione, Animazione, Cultura, Servizi APS and Comunità Giovanile Ettituxia will support our activities.
We aim to promote a community-led system that empowers people through a creative subsidiarity focused on a cultural transition process that calls to action artists, designers, students, organizations, institutions, and citizens. On these bases, we already involved a plural and heterogeneous range of actors, activities, and methods, to lead a small-scale and bottom-up urban regeneration process.
The Municipality of Sezze is the first public institution that, at local level, has interacted and continues to interact with the overall project. Following the principle of subsidiarity, the administration has encouraged from the beginning our bottom-up urban regeneration initiative. As regards RE-POPULART, the Municipality provided the patronage, being crucial for the concrete implementation of the activities. With respect to ARTISTICO, it took part in a formal partnership in which the district school and two associations working for the inclusion of people with disabilities joined. All these partners will be involved in the co-design process. The provincial subdivision of ATER (Territorial agency for residential buildings), as owner of the buildings, has provided us formal authorizations to realize the street art project in Fontanelle district. Lazio Region has financed the initiatives with the call LAZIO STREET ART, promoted in implementation of a specific law on urban art. The call was to enhance the Street Art as “an expressive form able, for the strong communicative ability and impact on the territory, to help regenerate, redevelop and enhance, in a cultural and social key, the places and assets of the city, with particular reference to areas to be recovered as well as peripheral or extra-urban”. Following that statement and on the basis of previous project of the festival, we built a more conscious and feasible path of collective intervention. Moreover, a plurality of associations, volunteers and informal groups of citizens move around the initiatives of regeneration without which the entire path could not come to life.
CREATIVE LIVING PLACES deals with “placemaking”, a process that calls to action artists, architects, urban planners, sociologists, and communities. It focuses on the identities and societal values of a place, and needs the energies of citizens and local administrators. To accomplish this process, we embrace the word of the arts, using music, poetry, theatre, cinema, photography, literature, and painting. They are useful for maintaining a high level of local vitality. It is a kind of open and shared art: our street art project is based exactly on the idea of “collective artistic product”, as a result of the interaction between inhabitants, students, and street artists. The cultural sector also plays an exciting role in co-design activities. It helps in the phase of emergence of needs: using photovoice we will engage people in the construction of a collective map, as the base of planning work. Digital tools (videomaking), creative laboratories and temporary installation in the public space are included. The figures of the sociologist and community educator have the role of social facilitators. At the same time, the project embraces some competencies expression of design disciplines, including the expertise in terms of policy and planning of the technical office of the Municipality. Moreover, the effervescence of collective intelligence is at the heart of our process: people together are able to be more creative and produce innovative scenarios. The project is carried out by a heterogeneous and dynamic group that reflects these disciplines. We bring together young architects and engineers (Re-gen Sezze), theatre actors, urban planners, sociologists, economists, educators, video makers.
The innovative character is in the “process” and in its “embeddedness” in the territory.
Usually, a great attention is placed on immediately measurable results, while values and resources such as trust, social capital, sense of belonging and sense of community end in the back. We propose a method based on collaboration through culture. This takes time and demands patience. Moreover, it deals with intangible elements, albeit powerful. A common path needs to be followed, calling for the help of all actors and a solid presence of public institutions, especially at the local level. If RE-POPULART lasted one day, ARTISTIC nine months, we would like CREATIVE LIVING PLACES to last longer. This means activating a community shared project in which great attention is on micro and creative initiatives as innovative factors.
As regards the embeddedness, we believe that a successful initiative should be strongly connected to people and places involved. We are making a great effort to read the territory, and we thought that it is a good time to act. On 14th January 2023 the initiative “Il Paese che vorrei” (The village I would like) promoted by the informal group “Ri-gen Sezze” in collaboration with the Europe Desk of Municipality was shared with the whole community. After a previous exploratory survey and with the support of the technical equipe of the Municipality, they proposed a list of concrete projects of urban regeneration. Our administration’s idea is to integrate these efforts in the “Europa, giovani e periferie” project born cooperatively with XIII Mountain Community of the Lepini to keep the opportunities of Erasmus+ program. CREATIVE LIVING PLACES will be integrated in this collaborative path. Moreover, the idea of attaching art to urban design seems quite stimulating. In conclusion, focusing on local trajectories, creating synergies and building connections using art and participation could represent a new way of understanding urban and territorial development.
The target territory of our initiative is representative of most Italian contexts, composed mainly of small and medium size cities. Sezze is a village of about 24,000 inhabitants, located in the XIII Mountain Community of the Lepini Mountains. Situated on the outskirts of major urban attractors such as Rome and Naples, it is classified as an “intermediate area” by SNAI 2020 (National Strategy for Inner Areas). Although equipped with the main services, it needs a strategic plan of revitalization, especially from the cultural point of view (just think that there is no cinema, a library or youth centers). Nevertheless, it is a site of thousand-year history with an exciting “multidimensional territorial capital” – such as the Cathedral of Santa Maria dating back to the XXII century, the Medieval Palazzo De Ovis, the Renaissance Palazzo Rappini, the polygonal walls dating from the fourth century BC, and the ‘ancient urban space’ (the arches, the alleys and the steps) as a new performative space, incubator of innovative entrepreneurship. In addition, gastronomy, folk traditions, memories and symbols (e.g., the myth of Hercules as the founder of the village) characterizes it. All of these aspects are “collective resources” that could be improved. We think that a sustainable local development process should include people embedded in the territory, and consider the “soul of places”. For this reason, the first phase was aimed at creating a living place, calling people to action through diverse kinds of socio-cultural-educational community animation. The second phase promotes that cultural baggage as the core of the street art project. The third phase consists in a small-scale experimentation of a local and territorial transformation focused on added actions: consultation, co-design and empowerment. We propose a cultural-driven “processual method”, based on soft interventions on space, aimed to reinforce the awareness of all actors involved.
The project uses a blended approach, derived from both sociology and pedagogy.
It is inspired by the participatory urban planning model of Ciaffi and Mela (2011) based on four interrelated actions:
a) Communication: a multi-target (in reference to code, language, accessibility, culture) and interactive action, realized in the sites where the regeneration process takes place
b) Animation: activities that stimulate a cognitive response (festivals) and mobilize the territory with expressive and artistic value (creative workshops), performances and audio-visual products
c) Consultation: dynamic tools, forums, techniques oriented for collection and reading ideas
d) Empowerment: strengthening the ability to imagine the future and act collectively
About educational models we use parts of Freire’s Pedagogy of oppressed, Dolci’s Reciprocal Maieutics, Mindell’s Deep Democracy. We also include peer education and draw inspiration from Roger’s person-centered approach, Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, the “Oasis Game” of Elos Institute, and principles of art therapy.
The project uses Creative Confrontation methodologies based on active listening, collaborative and shared problem-solving models. It considers World Café and Open Space Technology as useful tools for conducting democratic debates, managed directly by participants, with community leaders acting as facilitators. Moreover, the project includes visual sociology tools, useful to capture the “state of art” to be compared in the future. It is quite exciting here the elaboration of new visual products by participants. When establishing a significant relationship with and among inhabitants (our expected outcome), they can face the subjective production of meanings on the target place. The results of collaborative activities (photovoice, focus group, visioning, social maps, community organizing) help us to catch problems and potentialities, elaborating them into a SWOT analysis, following the back casting method.
The first challenge is related to the idea of a “human-centered city” (EC, 2019) to make a future with low-environmental impact, less social inequalities and spatial segregation. The selection of a peripheral neighborhood of public housing and the participatory process that we propose, represent a concrete step towards this goal.
The second is to make operational the idea that art and culture are levers of sustainable development and well-being (Unesco, 2012). Culture is the core of our initiative, and a driver to trigger communities to act in the direction of UN SDGs. It is especially relevant at the local level where collective meanings can circulate and take root. We try to extend the value of the cultural sector including the pivotal role of the community in local and territorial development processes. People can generate innovation and innovation can be generated in people’s everyday life. We want to show that communities act, re-appropriate and reinvent spaces, producing new shared meanings. Also, why not, that they can (together) suggest something to policies. The project points to the emerging development model that enhances culture as a tool for urban renewal. In this framework, public art becomes social art. Creativity here isn’t a “plastikwörter” (plastic word), to use the Pörksen’s neologism. It isn’t contemporary rhetoric only if it is practiced by communities, and when it is connected to people’ needs and desires.
The third is related to the topic of social and collaborative urban planning. It is a consolidated but still open debate, mainly because there are no universally adoptable methods but local-based solutions to analyze. On this basis, the project proposes a micro-scale experimentation of an open model to make the city. The cultural and educational experiences of RE-POPULART and ARTISTICO, were necessary to create a genuine melieu. Looking at the future, CREATIVE LIVING PLACES aims to achieve a turning point towards cooperative governance.
RE-POPULART (2022) was a fundamental piece of a wider puzzle in which the success keys are trust and sense of community. ARTISTICO (2023) is promoting a co-design process through art. Both are considered crucial to community building and local vitality. Then we want to go further, implementing a list of actions directed to a common urban development project.
The development plan for 2024 embraces the following tasks:
1. Identification of challenges, issues and barriers to neighborhood regeneration;
2. Recognition of resources, opportunities and potentialities of the context;
3. Creation of a common vision (also using creative languages and realizing some artistic output);
4. Elaboration of innovative solution using a co-design approach;
5. Testing concrete action in accordance with the project economic capacity and including a long-term horizon;
6. Inclusion of a Monitoring & Evaluation Plan, together with the Municipality and inhabitants.
CREATIVE LIVING PLACE aims to activate a local transformation in the district of Fontanelle promoting a social and collaborative project through art. The initiative concretely implies: a) continuing the cultural activities of territorial animation; b) continuing the tactical urbanism measures based on the principle of low-cost and high impact; c) developing the above-described plan in 6 steps; using collaborative methodologies, arts and digital/visual tools to create common and creative narratives about the future.
The idea is to develop other activities in the neighborhood to dispel disempowerment, create a shared project, carry out interventions according to the available economic capacity and look for additional funding opportunities. It is important to highlight that this last phase should pursue connections with local public policies, supra-local programs and territorial stakeholders.
Our whole project is based on the conviction that to promote a transformation process in a community (especially if characterized by social marginalization and crime) is necessary to give people space and time, where to feel free to express without judgment, and to involve them in the regeneration process. We want to create a setting where we can train each one’s sights in finding hidden beauty and making it shine.
The project deals with non-formal and informal education, characterized by voluntary participation of learners, open to their inputs and encouraging links with their real life, in order to give people back the power to change. We also choose experiential learning, for the opportunity to flow from reflection to action in a never-ending spiral.
About the GreenComp, we intend to focus especially on the development of the following competences: Systems thinking (2.1), Futures literacy (3.1), Collective action (4.2) and Individual initiative (4.3). For that, we chose art as a tool and as a purpose, involving people in a process that, literally and metaphorically, transforms trash to treasure and engages them around the goal of regeneration. Especially in the CREATIVE LIVING PLACE we will use a transversal approach involving multidimensional activities, crucial to reinforce societal networks, and contribute to promote well-being. The Freirean cultural circle will provide the “reflection” and “idea development” part (of the learn-by-doing process), and practical laboratories, mixing different languages and techniques, will make things happen. We expected to inspire people in expressing their needs through art languages and especially in transforming waste in art objects, urban and non-urban, or “brand new” objects that could also be introduced in local markets as an economic opportunity. These will provide an experience of connection between people and will facilitate a new sense of care for the natural and built environment
