A digital tool for bringing young people together to create a beautiful and sustainable city
How can you be active in learning about your town? FirstLife is a local civic social network we use for innovative forms of community mapping and media&digital education based on a Neogeography approach. It gives a voice to young citizens with the aim of fostering their participation in the co-creation of the places where they spend daily lives. We have used FL in schools over the years, inspiring thousands of teenagers to be protagonists of a sustainable, inclusive and beautiful environment.
Cross-border/international
Italy
France
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Greece
Turin and the suburban municipalities of Collegno, Carmagnola, Chieri, Pinerolo, Rivalta di Torino, Bruino, Luserna San Giovanni, and Avigliana (Italy)
Venice and San Donà di Piave (Italy)
Rome (Italy)
Paris (France)
Athens (Greece)
European networks of urban commons (Ge.CO; Commoning Europe)
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
Yes
Horizon2020 / Horizon Europe
H2020 2019 DT-TRANSFORMATIONS-02
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): University of Turin - Computer and Science Department Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Chiara Last name of representative: Sonzogni Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Researcher Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Corso Svizzera, 185 Town: Torino Postal code: 10149 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 338 155 4789 E-mail:chiara.sonzogni@unito.it Website:https://www.firstlife.org/en/
URL:https://www.facebook.com/firstlife.org Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): #firstlife #civicsocialnetwork #civictechnology #crowdmapping #unito #dipinfo
URL:https://www.instagram.com/_firstlife_/ Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): #firstlife #civicsocialnetwork #civictechnology #crowdmapping #unito #dipinfo
Young people and teenagers are great insiders of the urban landscape, but they are rarely involved in urban design or asked about their needs, even in initiatives about getting to know their towns. They are under-represented categories in shaping their city's future. To close this gap in representation, we used the FirstLife (FL) digital platform as an innovative educational tool. FL rethinks community mapping as a strategy for teaching young people to assess urban landscapes to discover the potential of places, find resources in their territory and, with a Neogeography perspective, make proposals together to improve the livability, accessibility and sustainability of those urban landscapes. FL is a local social network based on a newsfeed paired with an interactive map. Its aim is to foster citizen participation and interaction in social and civic aspects of public life. Users can create publicly georeferenced content, create theme-based mappings, promote their actions, make their views known, and create groups. FL is used for community empowerment, international cooperation and (one of the most important applications) civic and digital education. FL’s approach is based on the idea of the territory as educator. The first educational project, called "TeenCarTo", was proposed by the Education Services of Turin to 700 students, with the aim of designing a “Teenagers’ Plan” for future developments in the city. From then on, FL has supported several projects, providing platforms that turn into places of learning frequented by students, educators, institutions and researchers sharing proposals, practices and thoughts about the shape of the city’s environment in the future. FL is developed by the Digital Territories and Communities Group, a multidisciplinary research group at the University of Turin's Computer Science Department. It is available as an open-source web app for PCs, tablets and mobile phones and is totally free from commercial interests and user profiling.
Education
Community mapping
Social networks
Teenagers
Phygital
Inspired by the principles of the 15-minute city, FL pursues social and environmental sustainability objectives at different levels and helps young people to grasp those objectives and contribute to them. First, the platforms Città15minuti and EduLife bring young people closer to the topic of proximity and liveability via crowdmapping and the design of an urban narrative about a network of local entities promoting awareness and good practice in the fields of solidarity and the circular economy (e.g., food waste). Secondly, it makes sustainable social and economic activities more visible through platforms such as Youth2030agenda and Pedalé. Youth2030agenda, supported by the EU-funded project “Mindchangers” of the Piedmont regional government, fosters the crucial engagement of “young sustainability influencers” in mapping and developing dynamic and engaging narratives of events and activities in the fields of climate change and migrations. Pedalé, promoted by the environmentalist advocacy group Legambiente, supports safe urban cycling mapping with the creation of interest groups and reporting services for highlighting structural problems to the City of Turin, thus providing a real chance to make the city greener and safer. The CO3 Urban Modelling platform, developed within the EU H2020 project CO3, has also been used in Paris with 10 schools for re-planning in their territory. Here, FL was integrated with augmented reality, 3D modelling and BIM functionalities to support teenagers in developing shared and critical knowledge about urban spaces (e.g., ecological issues), and collectively reimagining and co-designing solutions. Furthermore, FL is integrated with a digital instrument that promotes and contributes to the sustainability of urban communities: the CommonsHood wallet app, based on sustainable blockchain technology, allows the dematerialization of coupons, certificates, customer loyalty cards, etc., and fosters the design of circular economy services.
By beautiful urban places, we mean those places that maintain aesthetics and ethics, formal aspects and quality of experience. This combination often requires civic participation and the development of a critical gaze capable of taking into account complexity and diversity. Relations among people are increasingly shaped by and lived through online means. The educational use of FL plays an active role in making young citizens responsible, fostering a view that goes beyond the pure functionality of digital means, where the digital is not set against the physical, but is rather functional to directing personal relationships and is a constitutive part of our real daily interactions. FL also transforms maps from a traditional instrument of power imposing a mainstream view of the territory into a collective effort to generate new aesthetic and ethical meanings. We have made several educational activities, defining a new methodology together with local authorities, research institutions, EU networks and local associations, with the aim of stimulating the involvement of teenagers in not only understanding but also designing public places. We have enabled young people to explore and explain the city in a critical way, and to share bottom-up proposals for regeneration. FL has been used at the EU level in the Urban Innovative Action (UIA) Co-City and H2020 Generative Commons Living Lab (gE.CO) projects on urban commoning, at the national level in Riscatti di città (Redeeming Cities, developed by TeamFactory) and at the local level in Riscopri Risorse (Rediscovering Resources), TeenCarTo, Adotta un monumento (Adopt a Monument), and Quartieri Attivi (Active Neighborhoods). All these projects result in platforms that enable young citizens to recognize the city's resources, both material and immaterial (e.g., urban voids) and make them capable of drawing up proposals for organizing micro-regeneration actions with the involvement of local communities.
FL is a public participation platform that supports peer-to-peer engagement and commoning and the construction of a collective identity that, according to the famous theory of "Global Village" (McLuhan, 1964), can be defined as a communion of information, references, content and also public goods circulating in digital media. FL gives under-represented communities (for this proposal, first of all, young people) a voice, recognized also through the ways people mean, use and live in urban spaces. People can use maps to offer viewpoints that are often overlooked. Teenagers who do not usually join civic initiatives or know about the possibilities for voicing their desires and visions about public spaces have had the chance to discover participatory process. Linking the EduLife platform with the Toponomastica al femminile (Female Street Toponymy) platform is an opportunity to discuss the gender imbalance in cities with young people and to develop proposals for a more egalitarian urban space. Riscatti di città (Redeeming Cities) offers a model by highlighting urban voids and fosters the right of young people (but not only) to a beautiful and sustainable city. CO3 Urban Modelling, has enhanced the digital literacy of more than 300 students in a peripheral area of Paris as part of their school activities. It has provided them with practical experience of political expression, deliberative processes and dialogue with urban planners and decision makers. For this purpose, open-source versions of software such as Minecraft were re-used and made available to underage students, with the supervision of adults, and connected to the map. Furthermore, FL is a web app rather than an app downloadable from a store: it is available to all devices with a browser and an Internet connection, including mobile phones, thus making it most affordable. The design has been carefully created to improve accessibility. The interface is very intuitive and does not require any specific knowledge.
Using FL, young people develop skills in: active citizenship, conscious use of digital technologies (social networks and geographic information systems), and designing and drawing up proposals to improve the places where they live. FL has empowered young people, fostering their leadership and identity, and giving them tools to find the “anchors of collective beauty” (for example stories or places) to build their own maps and design a collective narrative of the city environment from which to start a process of regeneration with proposals, visions, ideas, and projects. FL has been used as a tool for discussion between students and teachers, families, public officials, and local associations. It has been used to share proposals, provide updates about works, and to ensure public monitoring. For instance, in the project Riscopri Risorse, students designed 12 actions of micro-regeneration in 6 municipalities involving friends, parents, citizens, local entities and institutions. Moreover, FirstLife as a tool for bottom-up information has become the starting point for opening up a constructive dialogue between public administrations, institutions and new generations, producing knowledge about uses and representations of the Teenagers’ City. For instance, in 2016, the City of Turin defined its first “Teenagers’ Plan”, which also used information collected on the platforms TeenCarTo and M.AD - Teenagers mapping for urban regeneration. In accordance with the European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles, FirstLife is a virtual place where people and the well-being of users are at its center: it is totally free from commercial interests and user profiling, and is also defined as “slow digital means" because it requires conscious use, critical and respectful of the community.
FL is the result of a co-design process involving several representatives of different stakeholder groups. The research team involves developers and social scientists from different universities (including the Pedagogy Department at Salesiano Venice University Institute). They work together to continuously adapt and further develop the instrument. Moreover, the educational functionalities of FL are the result of years of experience in different projects and contexts. In the educational process, the main stages of the co-design process take place at the local level. The stakeholders are schools, associations, formal and informal groups, public administrations and institutions, all of which are involved from the beginning of the implementation of the initiative. Teachers and FL educators co-design didactic units (lessons, fieldwork work and events). Local entities interact with students first during the urban landscape analysis and exploration of territorial resources, and then at public events when young people publicly present their observations and proposals. At this stage, stakeholders can not only open up a dialogue with the young people but can also keep a record of precious elements to design future plans, activities and projects that take into account their point of view. For example, in Paris, researchers from one of the academic partners of the CO3 project consortium (Institute of Reseearch and Innovation) firstly explored the potentialities of the FL platform with teachers. Further technical developments were then made by developers according to requirements collected by sociologists. Teachers and researchers introduced the platform together to the students and accompanied their use. While using the platform in their neighborhoods, students had the chance to meet relevant local stakeholders (e.g., retailers, social workers), and finally the representatives of the local administrations, to present their proposals.
FL was developed as part of an interdisciplinary research project bringing together computer scientists and developers, urban and digital geographers, architects and urban planners, psychologists, pedagogists, philosophers and activists. Moreover, the co-design and experimentation phases benefitted from the knowledge and working experience of practitioners and professionals in different fields of social and educational work (social workers and educators, community facilitators, teachers) and the students and teenagers who participated in the different projects. This variety of competences allowed us to gather different contributions as regards: the choice of content; how to represent content on the map (e.g., giving priority to collective rather than individual points of view; how to make public content findable and through which categories; which functionalities to develop accordingly). Interdisciplinarity is an added value not only for the development of the instrument but also for its educational approach. FL, being a civic social network, uses a media & digital and civic education approach (crowdmapping, new media, active citizenship, art). Moreover, its interactive map is a tool for Neogeography (using geographical techniques and tools for community purposes). Furthermore, the disciplines of landscape architecture, and anthropological & urban studies are also involved, providing tools to read existing places and imagine new ones. A specific research strand in computer science and pedagogy has recently been started by the universities of UniTo (Turin) and IUSVE (Venice), based on findings concerning the use of FL as an education tool from the following perspectives: ethics and education applied to digital platforms for social interactions; a constructive educational approach to digital means of supporting participatory processes; awareness of young people when choosing digital platforms; the potential of the digital tools to trigger transformative processes.
FL involves an innovative educational methodology that promotes young citizens' participation and collaboration with other actors in the urban context, both in terms of large-scale dissemination and in terms of the acquisition of personal skills related to the use of civic technologies. FL is also an opportunity to innovate teaching programmes for the recent mandatory module of Civic Education courses in schools in Italy. It offers professors the possibility of structuring personalized and multidisciplinary paths, and students access to a digital instrument that develops their abilities not only as users but also as co-designers of processes, while also enabling them to gain skills in active citizenship and designing soft interventions in public space. In accordance with the phygital approach, FL is used to expand the interactions in close proximity among people and to incentivize them to experience the same spaces, rather than just enabling online interactions from a distance. It also offers new ways to teach geography and raise digital awareness. Moreover, it contributes to the development of social digital rights, boosting public and private investments in the field of digital citizenship. Differently from traditional community mapping, FirstLife is a social network, with the functionalities to put users together, create an interactive and live map, and share contents of public interest. FL brings the advantage of technologies that are successful at the global level down to the local and accessible to local communities, putting innovation at the service of citizenship, unlike mainstream platforms that, being centered on maximizing the accumulation of personal data, do not give users power, do not leave them any value and keep them in a condition of practical (and sometimes even psychological) dependence. In this sense, FL gives meaning to the original intention of the Internet: sharing information, empowering people, fostering bottom-up processes.
As the educational platforms show, FL is a flexible tool that can be used at different levels and in different contexts: from primary to secondary school, in formal or informal groups and in different cities (Turin and its metropolitan area, Venice, Paris, Athens). Moreover, its map is based on OpenStreetMap, so that it can be used in all the parts of the world covered by that open-source tool. FL is a tool not only for young people but for all citizens. For example, the platforms Città15minuti and Riscatti di città have been used during public events such as exhibitions or “European Researchers’ Nights”, bringing opportunities to raise awareness and spread knowledge beyond academic networks, at the national and EU level, with the aim of designing collaborative experimentation projects in new contexts. Thanks to its multidisciplinarity and modularity (urban mapping, participatory planning, open public debates, micro-initiatives of urban regeneration, web literacy, civic participation, neogeography, urban sustainability, gender toponymy, and urban knowledge) the set-up of an educational path with FL is entirely customizable. Co-designed with teachers, it is perfectly adaptable to the different needs and interests of different groups of users and contexts. FL is an open-source software provided as software as a service (SaaS) for those who cannot install the system themselves. It is available to the public through a website that provides: information about its purpose, functions and use cases; and a registration section for direct access to, and use of, the platform. User guidelines (and an online tutorial about FirstLife) are available. EU research projects implemented by the same research group make other materials available to support the co-design of different use cases of the platform. For instance, the CO3 project developed guidelines on co-design methods and tools to implement the model in local urban contexts.
FL educational initiatives transform community mapping into an educational instrument that involves young citizens in identifying the assets of their neighborhood and tapping into participatory processes. The method can be summarized as reflecting, mapping, reusing and sharing. The approach is based on different and interacting disciplinary perspectives and knowledge fields (exploration of the territory, creation of collective maps, production of images and multimedia texts), enabling conscious use of the technology and a critical constructive approach to the digital world to support concrete actions in the physical daily world. The digital platform becomes the glue for teaching topics on media & digital education, neogeography, convergence and phygital culture, gender and inclusiveness studies, sociology of media and communication, landscape architecture, while adopting well-established methodologies and best practice in the fields of web literacy, education for civic participation, and activism for urban sustainability.
The educational process involves 3 macro topics (sustainability, gender equality and teen & territory) and is divided along the following steps: teacher training for co-designing workshops and activities and for learning about digital means, theoretical classrooms (civic technologies, neogeography, crowdmapping), visits on the ground to see local entities and investigate the territory (providing journalism techniques and tools such as interviews, photo reportage, etc.), digital mapping via FL, a project module for proposals and soft interventions, and finally, sharing moments with all the community. For example, in the teen & territory path with the EduLife platform, during the analysis of the proximity urban environment, the lack of a counseling center emerged and so local institutions have been involved to fill the gap. During the gender equality path, students started a process for giving the garden of the school the name of a female figure.
FL contributes to several sustainability development goals (SDGs) promoted in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by the United Nations (UN).
Goal 11: making cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. FL supports the co-design of shared public spaces by enabling collaboration among public and private actors and fostering citizen engagement. FL also addresses the challenge of (re)planning sustainable urban spaces where digital and physical dimensions are merged in an “augmented space” that expands the resources available for cooperation.
FL provides citizens with a public digital space for sharing proposals and requests about changing and improving urban spaces, for coordinating collaborative processes, and for engaging in open dialogue with local authorities. For instance, in the Riscopri Risorse project, 5 municipalities implemented urban micro-regeneration actions that started from proposals made on the map.
Goal 4: ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning. FL is a powerful education tool to introduce people of all ages to a way of using social networks oriented towards civic participation. It ensures that students acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to promote sustainable development and lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and the enhancement of cultural diversity.
Goal 9: industry, innovation and infrastructure. FL, as an open-source and civic digital system, contributes to increasing universal and low-cost access to information and communication technologies. Moreover, it provides an opportunity to redeploy metaphors that have been successful in the global village (word of mouth, continuity in relationships, trust, etc.) at the local level (city, neighbourhood), by the transformation of global tools such as social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and interactive maps (Google Maps) into a local tool to provide local solutions.
The FL educational platform contributes to bringing a sense of belonging and a spirit or meaning to places. Thousands of students involved in the training have acquired skills in critical reading of their own territory and in digital and civic use of social networks. Hundreds of places have been mapped: TeenCarTo (2016-2017) involved 670 students and resulted in the first “Teenagers’ Plan” of Turin; UniCarTo (2017) involved 200 students; Riscopri Risorse (2019) involved 350 students and 30 local stakeholders, and resulted in 12 micro-regeneration interventions in 6 municipalities; Youth2030agenda resulted in 133 sustainable actions; EduLife (2022) involved 175 students, covered 295 places, and included 3 public events (one in the presence of the president of the neighborhood council). The platforms are big databases of beautiful maps expressing clearly the desires of young citizens: the territory should be a "refuge" to grow up in and learn about life, and should be as sustainable, beautiful and inclusive as possible! In the next few months, we will start new educational projects. In Turin, there will be education paths in five schools. Two projects (by Gruppo Abele) are ComunitAttive (Active Communities - is for creating a widespread and continuous educational community) and Present4future (is for fostering the growth of young people as multipliers of paths and actions aimed at the redevelopment of the territory). Tecnoprofezie (Technology Predictions, by Museum of the Fantastic and Science Fiction) is about involving NEET young people. Musei di Classe (Classroom Museums, by Industrial Union) is about mapping visitor experiences of their industrial museum. Another project (with INDIRE) will develop systems for evaluating and managing the educational and pedagogical impacts of using FL. In Venice, there will be educational activities at school and a research project with IUSVE university about the educational value of digital means.
The FirstLife educational initiative contributes to the development of key sustainability competences, promoting activities and ways to think, plan and act with empathy, responsibility, and care for the planet and public health. For example, with the EduLife platform, we propose a sustainability path aspiring to the SDGs for 2030. Through the principles and tools of community mapping, the students learn to analyze and represent their environment, and develop critical thinking about the sustainability of their territory. At the same time, thanks to the media & digital competences acquired using FL, they can implement a new method to build innovative storytelling to declare their own power as sustainability actors. They can show how to actively contribute to improving prospects for the community and the planet, thanks to gaining competences for developing not only individual initiatives but also collective action, and thus responding positively to the question: how to act for change in collaboration with others? Based on the same principles but on a different scale, the FL platform youth2030agenda is also a great example. Youth2030agenda is used for mapping and recounting all the activities of the Mindchangers EU project in Piedmont. Through the map, the “young sustainability influencers” share their community stories, actions, projects, and ideas for the big challenges of our era: climate change and migrations, fostering their leadership in the sustainability actions and changes.
