An afterschool for children. A model for a sustainable house for the neighborhood
Right in the middle of the city, where we need to rediscover nature the most, the Solar House is a laboratory to reconnect with the rythm of nature. A slower, deeper, kinder way of inhabiting the house, the neighborhood, the city, the world.
Local
Italy
The municipality of Ravenna is funding the project through a pact between the municipality itself and our association (Ortisti di strada). This kind of pact is a national project and is called "patto per i beni comuni" (pact for commons). They help us financially and we take care of a building that was once abandoned.
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): Ortisti di strada APS, Lucertola Ludens APS, ARCI Ravenna, ACER Ravenna, Municipality of Ravenna Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Veronica Last name of representative: Parato Gender: Female Nationality: Italy Function: Member Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Gioacchino Rasponi 13 Town: Ravenna Postal code: 48121 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+39 349 286 7031 E-mail:info@ortistidistrada.com Website:https://ortistidistrada.com/
Our project aims to transform a once abandoned bulding and the garden around it called "The Flying House". It is a building owned by the public housing institution (ACER) and managed by an organization (ARCI) that coordinates volunteering associations like ours (Ortisti di strada, in english: "Street Gardeners").
We are working on The Flying House in order to create an afterschool called "The Solar House", as families in the neighborhood need a place for their children to stay when parents are at work. We invite them to join us after work, as we wish the Solar House to be a place of intercultural and intergenerational conviviality.
We want to meet their need for an afterschool and propose ideas for an alternative urban lifestyle made tangible in the transformation of the place, creating with children a model of a sustainable household growing food in the garden, building a greenhouse, managing the composter and the storehouse, collecting rain water and solar energy. We create a net of relations with people having different competences, from yoga to puppet theatre, illustration, carpentry, basket weaving, creation of traditional toys from recycled materials and more. We do this in order to learn together by doing and to create what we need in order to buy less.
Not only what kind of work, but also how the work is made convey our ideas. We work slowly and with attention to what we do, why we do it and whom we are working with. Our association already manages other social gardens and orchard in another popular neighborhood and around the city of Ravenna; the Solar House is therefore another step of a diffused education project to share our knowledge about permaculture and non-formal education.
Interbeing
Permaculture
Outdoor education
Urban regeneration
Resilience
Our main objective is to regenerate the spaces of the Flying House in order to share knowledge about good practices in sustaibility through the work on the building and the garden themselves. We get our inspiration from books such as "Retrosuburbia" by D. Holmgren to create a tangible example of a sustainable household. We use recycled materials: we got the topsoil already used in a gardencentre; we collected stones for preparing the beds for vegetables from another gardener that didn't need them anymore; we got the tanks to collect rain water from a glucose industry; we get tools from an organization that lends them for free. we get our seeds and plants from the other gardens our organization manages; we take care of the biodiversity of the crops and of the wild herbs and we create bugs hotels, birds and bat boxes. We are now looking for what we need to create a water filtration system since the tap water in the Solar House is not potable. Since we have an exercise bike we found in the garbage and since a member of our organization has the competences to do that, we are creating an electric system powered by cycling. We manage a composter to have topsoil in the future. Since the wood from trees felled by public and private gardeners is normally thrown away and since a member of our organizaton is a gardener, we get and store it. We will use it for an outdoor kitchen we are creating in the garden. Those are some practical examples of actions undertook in the Solar House. Of course, we do not expect families in the neighborhood to store their wood or grow all the food they need. It is more important to be educated to an approach of sustainability and consciousness about the challenges of our time and do what is within our reach, nothing less and nothing more than that.
We see the Solar House as a place of conviviality where we share both work and play. It is a place where the hurry we live in is suspended and where formal education is replaced by a non-formal one, based on relationship and well-being, experience and practice instead of competition and cognitivist abstraction.
We run fast not ontly in traffic, but also in our reactions to the many stressors we are exposed to as we live in the city. Our schools lack in education concerning non-violent communication and emotions. We think that is fundamental to learn how not to respond quickly to the many stimuli we are exposed in our daily life, so that quickness does not become an habit and we do not develop a sort of indifference towards other people and other forms of life. We work on active listening to enhance the quality of the relationships and to be sure that anyone has space to express what they feel and think without judgment. We do so co-designing the internal and external spaces of the Solar House and inviting people to share their knowledge and talents organizing workshops. As other competences concerning gardening and the managing of an household, we hope that competences concerning active listening, empathy and emotion management learned inside the Solar House could be brought outside as well. We take inspiration from books such as "El derecho a la ternura" (the right to tenderness) by L. C. Restrepo. We understand beauty as a harmonic system that flows easily and peacefully.
Our approach to design as permaculture enthuasiasts is life-centered. We believe that as plants contain the intelligence to grow and take all the various and beautiful shapes and colors they can, the same in for children. We are facilitators preparing the soil for the children to grow their talents. We see that often schools, with rigid programs and curricola, tend to exclude "dis-abled" children, as argued by R. McDermott and H. Varenne in an article entitled "Culture as disability".
We do not focus on what are usually called "dis-abilities" because we think that disability spring from a design that is standardized. Each child gives what he or she gives, such as plants and vegetables: we do not ask aubergine plants to give us tomatoes and we do not call them "disabled" because they do not give the tomatoes. We observe and listen to children carefully and ask them to help us for what they can and what they feel. This way, everyone participates in terms of their possibilities to the same work. One may hoe the ground, one may check for the right intercropping, one may plant the plants, one may write the name of the crop on labels to mark the plantation, one may take photos, and so on. Apart from gardening, everyone should be encouraged to share their knowledge and talents as we share ours.
We do not ask money for any of the activities run in the Solar House since we are working on a voluntary basis. We think that in a world where often being poor in money means poorer education and less opportunities, we should provide a place where people get not excluded because of their income. The prize would allow us to invite experts in various branches and pay their work to offer workshops to children and their parents. For example, since we need some restoration work on walls and doors of the House, that would be a good pretext to learn something new about masonry and then we could invite an artist to decorate the wall.
In the first time, before the pandemic, the idea of a place for parents to help each other taking care of their children sprung from the spontaneous initiative of a mother living in the neighborhood. She managed the place and workshops for children were organized. The Flying House served this scope until the pandemic begun, and then the activities stopped. Two years later, a member of our organization was working in the afterschool of the primary school of the neighborhood. The afterschool is organized from 1 pm to 4.30 pm from monday to friday. There are five groups of maximum 10 children, one for each year, for a total of 50 children. Forms for registration were not given to all children and not in all classes because of shortages in resources. The afterschool is something made necessary by cuts in State funding that previously offered full-time school. Afterschool is now an outsourced service managed by organizations that collaborate with the municipality and families have to pay a fee for their children to attend it. Those service often cannot meet the needs of families: some children get excluded because there is no space left for them or because families do not have the money. When the member of ours was working in the afterschool as an educator, she was asked by families for more time during the day in the afterschool, for more days during the week and the ones that get excluded asked for the possibility to get access to it. We started our work in spring 2022 with a project called "The Secret Garden" where we welcomed children from the neighborhood. Since then we developed that idea and the project for the Solar House took shape. We want to meet the needs of the families and help them in taking care of the children and future fellow citizens. We expect the project to be helpful for these families and the neighborhood in general, as we see the Solar House as a place of conviviality where parents as well can meet at the end of the working day.
Different people representing organizations and institutions are helping us. ACER, the public housing institution that owns the building, allow us to carry on our initiatives in their space. In particular, the Social Mediation and Proximity Activities office supports, raises awareness, promotes the various activities by promoting collaboration with other realities in the area. ARCI Ravenna, the organization that coordinates volunteering associations in the city, promotes our initiatives and help us financially. We made a pact with the Municipality of Ravenna called "Patto di collaborazione per i beni comuni" (collaboration agreement for common goods) introduced through the Constitutional Reform Act of 2001 in article 118, par. 4 of the Italian Constitution. The Municipality gives us the possibility to regenerate a public space and help us financially with a yearly prize; in change we take responsability to organize events and workshops of public interest and to report on them. ARCI helps us for this reporting work and for other aspects of the relationship with the institution. We work in close cooperation with an association called Lucertola Ludens that works for the promotion of the right of the child to play. We work together to organized workshops and events on traditional games. The scout group of the neighborhood got interested in our project and is helping us designing and working on the garden. Of course, we are in contact with people of the neighborhood and get feedbacks from them.
A project manager who works for a social cooperative society called LibrAzione gave us advice looking forward for future collaborations; another project manager working with unaccompanied foreign minors shown interest in our project as well, as many of the accomodations they manage are in the same neighborhood where the Solar House is.
We are now happy to learn that they are supporting us in submitting to the Bauhaus prize in order to widen our vision on a European scale.
The Solar House project springs from two main branches represented by members of our organization passionate about childcare and agriculture, both in a non-violent and pacifist perspective. One branch concerning agricultural methods such as permaculture by Mollison and Holmgren, natural farming by M. Fukuoka and synergistic gardens; the other concerning non-formal, play-based and outdoor education methods. About the latter, we get inspiration by the "Pedagogy of the snail" by G. Zavalloni that led a project called "peace gardens" for many years; by the works of Montessori and by the so-called "Movimento di cooperazione educativa" (cooperative education movement); by the so-called "Ludopedagogia" (Pedagogy of play) that works to empower people through the creativity of play and by the Reggio Children approach; by the Children in Permaculture guidelines.
We see the interconnection between growing a plant and growing a child: in both cases, we are speaking of living being who need to be supported in expressing all the intelligence and competence they already have. We make the two branches interact with each other because in both cases, care of plants and of children, our focus is on taking care of life, no matter which form it takes. We want to celebrate biodiversity both concerning plants and people. Permaculture is the perfect bridge between the two branches, because the three pillars of this method are Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share.
That is why we invited Andrea Minchio, a permaculture designer, who helped us co-designing the garden with a group of scouts who got interested in the project.
We are on continuous training in permaculture and play-based learning and outdoor education. We work together as friends who hope to share methods, practices and ideas we believe in. We want this interaction to be tangible thanks to a library open to the public we are preparing with all the books we have concerning these topics.
We see that schools tend to standardize and not celebrate the diversity of people with different talents, interests, needs and hopes, and tend to define a-normal anyone who do not incarnate the expectations of rigid programs and curricola. Focus only on cognitivists and abstract thought at the expense of other forms of intelligence, crowded classrooms, having to stay seated for exteded time may make children feel excluded and frustrated. Afterschools as well mainly focus on homework at expense of play, arts and socialization. We see this can cause mental and physical suffering, from performance anxiety to attention disorders.
We think that schools and other educational institution should celebrate diversity and adjust their curricola and their architecture to meet the needs of children and not the other way around. We also think that adults who work in education should accept the challenges concerning play and nature deficit disorder our children suffer from living a urban life. Play and nature deficit disorders include anxiety, depression, obesity and ADHD.
We believe there are no a-normal children, but only children that suffer from bad school design that is not child-centered. This is why we choose non-formal methods and want to create a space for children to play, express themselves and reconnect with nature. We want to celebrate all forms of intelligence throught different workshops we hope will emerge from mutual listening and children's initiative. Following G. Zavalloni's "Pedagogy of the snail" method we should divide our time by 1/3 play, 1/3 manual work in the garden and 1/3 study.
We see how many young people are moving to the countryside to live a more sustainable life based on agriculture and more connected to nature. We know that not all people can move to the countryside and we know that we have to work on the city to have more sustainable lifestyles, because most people live in urban areas and because people are getting poorer and this will lead to social problems. Since the neighborhood is historically one in Ravenna where the working class live, it experienced a strong immigration of families from Asia and Africa that show many indicators of financial, social and linguistic fragility.
Our initiative, our ideas and philosophy develop from urban gardening and the techniques mutuated from permaculture. The three main principles of permaculture are care of the Earth, care of people and return of surplus to Earth and people. It is a research from people living the city on how to live the city in a different way that is in reach of all. It is less important to grow all the food you need than living by ideas others than blind and fast consumption. What you learn inside the Solar House, you can bring outside as good practices for your daily life as a different approach to life in the city.
We work to outline guidelines inspired by the methodologies we adopt so that is possible to apply them in nearly every circumstance as an approach. It is a heuristic vision that can be implemented to meet the needs of different geographies.
As we think that the big challenge of our time is the hurry we live by, we adopt the "pedagogy of the snail" by Gianfranco Zavalloni. His pedagogy, as he presents it, is "slow and non-violent" and it is based on play, work and study. As Zavalloni argue, children learn by playing, therefore we use techniques mutuated from the Ludopedagogy approach. Ludopedagogy is an experiential method to explore a topic of interest through play and to empower people. It was invented in Uruguay to empower people though the creativity of play during the dictatorship. As Zavalloni did, we use the educational garden to reconnect with the life-cycle rythms, to learn how to be patient, to understand that what Earth gives us is not to be taken for granted and to meet and get to know other forms of life such as plants and animals. Once we explored and worked in the garden with our senses and emotions, then we can deepen our knowledge studying on books: we prefer moving from practice to theory, from body to mind and not the other way around. As many of our organization are training in permaculture, we adopt its principles and convey them to children through work in the garden. As the EU already worked on permaculture with children, we take inspiration from the Children in Permaculture project. Permaculture is an approach to the design of human settlement based on the observation of natural ecosystems. Our method therefore springs from the interaction of permaculture and non-formal education, summarized by Zavalloni's work on so-called "peace gardens". We think that methods like the Children in Permaculture one and the "Snail Pedagogy" one are more inclusive for all intelligence types and enable us to face the challenges posed by nature and play deficit disorders that children living in the city tend to develop.
As we work on sustainability, we take inspiration from the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. We believe that the first step to change is quality education accesible for everyone, no matter the financial or social status. That is why we do not ask a fee for attending the Solar House and try our best to create a safe and peaceful environment where learning comes easily through practical work and play. We want to raise awareness about the limits of our urban lifestyle based on blind and fast consumption and learn how not to take resources for granted by practicing an alternative lifestyle. We want to create with children a sustainable household and educate ourselves to an approach, a vision that may be applied to any daily action to make them a little more sustainable. We want to share our knowledge about a water filtration system and learn how not to take this good for granted. We want to share knowledge about agriculture in order to make people autonomous in growing their food. We want to install solar panels to share as the knowledge about them as the energy we will produce. We work on outdoor education and play-based learning because we understand that nature deficit and play deficit disorders undermine our mental and physical health.
Our initiative begins in spring of 2022 with an afterschool called "The Secret Garden". A group of 6-8 children aged from 7 to 10 years visited the Flying House every Tuesday from 5 pm to 7 pm. On that occasion, we prepared beds where we planted mint, zucchini and tomatoes. We invited parents as well and organized walks in the neighborhood to map trees from which we could get food, such as a cherry tree. Since we found a broken bycicle pump, we got the idea to organize a workshop about air pressure. We organized workshops to create traditional toys from recycled materials. As parents often brought us something to eat, we took the habit to end the day having a snack together. As the crops grew, we share the fruits among us. Children gave us feedbacks saying the activities in the garden helped them relaxing. We then felt we needed the advice of an expert to design our garden, we organized an event called "Neighborhood garden" with permaculture designer Andrea Minchio and promoted it throughout the neighborhood thanks to the help of ACER and ARCI. The event attracted a group of scouts that is now coming to the Flying House every saturday afternoon. The place attracted a group of younger and older people which is spontaneously meeting every saturday morning to weave wicket baskets. We are working to offer a twice a week afternoon appointment for children to help them with homework and to work in the garden, and a monthly event or workshop open to everyone starting from spring. The next steps are building canopies to protect the crops from the exceptional summer heat; buy photovoltaic panels; create a children journal to document the activities; ask permits to close the street to the traffic and organize sunday lunches; organize workshops such as puppet theatre, illustration, construction of bird feeders, yoga, water and soil management and more. We expect to be helpful for families and to contribute to the physical, mental and social well-being of the neighborhood.
We believe that the focus on permaculture and our will to apply that knowledge practically will bring to the developing of knowledge and competences concerning sustainability. Permaculture is based on observation of natural systems and the designing of human settlements based on them. We expect that children educated to observe peacefully the harmony and balance of natural systems will also develop a consciuousness about the imbalance we usually live by. We want to strengthen the competencies concerning active observation, careful attention and active listening through tools mutuated by permaculture, mindfulness methods and play-based learning. We think that this will naturally lead to a development of ecological awareness.
