by Vito Mastrogiacomo | Nov 20, 2018 | Event
In an increasingly polluted world the local communities bring with them a huge, but unfortunately often neglected, potential for the development of social innovation initiatives aimed at a radical change in favor of renewable energy.
The seminar “Local Communities and Social Innovation for the Energy Transition” to be held at JRC Ispra Site (Ispra, Varese, Italy) on 22 and 23 November 2018 aims to study this potential and research recommendations aimed at obtaining a better exploitation of energy resources.
Furthermore, existing obstacles and conditions that favor or undermine the potential of local communities in the development of remedies of this kind will be discussed, as well as new models of innovation governance useful for the growth, consolidation and dissemination of social innovation initiatives in local communities.
We will also discuss the characteristics that allow local energy communities to be recognized in the panorama of EU regulations and how they can be disseminated through European policy. Some of the main existing examples of initiatives of local energy communities developed in the EU will be discussed below.
Finally, particular attention will be given to the important role that can be played by municipalities, both as local energy communities, as facilitators and as promoters of social innovation initiatives.
At the seminar will be present: Nicola Labanca (JRC Energy Efficiency and Renewables Unit), Sabine Hielscher (University of Sussex – UK), Josh Roberts (RESCoop.eu, Belgium), Paolo Bertoldi (JRC Energy Efficiency and Renewables Unit), Christian Iaione (LUISS Guido Carli University, IT), David Hammerstein (Commons Network), Fritz Reusswig (Potsdman Institute for Climate Impact Research, DE), : Daniele Paci (JRC Energy Efficiency and Renewables Unit), Jan Steinkohl (European Commission, DG ENER, Brussels), Dirk Hendricks (European Renewable Energy Federation, Brussels), Nikolaos Hatziargyriou (National Technical University of Athens, EL), Fabio Monforti (JRC Air and Climate Unit), Anna Mengolini (Energy Security, Distribution and Markets Unit, Joint Research Centre), Sarah Rieseberg (Arepo Consult, DE), Chiara Candelise (IEFE Bocconi University, IT), Gianluca Ruggieri (Insubria University, IT), Dick Magnusson (Linköping University, SE), Verhoeven Sofie (Ghent Municipality, BE), Lourdes Berdié (Network for Energy Sovereignty – Barcelona).
Professor Iaione, co-founder of LabGov, will present in the second discussion panel “Governance and Local Communities’ Social Innovation: which governance
approaches are needed to stimulate this innovation?” on the “Pooling Economy, Tech Justice and Urban Experimentalism for a Human Rights-based Approach to the Sharing Economy”.
by Alessia Palladino | Oct 9, 2017 | The Urban Media Lab
Mobility represents a fundamental right, intimately tied to the quality of life in cities, hamlets and suburbs, occupying a large portion of the community’s land.
In this regard, the increase expected by 2050 of over 66% (compared to 54% in 2014) of the world population that will reside in cities must be taken into account. Indeed, people living in urban areas spend a considerable amount of time on public transportation, as stated by a current, exentsive study, carried out by Ipsos and the Boston Consulting Group in ten of the major European Union countries, looking at transport infrastructure.
The research shows that:
- a European citizen employes, on average, 9 hours and 35 minutes to move every week;
- there is a strong car dependence, which is the mean of transport mainly used.
The European citizens seem to be, overall, quite satisfied of the single infrastructures of mobility as the railroads, the road net, the system of public transportation, but they are very dissatisfied instead of the level of interconnection existing among these infrastructures. Furthermore, currently transportation systems lack efficiency, facing up new – bottom up – needs required.
Neverthless, transportation is often used to be centered on private vehicles. This choice, however, does not result very efficient: from a user’s perspective, it usually provides limited transportation options, but it also leads to severe congestion and considerable gas expenses, especially in densely populated urban areas, due to traffic jams, lack of parking space and high costs due to increasing fuel prices[1].
These concerns, as can be seen, are too crucial to be ignored[2]. Improving roads could ease temporarily congestion levels; however, the study of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre found no significant impacts on reducing congestion.
In this regard, a truly sustainable mobility system should be necessary; it needs a virtuous circle, produced by investments in infrastructures more interconnected, in a way which provides local, regional and inter-regional accessibility at an affordable cost to families and businesses, while serving community needs for social and economic exchange.
This goal, however, couldn’t be achieved without a change of approach (even methodological) by both public spheres and community, supported by the development of the new technologies as an important contribution to road safety too. Transportation, in conclusion, shouldn’t just be considered as a goal in and of itself, but as a wider powerful tool, useful for the development of livable, productive, equitable and healthy communities, in accordance with the new and more active role played by community.
Transportation, as well as pollution, road congestion and many other concerns mentioned above, constitute issues not only related to the European framework, because they also affect the American landscape.
In view of the above, many American and European initiatives can be mentioned, respectively encouraging projects among Departments of Transportation, Community Partnership Program and citizen awareness, even to ensure cities would remain a desirable place to live.
The first illustrative initiative, above all, is the development of Smart Transportation. Namely, the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Departments of Transportation partnered in the development of the Smart Transportation Guidebook in 2008. It achieved to integrate the planning and design of streets and highways in order to foster the development of sustainable and livable communities.
In this regard, the concept of Smart transportation was taken into account: it means incorporating both financial and environmental constraints, community needs and aspirations, land use, as a new approach to planning and designing roadways. Thus, transportation investments should be tailored to the specific needs of each project, while the adequate determination of solution’s design is measured case by case, pursuant to the whole financial, community, land use, transportation, and environmental context.
Better transportation solutions, however, are considered as a result of a deeper process involving a multi-disciplinary team, considering a wide range of solutions, works closely with the community. Smart Transportation also encompasses network connectivity, and access and corridor management. It would help both states and communities to adapt to the new financial context of constrained resources.
This initiative, however, sheds light upon the new role of DOTs, which have to support Vibrant Communities into the delivery of transportation projects. This goal was a key concept of the project Building Projects that build Communities, carried out by the Washington State Department of Transportation in 2003.
Even if DOTs are faced with economic, health, environmental and social challenges, they can’t effectively support many communities’ programme, as active transportation, defined as humanpowered modes of transportation, involving walking and bicycling, but also skate boarding, canoeing, roller-skating. In these cases, DOTs’ responsibility is often restricted in many states to the state highway network, so their efforts to support active transportation is limited to the state network.
Besides these initiatives, closely related to infrastructures, EU institutions aim at raising and fostering citizen awareness, through rewards, on the quality of the urban environment where people live, in order to promote a shift towards more sustainable and healthy mobility choices. In this regard, technologies have an essential role[3].
MUV – Mobility Urban Values – is a Research and Innovation Action funded by the European Commission under the call Horizon2020 MG-4.5-2016.
The MUV system will result from the combination of:
- behavioural change techniques;
- new technologies;
- data science;
- co-design approaches.
The solution will include a mobile app, which will track users’ daily routes and assign points for sustainable behaviours and a network of sensing stations designed by the makers’ community. Urban commuters, from a set of six different urban neighbourhoods, spread across Europe, will co-create and then test different game dynamics; finally, their achievements will be rewarded by a network of local businesses that will benefit from the advertising provided by the MUV platform.
The methodology used reflects the Gamification, ICT and data science to translate people’s needs into new sustainable mobility solutions.
Mobility and environmental data are gathered via the mobile app and the monitoring stations; they are all released as Open Data: data visualization can simplify complex information about urban mobility and support decision making; it will allow policymakers to enhance planning processes and civic hackers to build new services able to improve cities’ quality of life in a more effective way.
In particular, the MUV solution will be open, co-created with a strong learning community of users and stakeholders and piloted in six different European neighbourhoods:
- Buitenveldert in Amsterdam;
- Sant Andreu in Barcelona;
- the historic district of the Portuguese county of Fundao;
- Muide-Meulestede in the harbour of Ghent;
- the new area of Jätkäsaari in Helsinki;
- the area of the Historic Centre in Palermo.
This approach will allow to reach specific objectives, as understanding the neighborhoods’ peculiarities and emerging values to define an effective behavior change strategy. Co-designing site-specific solutions will foster better and more liveable urban environments, developing scalable digital solutions and technologies to improve globally the experience of urban mobility, integrating new co-created mobility solutions into urban policy-making and planning processes at neighborhood level.
Raising awareness among citizens on the importance of sustainable and healthy mobility choices could be a successful approach to reduce private vehicular traffic and its negative externalities, encouraging local consumption. In this regard, MUV builds on the experience of trafficO2, an Italian research-action project co-funded in 2012 by a grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and carried out by PUSH – MUV’s Project Coordinator – in the city of Palermo in the last three years. The experimentation involved 2.000 students of the University of Palermo and a network of 100 local businesses, and showed a reduction of the carbon emissions associated to the active users of more than 40%.
Data and sharing mobility and environmental data to build an effective decision support system for multiple stakeholders, bringing the whole experiment to the market through an innovative business model in order to improve urban transportation in crowded neighborhoods and cities all over the world. This research embrace a model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation, but it also raises the question of data ownership and sovereignty.
La mobilità ricopre un ruolo fondamentale nella vita di ogni cittadino. La crescita demografica, l’inquinamento e la congestione, nonché la diffusione delle nuove tecnologie, inducono un ripensamento degli ordinari approcci in materia, ma soprattutto del rapporto tra il pubblico e i cittadini.
[1] Sahami Shirazi, Alireza & Kubitza, Thomas & Alt, Florian & Pfleging, Bastian & Schmidt, Albrecht, WEtransport: a context-based ride sharing platform. 425-426 (2010), doi 10.1145/1864431.1864469.
[2] C. Iaione, The tragedy of urban roads: Saving Cities from Choking, Calling on Citizens to Combat Climate Change, 37 Fordham Urb. L.J. 889 (2009).
[3] Zhang Z., Beibei L., A quasi experimental Estimate of the Impact of P2P Transportation Platforms on Urban Consumer Patterns, in Proceedings of KDD ’17, August 13-17, 2017, Halifax, NS, Canada, , 9 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3097983.3098058.
by Cristiano Gatti | Jan 13, 2017 | The Urban Media Lab
In urban development, gentrification is a very important process that can transform the city, both socially and economically. Gentrification process in urban areas has several positive aspects (buildings are renovated and beautified, there are more jobs opportunities, more retail and service business, etc.) but also some negatives ones such as the loss of affordable housing and public assets (including parks, park buildings, former schools, library buildings, community gardens, etc.) and city-owned vacant lots are in the crosshairs of developers. This is the case of the Lower East Side in NYC that it is now one of the hottest real estate markets in Manhattan.
According to Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, the state chapter of the national civic engagement and government accountability organization, in urban development, communities play the role of underdog, on the contrary, the government and real estate developers run the show (especially the latter).
So, it is important to analyze what set of organizing tools community-led organizations have built to help grassroots groups compete with private real estate developers when it comes to determining the future of publicly owned assets across the city.
An interesting example is given by Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center, a group that provides legal, participatory research and policy support to strengthen the work of grassroots and community-based groups in New York City to dismantle racial, economic and social oppression and 596 Acres, an organization that builds tools to help neighbors see vacant lots as opportunities and create needed green spaces that become focal points for community organizing and civic engagement. These groups, in collaboration with Common Cause New York, are working on a huge project, named NYCommons.
According to the website, NYCommons is basically a new online map and database of all the public assets that helps New Yorkers impact decisions about public land and buildings in their neighborhoods and provides some type of potential real estate development opportunity. According to this statement, it’s hard to define precisely what it includes, but Paula Segal, founder of 596 Acres claims that, if it is true that in cities most of infrastructure and assets are shared (the subways, the roads, the sidewalks, the water, housing, etc.) so, the platform goes on and on to the point where privately owned property can start to seem like the real outlier.
This idea was born about three or four years ago, Mrs. Lerner says, when NYCommons partners started to see a pattern in the organizing around the future of public assets (i.e. a proposed soccer stadium in Queens, the Midtown Library in Manhattan and the main Brooklyn Public Library Branch). They “started thinking about the fact that all of these separate challenges had similar underlying policy issues that have to do with how does government think about commonly owned, shared assets.” In fact, although residents were spending a lot of time and energy, often they didn’t received benefits from these proposals involving public assets.
At the same time, there was some movement: 596 Acres supported some grassroots groups that organized around 36 former publicly owned vacant lots, which turned in declared permanent parks at the end of 2015. In addition to this, 596 Acres has developed a number of tools and created resources around city-owned vacant land: we are talking about Living Lots NYC and Urban Reviewer. The former is an online map and database that provides a useful platform for organizers to connect and maintain records of organizing activity around each lot, the latter is a catalogue of over 150 urban renewal plans that NYC adopted to get federal funding for making way for new public and private development.
In accordance with that, the specific purpose of NYCommons is indeed to create an expanded tool set to serve grassroots organizing around the broader universe of public assets in NYC. They decided to start by asking people in 10 neighborhoods and they finally found a great deal of interest for sharing best practices and connecting with others doing similar work. For testing their job, NYCommons chose three neighborhoods for pilot including the Sara D. Roosevelt Park in Lower East Side. This park presents a very strong story of citizen empowerment and, over time, that participation has contributed to the creation of Sara D. Roosevelt Park Community Coalition (SDRPC) with the aim to bring “together local stakeholders who seek to foster community-based stewardship by providing a voice for all who love the park and the communities it serves”.
Kathleen Webster, long-term resident on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and president of the SDRPC affirms that documentation, workshop facilitation and other resources to begin developing a tool kit provided by NYCommons were very helpful as a draft basis from which to go. The fact that all pilot sites will continue to shape the final NYCommons tool kit and the online platform and this pushes other sites to upload their data into the platform is the strenght of this project. Organizing track records provide vital talking points for future hearings and op-eds and community meetings.
In conclusion, the words of Mrs. Lerner are suitable to describe the characteristics of this projects: “Hopefully NYCommons can provide an entrée into a fairly sophisticated, experienced, citywide network of groups who are all thinking along the same lines, putting pressure on government to be responsive, with a similar vocabulary and set of expectations about public assets serving the public”.
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NYCommons è solo l’ultimo degli strumenti forniti ai gruppi grassroots di New York che lavorano per garantire ai cittadini la libera fruizione di spazi pubblici con un alto valore sociale. Nello specifico, si tratta di una mappa e un database online continuamente aggiornati secondo la dinamica bottom-up per mappare gli assets pubblici di NYC.
by Chiara Fratalia | Jul 21, 2016 | Commons Press
Longtime LabGov member Elena de Nictolis and environmental law expert Chiara Prevete wrote an article on the agendadigitale.eu “Open Government Forum” section. The article describes the modus operandi adopted by LabGov in fostering the trasformation of our cities in co-cities with a collaborative governance.
The “Co-City” action carried on by LabGov promotes collaboration as a technology using “incentive prizes, crowdsourcing, and citizen science to advance national priorities, collaborating with civil societies including companies, universities, foundations, non-profits, and the public”. This action also includes a methodology to develop a collaborative government structure, which enables various kinds of collective action: not only the voluntary, individual ones, neither that of associations, but also those originated by solidarity and by the shared management of services of common interest.
The final aim of this action is to transform the cities into “co-cities“, that is collaborative cities, by means of the implementation of the governance of the commons design principles, outlined by the Nobel Prize Elinor Ostrom. This strategy aims at creating a quintuple helix institutional structure (an approach recognized by EU’s new Urban Agenda). This structure stimulates public-private partnerships, by involving five types of actors: civic (social innovators and active citizens), social (third sector organizations), cognitive (cultural institutions, schools and universities), public (public institutions) and private (local enterprises and industries).
The methodological protocol is a key-element of this strategy, and it is divided into five steps:
- constitution of a civic collaboration unit, formed by experts in different subjects, to interact with the PA and support the whole process;
- social innovation mapping, by involving citizens and exploring the territory;
- co-design paths, to coordinate the projects found in the previous step between them and with the city;
- definition of polycentric and collaborative governance tools, tailored to the specific situation;
- monitoring and evaluation of those governance tools.
As examples of this strategy and its adaptation to various local conditions, please visit www.co-roma.it, www.co-bologna.it, www.co-battipaglia.it, www.co-mantova.it.
If you are interested in this subject, please explore the full article here.
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Elena de Nictolis e Chiara Prevete, in un articolo pubblicato su agendadigitale.eu, hanno esposto i principi e il modus operandi che guidano l’azione Co-città portata avanti da LabGov negli ultimi anni. Quest’azione mira a trasformare le nostre città in città collaborative, basate sulla gestione cooperativa dei beni comuni urbani, risultante dall’interazione efficiente e costante tra i cinque attori chiave della società (modello a quintupla elica). Questa strategia si avvale inoltre di un protocollo metodologico volto a elaborare e applicare strumenti di governance policentrica fatti su misura per il contesto in cui si troveranno a operare.
by Ieva Punyte | Jul 18, 2016 | The Urban Media Lab
On the 15th of July, Unipolis Foundation in collaboration with Fitzcarraldo Foundation and Make a Cube association organised a second mentoring workshop for the 15 finalists (the description of finalists see below, or at: http://culturability.org/notizie/finalisti-bando-culturability/) who have been selected from the “Culturability” call – an Italian national call to support innovative projects in cultural and creative fields to promote urban regeneration processes (see more about Culturability at: http://culturability.org/).
The third day of the workshop series was complemented by Urban Law professor at Fordham University Sheila Foster and LabGov coordinator, prof. Christian Iaione’s presentation as well as an interactive discussion with the audience. Scholars focused on bringing the attention of the 15 progressive cultural innovators to the idea of urban commons and, more specifically, addressing the collaborative governance of commons as the main target in the urban regeneration processes of today.
Coming from the school of thought on commons, Sheila Foster began with questions of what exactly an urban common is and what does it mean to the society and the city as a whole. “Urban commons are what city inhabitants share daily, in fact, these commons are of a deeply democratic nature, because they have an open access meaning that the usage of them is non-excludable”. From a property law perspective it is very important to distinguish urban commons from what is conventionally understood as common pool resources within the field of environmental law. Such distinction is necessary, because these commons differ in terms of their nature, characteristics and value that they create to the society, and hence this affects the character of their governance. “Urban commons are city spaces, such as squares, parks, abandoned or non-utilised buildings, streets, vacant lots, even cultural institutions, for instance, museums, and other urban open-access units – spaces of a truly common good nature”- addressed S. Foster. “These spaces are unique because they generate value, that is precisely of a social and cultural origin and a wide range of city actors have a stake or an interest in these urban commons. Thus, by preserving commons together, we can contribute to an inclusive and sustainable well-being co-creation by and for city inhabitants”.
On the other hand, scholar stressed that commons are not a simple concept in law or theory. “Commons are neither private nor public, it is something in between. Therefore, the question of governance of the commons is condemned to be a challenge from both practitioners and scholars’ viewpoints”. Having addressed the “Tragedy of Commons” (see H. Garrets), S. Foster emphasised that urban commons are not something that should be governed either by private or public, because these commons are not necessarily in threat of over-consumption or degradation like natural commons, as some scholars suggest. The opposite – open-access urban spaces, which increase multi-stakeholder usage, even enhance shared social, economic and environmental value and contribute to the so-called “Comedy of Commons” (see C. Rose). “The issue is that today every urban common is overly regulated, today nothing is an open access and non-excludable anymore and having mentioned the value of urban commons the re-opening and collaboratively governing urban commons is a highly valuable process for all stakeholders. The opening urban commons – contributes to the stimulation of a social value to the community. To add, the value of opening up the commons is directly linked to the production of culture, of housing. Commons are not about tragedy, rather about solidarity and shared value” – stressed S. Foster.
Christian Iaione took over the debate stressing that today there is a growing need to rethink economy, institutions and focus on the energy that the community possesses. “The community should recognise the value of commons. It is not the tangible commons that matter, it is the collaborative governance of commons and the value to the community that it produces”- said C. Iaione. Professor focusing on governance of commons stated that between the state and the market there is a room for experimentation and this is the space of commons that connect different stakeholders. So far, what the overly regulated cityscape has produced is scarcity and collaboration, or collective action, as stressed by E. Ostrom, yet in an urban context, is the way to introduce new approaches to governance and eliminate the problem of scarcity. Despite the fact that “[w]orking on commons requires constant experimentation, what we have accomplished thus far is writing the Regulation which is a strong step towards the recognition of urban commons at the city level and the introduction of collaborative urban governance”.
Lastly, by sharing experiences from the Parco Centocelle project in Rome and the project on #CollaboraToscana, C. Iaione emphasized that the governance of commons is an arrangement between 5 different actors (or “quintuple helix” model, see more about this in “City as a Commons“), where (1) the unorganized public (e.g. social innovators, active citizens, urban regenerators, urban innovators, etc.), (2) public authorities, (3) businesses, (4) civil society organisations, and (5) knowledge institutions (e.g. schools, universities, cultural institutions, etc.) work together to establish public-private-community partnerships and contribute to the preservation of the cultural heritage and the co-creation of the social as well as economic value.
Laboratory for Collaborative Governance of Urban Commons appreciates the energy and the ideas that 15 finalists of the Culturability Call possess. These finalists are promising examples of urban regeneration processes and therefore are strongly supported by LabGov.
The information about the finalists:
An initiative which regards culture in proposing a hybrid agricultural production system which creates a lively ecosystem. This, while restoring the role of not only agricultural production, but also of culture, contributes to the creation of welfare and strong community. This is a biological and social farmhouse of innovation and agriculture to improve the integration and employment, aggregation of space and the production of cultural places. It creates a sustainable local supply chain between farmers as well as it is a museum contributing to the regeneration of an area.
A non-profit organisation, founded by people who share a dream: to return the Cascina Sant’Ambrogio – an important place of agriculture and economy. This place regarded as poor and outdated due to the transformation of society is just an error of perspective. The Cascina is place rich in culture, memory and practices that need to be rethought by integrating them with the needs of present times. Citizens must not just be consumers and voters, but producers and active citizens able to concretely transform a portion of reality. This path does not come from nothing, but by a gradual emergence of the collective application that, with more and more insistently, asks sustainable and alternative lifestyles, as well as adequate opportunities.
- Caserma Archeologica + Art Sweet Art – San Sepolcro (Arezzo) | artsweetart.net
This is a platform of artists to display their works in private homes to visitants. A homeowner can choose an artist via the website artsweetart.it from those who have joined up to the initiative. After assessing the home, the artist decides what type of art work to display in the new location. The art has to fulfil both the customers’ needs (the house as a location, the artwork’s theme, etc.) as well as those of the artist (who is invited to carry out a piece of art which fully respects their artistic expression). The initial drafting phase is followed by the artist creating their work. The artist is hosted in the customers’ private home, an unprecedented experience which influences the creative process. During the artists’ stay, the organisers-together with the hosts’ family- promote the art in construction and facilitate workshops in schools, local cultural guides, gatherings with friends, etc.
The projects seeks to reform the system of support the cultural industry in Italy. It highlights the critical issues and illustrates the best solutions.
The project promotes different cultural tradition lines belonging to all Italian regions. Through musical concerts, plays, lectures and seminars, many of the popular culture heritages met within the framework of demonstrations made in Pisa, which due to its characteristics naturally prepares to host a dialogue between diverse communities and different cultures.
The project that seeks to create a network of people and spaces, such as, the abandoned buildings and underused of sites, with the objective of denunciation of situations of abandonment and then revaluation of the buildings by putting the spotlight on forgotten places, abandoned or fallen into disuse, showing its potential for reuse, it will foster a new collective interest in these spaces. This is a project that wants to revolutionise the way of seeing and understanding the assets disposed of a city, turning it into a resource.
This is a residence project that was born in a former industrial factory, able to provide hospitality for the whole year to travellers and tourists, and simultaneously transform into a school on urban regeneration: a “training of the mind” in the heart of central Italy, where two cities, Terni and Rieti meet. The idea is to experiment with new solutions and re-design territorial integration policy.
- LAB+: Piazza Gasparotto Urban Living Lab – Padova | copiu.it/lab
The project that focus on workers with different skills to meet, share ideas and expertise in urban regeneration practices. Gasparotto Square in a space of co-design living between citizens, private organisations and public institutions. To achieve this objective, the project makes the system a series of micro-actions of re-appropriation of public space: the urban expansion, construction of a weekly market of organic producers, involvement of local residents through the social theatre and community, realisation of works public art, use of storytelling and the creation of micro-community events.
- Mana Grika – Hub Culturale della Grecìa Salentina – Calimera (Lecce) | managrika.it
It is a Cultural Hub of the territory that will be made available to local communities to create initiatives with a strong cultural and social impact spaces. The main objectives are the territorial promotion and enhancement of the local culture through affiliated initiatives for social activation of communities and by creating a synergistic network among all organisations working in the area.
- MUFANT, MuseoLab del Fantastico e della Fantascienza di Torino – Torino | mufant.it
This is a project by a team of professionals and industry experts, academics, journalists and researchers who are aspired to imagine a world, in which people are aware that this is just one of the possible worlds. This is being accomplished by the multiple permanent or temporary exhibitions, performances, conferences, events, and such, in the MusueoLAB.
Piazza dei Colori is one of Co-Bologna “construction sites”, and the aim is to turn it into a collaborative district that could later include different realities from Croce dei Biacco and all the migrants that live there.
The project aims to put an end to the progressive abandonment and degradation of one of the most prestigious and representative testimonies of the assets of the industrial archaeology resulting from the old age epic mining of Sardinia, which UNESCO declared a universal value in 1997 . With the completion of the project they intend to preserve and make available the public buildings of great architectural value at the Sella Well located in the mining complex-Monteponi on the outskirts of the city of Iglesias. The work of protection and restoration of the industrial archaeological heritage will accompany the exhibition. The abundance and beauty of the available space will also allow to set up an area for conference activities with its audiovisual and multimedia equipment. With the completion of the project, as well as regeneration of the museum space, the site will be returned to the local community.
Station Chiaravalle project focuses on the regeneration of the unused gym of neighbourhood school and creation of a hybrid space in order to host a community hub: operational production based on cultural content, artistic home and an urban laboratory. Additionally, it reinterprets the disused railway line along the Vettabbia channel as space in transformation. Lastly, it activates a participatory observation with the local community and generates landscape projects and custody of places and common open spaces for the enjoyment of the area as a landscape for immersive experiences.
The project which has an aim to enter into the social and productive fabric of Rome and spread to further cities. It focuses to put in place cultural practices and job opportunities that would promote inclusion and integration of those individuals who are in need for help and solidarity. It is a job creation, but also the artistic expression, which can also become a source of income, are the ways in which we intend to intervene in the social and cultural fabric of Rome.
This is a non-profit organization active in the field of contemporary art and culture both at a local and international level. It produces and organises art exhibitions, theatre shows, publications, audio-visual works, training and residency programs with the aim to encourage artistic mobility and the promotion of artists on an international scale. It intends to invent original devices in order to promote projects and enable processes that mobilise unconventional strategies and plans of intervention in the artistic and cultural system. The members of the core working group are artists who chose not to limit their activities and their identities to “the creation of artworks”, but to work actively – and independently – for the activation of shared processes and the redefinition of the role of the artist in society. The project starts from an idea of hospitality and sharing to create a symbolic place where experience and the individual journey are set aside to make way for the development of a collective strategy. The network of people intertwined constitutes a network able to relate with institutions, questioning established practices and models, with the aim of generating concrete outcomes/results in the community.
LabGov congratulates all finalists and looks forward to new collaborations!
Secondary sources:
- Garrett, Hardin, (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons
- Iaione, Christian. (2016) “The CO-City: Sharing, Collaborating, Cooperating, and Commoning in the City.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2: 415-55.
- Ostrom, E. (1990) “Governing The Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action”, Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research, Volume 6, Issue 4, 235-252
- Rose, C. (1986) The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce and Inherently Public Property, 53
