Riscatti di città (Redeeming Cities)

TWM Factory and H501 City Hub, in collaboration with CoopCulture, investigate the city of Rome, focusing on the search for places and ways of regeneration. From this year, the mapping is also online and interactive thanks to the crowdmapping platform “Riscatti di città” co-created through the civic social network FirstLife.

Launched on the occasion of the “Riscatti di città” exhibition at Palazzo Merulana (April 2022), the mapping brings to light the disused buildings undergoing redevelopment (around 430) and the informal cultural centres (over 250) that are proving to have a strong regenerative power for territories and communities.

The tool is an opportunity not only to involve citizens in the mapping process, but to think of regeneration as an opportunity to experiment with new governance models that allow all urban actors, including citizens, to be active participants in the process of social recovery, ecocentrism and digital transition of the contemporary urban environment.

CO3 - Digital Disruptive Technologies to Co-create, Co-produce and Co-manage Open Public Services along with Citizens

The project aims at evaluating risks and benefits of disruptive technologies such as Blockchain, Augmented Reality, Geolocated Social Network, tools for Liquid Democracy and Gamification to co-create, co-produce and co-manage public services between Public Administrations and citizens.

CO3 will implement a unique infrastructure with all these technologies to facilitate the cooperation between PA and citizens: by sharing information on a crowdsourced map, manipulating financial objects with the Blockchain, online deliberation, Augmented Reality and Gamification techniques.

Paris, Athens and Turin will be the pilot sites to test a new model of interaction between citizens and PA based on 3 parameters: social and cultural, economic, legal with a focus on privacy and data protection.

In the project FirstLife is the main user interface as a tool of discussion, coordination, data collection, testing of coupon and discounts made with blockchain, active participation in online deliberation.

Co-city

Co-city is the winner of the first Urban Innovation Action Call of the EU.

Co-city is intended to break the self-reinforcing circle of poverty, social segregation in deprived neighbourhoods and lack of participation. It achieves this by supporting the development of an innovative, polycentric “commons-based urban welfare” composed of generative communities centred on urban commons, low-cost service co-production, social mixing, and care of public spaces.

The Municipality of Torino opened a public call for citizens to collect proposals related to the co-management of urban commons with local administrations. The authoritative approach is replaced by a collaborative one that considers citizens as potential changemakers, agents of virtuous circular processes of commoners’ welfare. Meanwhile, the public sector evolves from being a service provider to being an enabler and a partner.

47 proposals have been submitted to realise different kinds of intervention such as regeneration of buildings in abandon or the care of public spaces.

Within Co-city, the University of Turin is responsible with different departments for the Co-City Toolkit, a guideline for legal and technological tools implemented in the pilot use-case.

FirstLife was used to map urban commons co-managed by citizens and administrators, but also as a tool to coordinate, collect and share all projects.

The blockchain technology has been experimented with financial tools to support the local economy of urban commons: exchange of tokens as prepaid cards, coupons, fidelity cards, buying groups, fundraising initiatives.

Urban Alphabet

The purpose of the project is to increase the cultural offer in Borgo Vittoria e Madonna di Campagna, two neighbourhoods in the city of Turin, creating a shared Urban Alphabet. This represents a connection between different cultures, and uses music and theatre workshops as a different way to live school and public spaces.

The Computer Science Department supports the participatory process for urban and cultural regeneration actions with FirstLife. The map shows the places identified by students as relevant for micro urban regeneration activities, and reports on the actions and workshops done.

Riscopri Risorse

The project is managed by the Association LaQup, in collaboration with 6 municipalities in the Turin area and involving schools and citizens. The purpose of the project is to give back value to little urban spaces, as gardens or small squares, that are important in the everyday life in the neighbourhood with:

• Education: raising the citizen awareness on the territorial potentialities through seminars, study visits, educational activities with schools;
• Shared mapping of the urban spaces and their use: with FirstLife citizens and students reported more than 250 important places to be improved and valorised. The map is gradually enriched thanks to workshop in schools and public events;
• Reuse and Sharing spaces: schools draw-up proposals to reuse spaces, organizing micro-regeneration actions in public spaces involving citizens.

M.A.D. - Teenagers mapping for Urban Regeneration

The main objective of the project promoted by the Municipality of Torino was to stimulate more the involvement of the teenagers in the public local life, through urban regeneration interventions; to make teenagers able to explain the city in a critical way, building representations of urban spaces from their point of view.

The project was developed in three phases: territorial analysis, participatory co-design, fulfilment of the project in practice.

Students from high schools used FirstLife for a participatory mapping highlighting their personal point of view living the city, also bringing into the school a deliberation about technologies as a tool for participatory citizenship and web education, increasing their digital skills.

Openlabs

In 2016-17 took place many openlabs to experiment FirstLife in use-cases and real projects related to urban regeneration, valorisation of local resources, community services and so on. Each openlab saw the participation of different actors and similar projects, sharing challenges and ideas to facilitate social innovation and change.

The initiative involved participants in the co-design of a unique social network, contributing actively to enrich the platform with ideas and proposals for coordination, monitoring and evaluation of local projects.

Citytelling - The real-thought-lived city

The lab addressed architects and intellectuals with experience on buildings, public spaces, neighborhoods; artists and writers wanted to give voice to the places; to citizens and tourists that live the city everyday for the first time. Citytelling hosted projects and initiatives related to community mapping, with a strong involvement of citizens to share and discover local resources. FirstLife contributed to giving visibility and facilitating connections between projects and contents.

Resources - Local enterprises for the territory

The focus is the promotion of commercial, handcraft and professional activities in the productive and tourist ecosystem in the city. Resources tested the civic social network FirstLife as a tool to help small enterprises to collaborate with other companies in their networks, as a new participative model to share stories and the professional evolution of the enterprise collecting customers and workers point of view.

Regeneration - Urban regeneration paths

The lab addressed associations, citizen’s groups, local institutions involved in urban regeneration actions in the city, from people to people. Citizens participated to find innovative ways to reuse public spaces or urban commons. FirstLife was the tool to represent the entire regeneration process of a place, collecting and sharing activities and synergies with a participatory perspective.

WeGovernment - New models of shared governance

The openlab involved public administration and local institutions that tested FirstLife in local projects and initiatives regarding the co-design and co-management of public services and spaces, the co-production of new inclusive and integrated services. FirstLife was also tested in the two european projects WeGovNow and Co-City, based on a new model of governance and collaboration between PA and citizens.

Communities - Collaboration in the community services

Communities involved association, cooperatives, spontaneous groups active in the field of proximity and social services, but also projects with a strong impact for the local communities. It was a digital lab to experiment, with FirstLife, new models of internal and external coordination among association, companies, and local institutions in the same sector, improving the social innovation with a participatory approach.

EduLife - School, web education and territory

A lab for schools and educational institutions to facilitate the collaboration among teachers, staff students, families and other territorial organizations. EduLife is a virtual archive of projects developed by schools or classes to improve the continuity between the educational paths and the coordination between the different participating classes. FirstLife mapped and collected the projects from classes and schools; as a civic social network can also be a teaching tool for web education.

Transformation - The changing city

Transformation involved public administration, designer, local committees, facilitators in projects concerning new models to design and manage transformation areas through a participatory process, both on the territory and online. Goal of the project: a more involvement of citizens in the local policy extended the participatory processes, increasing the collaboration between civil society and administration.

Miramap - report, share, design

Miramap is the result of collaboration from DAD Department of the Polytechnic of Turin and of the Computer Science Department of the University of Torino. focused on the neighbourhood of Mirafiori.

The general objective of the project was to improve and innovate the communication and transparency between the local Administration and the citizens by using new technologies, to build new models of interaction able to identify critical points and potentiality of the local context, cooperating to find new solutions, adopting solutions to improve the co-management of common goods.

In the project FirstLife was used as a tool to report critical points at the neighbourhood scale, making requests or advice to valorize territorial needs.

Link FB : https://www.facebook.com/miramap.polito