During the last five days, the students from the Master participated in a workshop held by Liat Rogel and Valentina D'Addato under the patronage of the Milan Municipality. The theme of the workshop was urban resilience, proposed by a special department of the Municipality that is working on having Milan ready to confront possible emergencies, shocks or stresses for the city in different areas including housing. In particular, the students were asked to work on future scenarios for how to better utilize unused spaces in public housing complexes, a pressing issue that regards several neighborhoods of the city.
In the beginning, the problem was tackled by performing quick field explorations divided into groups, visiting particularly problematic or interesting areas of the city from a housing/community perspective. After the explorations, the students, under guidance, developed four topics to start ideating, resulting from a work of clustering and coming up with "how might we" questions. Each group then worked on one of the topics for two days, building the scenarios to be presented on Friday on a mini-exhibition consisting of prototypes, slides and a fictional newspaper article.
The first topic was about quality time in the community and developed into a scenario about artistic residencies and events organized in collaboration with external artists but that could bring benefit also to the public housing residents through workshops. The topic of integration resulted in an idea about a kindergarten managed by retired elderly people where kids could spend time by learning and practicing through various activities including gardening and cooking. A group worked then on how to bring economic benefit to the communities, and came up with a scenario that involved external organizations willing to rent the spaces in the public houses and at the same time provide job opportunities for the residents. The final scenario was about identity and focused on how to take advantage of healthy competition to bridge the gap among communities, appointing people from the public houses to become "experience managers" and propose activities for the residents.
All the students did a great job in clearly articulating the ideas from the research phase into concrete scenarios that can be helpful in visualizing opportunities for the Municipality of Milan. Let's see where these ideas will lead!
