This is a CTP of initiative: DESIS - POLIMI DESIS Lab Italy (Italy)
“The turning point was when we started to work on ‘real projects’ using design for social innovation. One of these projects was the vegetable garden in the campus of Politecnico di Milano. Coltivando is a community vegetable garden set-up at the Politecnico di Milano, Bovisa Campus. There are 1000 square meters of green space on campus that have been transformed into an urban garden, which was developed by us with people from the local neighbourhood, who are the ones that take care of this space. The space itself is the result of various co-design actions that we did, together with them (the community), to define the forms, the rules, the use of the space”.
The project is developed thanks to the proactive role of a design team from the Polimi DESIS Lab (composed by one teacher and their students), and the active, collaborative participation of local residents:
“The design team organized workshops with residents to co-design the community garden concept. At the end of the first two co-design sessions, more than 80 people from the neighbourhood were involved (…). Then they started to create the garden itself and gradually a community started to come into being. Soon work was progressing in weekly building/gardening sessions, where people worked on setting up the garden and at the same time strengthening community ties. Work on both garden and community called for continuous co-designing”.
The project started as a small prototyping initiative in 2011 and officially commenced in 2012. It is still running.
“The project Coltivando started from a series of events that we ran in an attempt to open the campus to the neighbourhood. These events aimed to imagine actions that would be able to bring people from the neighbourhood to the Bovisa Campus (Politecnico di Milano) which is a public space. One of these actions was the vegetable garden, and through a series of surveys we found out that it would be the action that would work most effectively to bring people into the Campus”
The idea of opening the campus to the neighbourhood came from the experience of the researchers involved as one of them had a lot of experience in working with public spaces. There was also a very active association of inhabitants in the neighbourhood: “we wanted to develop the activities in a public space, and there were people who were already active in the territory. It was a perfect match”.
“We looked for those who were already taking care of urban gardens, which were the first consultants. Then we motivated others to engage in the co-design process, looking for them in bars, restaurants and shops”
"I used to approach urban spaces as an architect. I began to see things from another point of view and to understand how a project could come out of a co-designed process (with citizens), and not just be imposed. It was easier to test this approach on a project in the Campus, because it is a space that does not require many permits (when compared to other spaces in the city)”
The experience of the Coltivando project opened up interest to investigating how its methodological approach worked, particularly how “the tools of design for social innovation could be used in other contexts, out of the campus”. A new project called CampUS was developed and won the Polisocial Award, the corporate social responsibility program of the Politecnico di Milano.
2014 – 2016 Project CampUS. Incubator and staging of social practices (http://www.facebook.com/campUS.polimi) Politecnico di Milano, Department of Design, with the Departments DAStU (Department of Architecture and Urban Studies) and DIG (Department of Engineering Management). The project is developed with the collaboration of the inhabitants and associations from Zone 9, and is divided into four activities: the shared garden in a green area of Zone 9 (Dip. Design); the Social neighbourhood TV (Dip. Design); a pavilion that will host exhibitions, sporting events, tournaments, conferences, meetings, activities (Dip. DAStU); identification of models for the economic sustainability of social innovation projects (Dip. DIG). The beneficiaries are people over75 and the NEETs, young people between 15 and 40, who do not study and do not work, interested in sharing their skills and acquiring new tools to express themselves and develop the CampUS projects
“In the Campus the development of the project was all very simple, and it was a surprise. We had the green light all over because it was recognized as a good project. There was also financial support from Politecnico di Milano.
The difficulty was in getting recognition from the actors already acting in the social field in Milan, considering that we are members of the Politecnico di Milano which is a large institution, i.e., a structure that has money, opportunities and researchers.
Particularly in the context of urban gardens, all those also active in this area looked at us with a bit of suspicion. We had to work hard to gain credibility in their eyes, and not to be seen as those who wanted to undermine them. Progressively instead, they have realized that our approach was to get things together in a participatory way, and that it would not be a temporary initiative but rather it would ‘make sense’.
We worked a lot on team building, to make people ‘aware’ of the use of the space and to become ‘attached’ to that space, to build it up together with them.
When we arrived to meet members of the Milan urban vegetable gardens network, they were thinking ‘who are these guys that have never touched the earth’ ... It is true that we had never cultivated the land, but we had skills that, along with other skills, could generate value to the city”.
The project was understood as a critical turning point because it was “part of an effort of the Polimi DESIS Lab to have projects on design for social innovation”.
The Polimi DESIS Lab made an effort to develop new social innovations, with the aim of answering demands and priorities identified at a local level.
Coltivando is an important project because “we realized how much the group (the Polimi DESIS Lab) could take action in the territory. The project involved a number of citizens who are active in the area”. The project is being successful and has reached the objectives that were defined at the beginning:
“The university campus has started to see the presence of loads of people, who were not only the students, the teachers, and the administrative staff, but the mother that comes with the baby buggy for a ride, groups from the elementary school who come for a tour in the garden, pensioners, i.e., a whole group of people who did not usually interact with the campus”
The project Coltivando is a project on design for social innovation that has run continuously since 2012. This “answered the demand to have ‘real projects’ on design for social innovation”, which is important for the Polimi DESIS Lab’s development.
“We had begun to consider issues on design research and practice that were not previously considered.
Developing a thesis about urban gardens was not easy, because this theme was not considered important. Instead, we introduced a new approach and language for the design of these spaces.
It was not just about how to design these spaces (the urban gardens), but the contribution from the point of view of the active participants, not just for consultation, but about the active participation by citizens in these design processes”.
The project contributes to advancement in the knowledge about design practices. The project Coltivando does not only included the design of “tangible things, for example, the garden bags, the layout of the area, the tools to be used to manage the garden” but also “the software part of the story, so let’s say, the soft innovation”.
The “software part of the story” means that the DESIS Lab fostered the relationship between people, motivated them to get involved together in the garden and “this means to be more connected to people and to let them be in charge of the activities that have to be done in the garden”.
It is working well: "This project is huge because it started years ago and it is still running and there is a large group of people taking care of this vegetable garden every week. They are urban heroes”.
Therefore, the project Coltivando is fostering “the inclusion of some new issues in the design research and practices”, and from a non-academic point of view “it is fostering more interaction with people in the neighbourhood of the campus”.
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