Community Engagement for World Urban Forum Unesco. Abu Dhabi, 2020 Different projects from the last years

1. The medium is the message?
The community is the message!
Stefano Mirti
Fondazione Milano, Milan
Community Engagement: A mandatory investment for inclusive, sustainable and liveable cities.
World Urban Forum 10
Abu Dhabi, Feb. 12, 2020

2. 7 projects
7 different ways to get your community to become the message

3. 1. Wondergrottole
To buy a small house, to transform the whole town

4. According to a report by Legambiente (2016), there
are about 2,500 depopulated Italian rural villages,
some semi-abandoned and other ghost towns.
Wonder Grottole is an experimental project that
involves and connects people and energies from all
over the world, it is a social enterprise that works to
rehabilitate the village hanks to the regeneration of
abandoned houses and the creation of a new
community.
Local and global, material and immaterial, past and
future. Being comfortable together, inventing and
imagining new ways of living in the community
between free time and work.

5. In red, one of the
two house we
bought in 2018.
Come to visit us:
we are now
Working to expand
our activities.
We are always
looking for new
friends and new
ideas and new
projects to
develop...

6. https://www.wondergrottole.it

7. 2. The Italian Sabbatical
After our first crowdfunding,
Wonder Grottole caught the
attention of Airbnb.
Together (2019), we invited
people from all over the world to
move to Southern Italy to
revitalize the village.
More than 280.000 people
applied and 5 candidates were
selected to become temporary
citizens of Grottole.

8. “experience” is the keyword

9. The whole town became
a series of experiences
open to its citizens as well
as to people coming from
all over the world.
The town as a stage, a theatre,
open to all kind of different
relations and activities.
https://italiansabbatical.com

10. Wonder Grottole and the Italian Sabbatical tell us that (if you want and you are
patient and stubborn) everything is possible.
You can transform a village and its people, step by step, day by day.
Bottom up, reaching incredible results.
Also, if it works in Grottole, it can work everywhere.
To have some clear and understandable and tangible goals.
To work in terms of relations and social connections.
To involve different people and different groups from day one.
If you have good ideas and positive energy, money comes
(shouldn’t money come, then you crowdfund - that it is even better).

11. 3. Bottom Up!
Bottom Up! takes Grottole’s concept and applies it to a big city.
Same idea, similar concept, but on a bigger scale.
From one project, now we go to twelve.
Enabling the citizens to transform their ideas in reality.

12. We are looking for desires
Propose a project by the 16th of January

13. Thirteen different projects.
Thirteen different process.
Each of them with its own
crowdfunding community.
A big social experiment on
how to transform the city and
its citizens.
https://www.bottomuptorino.it

14. 4. Mammamiaaa
Here, another project.
Thousands meals across Italy
and Europe, telling the culinary
traditions of thousands
of families.

15. How does it work?

16. Important
The big wall with
all the names, the
families, the
people, the
recipes, what we
did, how, when,
who...
To overlap social
and digital media
and the physical
world.

17. Also,
the big dinner.
A festival.
All together,
from all over Europe.
A big event to
celebrate new
friendships and
new relations.

18. https://www.mammamiaaa.it/en/
https://www.mammamiaaa.it/

19. 5. Co-creazione
Next project is a little bit more conceptual:
to write the “co-creation manifesto” from Matera 2019
Different activities, people and experiences. We interviewed all
the people who took part in the different events, asking them
for their special definition(s) of “co-creation”.
We collected all the definitions, and we transformed them into
fragments. A website made out of fragments.
https://cocreazione.matera-basilicata2019.it

20. Every time you refresh or you visit the website,
the fragments change their position (upon a random system).
There are no hierarchies, just a flow of fragments.

21. ...every time you refresh the fragments change their position...

22. ...there are no hierarchies, just a flow of fragments...

23. 6. Expo 2015, social media strategy
Bottom line, this is what we learned at Expo Milan, 2015:
You don’t communicate the big event.
You rather enable different people / groups to communicate what they want.
http://www.socialmediaexpo2015.com/

24. Last, but not least...
7. If you have a garden and a library,
you have everything you need.
A project for a new school
work in progress
(version 1.0, September 2019)

25. thank you!
Stefano Mirti
s.mirti@fondazionemilano.eu
@stefi_idlab on instagram and twitter.
(the Facebook page is the big archive).
Community Engagement: A mandatory investment for inclusive, sustainable and liveable cities.
World Urban Forum 10
Abu Dhabi, Feb. 12, 2020