Prototyping temporary urban solutions in Milan

This paper will explore a research and teaching project that involves a number of different Milanese associations: several small local communities of the Martesana District, Cargo, a private furniture company, and a group of students from an elective 2nd-year course in the Master’s Degree of the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano, all working together for the common purpose, to create new social inclusion in the neighbourhood. By strengthening the social fabric and generating new ideas of citizen well-being, the quality of the social and physical contexts together with collaborative actions create new forms of community and spaces which have a higher value. Behind each of these promising cases of social innovation are groups of people who have been able to imagine, develop and manage them. The re-occupation and re-design of public and urban spaces are increasingly frequent, especially in the suburbs, far from the city centre. This is principally thanks to co-design and co-participation with the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, promoting activities and new scenarios. In this attempt to activate new solutions, scenarios and strategies are proposed, bringing together the resident population and the small local communities, through the students’ design skills, to create synergies and new processes of inclusion and social innovation. The project described in this paper takes advantage of Cargo’s spaces, a furniture store located in the north-east of Milan. Cargo Hi-Tech asked the Polimi DESIS Lab, a research team of the Design Department of Politecnico di Milano, to help improve their relations with the neighbourhood while also offering the residents a new space for gathering, community and sharing. After an in-depth concept analysis of the context and the associations involved, the course will generate a prototyping event, Martesana Fest, also including some co-design sessions open to the neighbourhood. Over the course of a day the students gave a public presentation of their projects, with scale models and full-scale details that best expressed their project. Design practice is trying to go through and across the barrier created by the framework of market-driven economies, by co-designing and using a community-driven approach at its core. The role of the designer, and in this particular case, of forty design students, is to help these communities consolidate themselves through co-design and to help generate new ideas, and then to spread and replicate them in an urban context. The general vision is to move from being relatively marginal to becoming more widespread and, in the not too distant future, to be mainstream through a new social communication network within a neighbourhood. This event is a first step, with the constant assistance of the local communities, intend to act as spokespersons for a new regeneration and to build original solutions to the needs of contemporary urban living.