A research and teaching project for the Martesana district

Re-occupation and re-designing of public spaces are becoming increasingly frequent, particularly in peripheral and semi-peripheral neighbourhoods. This essay will try to explore a research teaching project that involves different realities, including small local communities of the City of Milan, a Milanese private company called Cargo, and a group of students from second-year studio on the Master’s Degree course in the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano. Here, the role of the design discipline is to take advantage of the fertile context of the Martesana District in Milan, and to propose new solutions, scenarios and strategies, by placing the resident population and the small local communities in a relationship by using the skills of the design students’ skills to create synergies and new processes of inclusion and social innovation. The process began when Cargo, a traditional furniture store in the north- east of Milan was looking to be more innovative. The company asked the Polimi Desis Lab, a research team of the Department of Design at Politecnico di Milano, to help them to increase their relations with the neighborhood, offering the residents a new space for meeting together, community, and sharing. Corresponding to a common phenomenon in many commercial areas in the world, Cargo is maintaining the character of a place of consumption, without engaging in community dynamics. After an in-depth concept analysis about the context and the associations involved, the studio will generate a prototyping event, including some co-design sessions extended to the people of the neighbourhood. Design practice is trying here to cross through the barrier made by the framework of market-driven economies, by co-designing and using a community-driven approach as its central core.