Morphologies of Multiethnic Relations in European Experiences of Public Space Design

Unprecedented migration phenomena and in transit behaviours are crossing European territories, highlighting a new geography of temporalities and cultural intersections, but also of exclusions, inequalities, tensions and fragmentations. Multiethnic relations embody a challenge and an opportunity, playing a key role in European spatial, social, and political resignification. Public spaces are called upon to host such new forms of sociality, remodulating risk perception, enhancing mixophilia. Thus, public space has become not only the place of crisis representation, but also the playground of a potentially change-maker social dialogue. This paper will provide an insight on some contemporary forms of spatial/social tension by presenting two recent design experiences by Architetti Senza Frontiere, concerning public and collective spaces in multiethnic contexts. 1)Costruiamo Saperi concerns learning by doing training in Ragusa addressed to marginalised migrants for integrating them in legal labour market. Abandoned commercial ground floors in the city center and a forsaken farm have been reactivated, being the training field and now hosting two social enterprises founded by some of the trained together with local workers.2)ERSILIALab is a programme active in Milanese Molise-Calvairate-Ponti district. Located in city’s southern fringes, this neighborhood hosts a hidden temporary reception centre, inhabited by a Roma community. ERSILIALab works on neighborhood public space with temporary interventions enhancing relations between residents —an already multicultural community— and Romas.The two projects will be explored through the lens of Beatrice Galimberti’s ongoing PhD research, that proposes a combined cross-scale morphological and relational approach to investigate social dialogue design of European public spaces. Drawings, interviews, pictures, and short videos will support the presentation, showing how multiethnic spatial and relational tensions can be an unexpected ground to structure publicness, generating cross-cultural interactions as formative elements to strengthen a renovated European collective dimension culture and design.