Co-designing neighbourhood identities. How to share memories and experiences towards a common sense of belonging

Participatory Design (PD) has expanded the field of Design in developing new ways of social engagement in the public sphere. The approach always aims at co-designing inclusive and shared solutions starting from a disarticulation and rearticulation (Mouffe, 2013) of different points of view freely expressed by individual people in a community. When applying PD in transformative processes for the public realm, researchers in Design have to deal with a complex but rich social party made up of pluralities (Manzini, 2015), enlarging the democratic arena and embracing all the participants and the different viewpoints (Björgvinsson et al., 2010). In this sense, PD is an effective way to deal with transformative processes in neighbourhoods as it gives the community a tool to democratically discuss together social, environmental, and cultural issues affecting the community. To design there - though aiming at an urban bottom-up renewal - means in the first instance to touch upon (shared or contested) meanings for the community, and possibly help the citizens to identify them, question them and re-assess them from multiple perspectives (Tassinari & Vergani, 2023). This is the case of Nolo, a neighbourhood in the city of Milan characterized by a proactive “creative community” (Meroni, 2007), where the research team the authors belong to fostered over the years social cohesion and innovation interventions through tailored-made PD activities. In this process – currently undergoing - specific attention is paid to address various points of view from the marginalized community of the neighbourhood such as immigrants, elderly, citizens with physical and cognitive impairment, children but also those agents coming from the non-human realm like plants, insects and others. In this framework, the paper presents a specific co-design session organized with some inhabitants of the neighbourhood to articulate a shared and inclusive sense of belonging, collecting, and comparing the viewpoints of the inhabitants. To map the neighbourhood's different identities – and understand the specific places to be redesigned together with the community using a bottom-up approach – we invited young and old people to join the co-design session, asking them to share their memories, tell their personal experiences and discuss cross-generational issues. The co-design session helped us to envision together future scenarios for their neighbourhood, while letting emerge the importance of preserving memories for the future of the community.