Integrating sustainability and community: Architecture of Participation in Monticelli d'Ongina

The ‘sustainable’ and ‘green’ dimension of a habitat includes both the quality of the built environment and the social relationships which the built environment contributes to determining or supporting. The union of these two dimensions is perfectly illustrated by the city of flesh and city of stone combination used by Ilda Curti (2019) to assimilate our cities as ‘social bodies in torment’ and highlight the urgency for new conceptual and design paradigms to give them shape. Architecture Prize winners such as Aravena and Kéré have confronted the question, proposing formal, constructive and procedural solutions capable of democratically incorporating multiple creative contributions which go beyond the mere construction of buildings to include the existential and phenomenological dimension of the space (Shulz 1063). Participatory architecture, the term used by Giancarlo de Carlo (2015) to express the strong collaborative ties between all the actors involved in the realization of a project, is seen from this viewpoint as technology in the pursuit of the idea of ‘architecture for everybody’ (Aravena, 2007), namely a new vision of social architecture within which, in the dominion of so-called auteur architecture, the vision of the project that knows how to reinterpret the original maieutic mission of social design, Papanek (1973) and the critical regionalism aware of the universal values of Frampton (1980) is prioritized. Along these lines, the Municipality of Monticelli d’Ongina has sponsored the ‘Island of the Future’ project with aim of stimulating and promoting forms of territorial co-planning together with financial operators, associations, local councils and the general public. The project, which is one of eleven Territorial Laboratories for the innovation and sustainability of businesses financed by the Emilia-Romagna region during 2020-2021, Isola Serafini, the biggest river island of the river Po in the Piacenza province and the only inhabited island, is a starting point for the development of a genuine culturally and environmentally based territorial strategy.