Make my City Better! by FARM CULTURAL PARK

Description

CONTEXT

Starting location: Favara, historic center.

Other possible locations: Abandoned historical centers in Southern Italy; suburbs of Italian and European cities.

FARM CULTURAL PARK, our association, has been working for seven years in Favara. Favara is located a few kilometers away from the Valley of the Temples of Agrigento and from the splendid Scala dei Turchi, two of the most important tourist attractions in Sicily. In Favara, starting with the impulse and enthusiasm created by the Farm, a community of artists, professionals and entrepreneurs has changed an entire city, transforming it in just a few years into the second major attraction of the territory after the Valley of the Temples Park.The challenge is addressed not only to our community of reference, formed by young people, creatives and intellectuals who work in Favara, in Sicily and throughout the country and in different parts of the world, but also to all those who are called by the challenge in the private or public sphere and who have solutions/resources/tools available to our and/or all those who want to undertake the same path or paths similar to Farm Cultural Park.

Challenge

We started our business in 2010 in Favara, Sicily, in our own land. Favara was a town of 30,000 people, more often known for mafia activity and fugitives. We felt a strong need to make our city more beautiful not only for ourselves but above all for our little girls, Carla and Viola. That's why we decided to give life to Farm Cultural Park, an independent Cultural Center. We like to call it an "Urban Lung", a place that’s given oxygen to the city and its citizens, has created a new identity as a small capital of urban regeneration and has outlined a possible way forward. During these seven years many things have changed in Favara; young people no longer leave but come from outside, the economy has woken up, in a place where no tourist traveled before, now more than 100,000 tourists have visited per year for the last two years in a row.To be clear, the challenges are still huge for the Farm and also for Favara as they are anywhere in the world. It has never arrived and there is a need to constantly question oneself, evaluate one’s own mistakes and correct the trajectory for the future.These past years the Farm has been visited by several hundred thousand people. The three most frequent words of our visitors are: surprise, genius, future. When you arrive at the Farm, you immediately breathe a "dimension of possibilities" and you immediately wonder whether what you are experiencing in Favara is not also possible in your own little town or in a neighborhood of your city.With the economic crisis and a poor public disposition for undertaking urban regeneration and territorial requalification, many historic centers are falling apart while most of the suburbs of big cities are devoid of places of a cultural-social nature. There is no vision for the future of our country, and above all, for how to make our cities nicer and better places to live. For children, adolescents, the elderly, for those in our country, for all of us.We are therefore seeking a solution that will allow us to consolidate the experience of a model of urban and social regeneration that is constantly transforming and at the same time can provide practical and useful tools for anyone who, in the public or private sphere, wants to undertake a similar pathway in their own cities.

THE CHALLENGE OWNER

Leadership and appropriate skills are the challenges of our time. Obviously also of the Farm. Even before having the economic resources to pursue long-term urban regeneration projects, it is necessary to build teams of professionals with cross-disciplinary skills that cover not only legal-economic and managerial areas but also, above all, social ones.Seven years of activity on the front have allowed us to mature a package of experience that we would like to make available to other changemakers in Italy and Europe. During these seven years Farm Cultural Park has saved from the rubble around 2,000 square meters, returning these spaces to the community for cultural and tourist purposes. It has hosted several hundred cultural events every year dedicated to art, architecture, design, music, volunteering and cooperation. It has carried out education and training activities; among them the most important and structured with Sou, the School of Architecture for Kids. Within a few years it has brought to Favara, which in 2010 was decidedly not a tourist city, around 100,000 visitors a year.

OUR MENTORS

Andrea Bartoli and Florinda Saieva are the founders of Farm Cultural Park and can count on a large community of national and international creatives, professionals and cultural operators.

Salvator-John Liotta is an architect who has lived in Tokyo for eight years, has collaborated and continues to work with Kengo Kuma, teaches in Brussels and lives and works in Paris.

Francesco Lipari is the founder of Cityvision, an editorial format for the promotion of architecture.

COMMITMENT

We are committed to working in close contact with the supplier(s) of selected solutions by providing all information, experience, methods, and material or immaterial resources available to us.

We will give access to our reference community and work together to make the solution sustainable in the long run.

DO you want to propose a solution for this challenge?