Trento PILOT: S.Chiara Cultural Incubator Co-Design kick-off

The main action of the URBAN INNO Trento pilot is to develop a participatory process with associations and citizens interested in the innovative development of the urban area. The main pilot activity is to co-create a Cultural Incubator in the Santa Chiara, an urban area in the centre of Trento that is going to be redesigned by the Comune di Trento through a large renewal project. The co-design activity is promoted by the Assessorato alla Cultura (Department of Culture) of Trento that is aiming in that way to involve teh civil society in the process. 

This is why a first co-design laboratory was made involving about 30 persons from 23 associations, that were also the participants in the ‘call for ideas’, made at the end of 2016, about usage of space available inside the ‘Ex-Lettere’ Building (part of the Santa Chiara area). This call collected more than 50 very different singular ideas, with a very wide scope.

The objective of the workshop, held on 29^th June 2017 in Trento, was to engage and work in collaborative way with the associations and interested citizen, to develop an integrated proposal, considering all the proposals collected from the ‘call for ideas’ and matching with the Trento Municipality Cultural Strategic Plan’, in an interactive process that will be made by several workshop until then end of 2017. All the discussions were gathered around the idea to build a Cultural Incubator, enabling to develop not only cultural ideas, but also new business, new jobs, and to create value and sustainability (last and not least improving selective money spending on culture) around the cultural production in Trento.

In particular, the focus of the before-summer co-design laboratories (others will be later) is to determine the mainly construction guidelines required to start the re-design of the building before to consolidate the definitive idea on how to implement. The laboratory was build around the Design Thinking method splitting participants in 5 groups, distinguished by the following areas of interest:

• Cultural activities included in the Project
• Cultural Factory as the overall result of the Project
• Communities concerned and involved in the Project
• Cultural promotion and accessibility of the initiatives developed in the Project
• Entities serving the Project.

The groups have been invited to select the most significant proposals from their area of ​​interest, and to discuss them in terms of content, method and governance, economic sustainability, impact on the use of the building.

In the third and last session, each group then relayed publicly to their work, collecting comments and suggestions from all the other participants. The purpose of this phase was to get to a list, not exhaustive or definitive, of opportunities and impacts, for each proposal line, which was the output of the day and the base of work for the next steps.

The workshop concluded with a collection of salient elements from the lecturer, postponing further developments for the second workshop to be held at July 13^th 2017.

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