New Agricultural Park with Citizens participation partnership - Bologna
Work after winning the National design competition: Bologna Via Larga - A new public Park for neighbourhoods and town (2002)
Project and Coordination of Citizen participation workshops (with Walter Sancassiani)
Architectural design, Works Direction and Construction Supervision, Safety project and Supervision
with arch. Elisa Ferretti and Mariapia Malagoli in L'Officina
Client: Municipality of Bologna
Cost: € 900.000,00
2007-2009

The project is one of the priority objectives of the newly adopted Bologna Urban Plan. It involves a particularly relevant area, albeit on the city outskirts, yet central to a neighbourhoods built in ‘80s-‘90s where the lack of places to meet and socialise is palpable and badly tolerated. Citizen Participation has accompanied all design stages, starting with a design competition. Organized in thematic Workshops, it was a chance for the inhabitants to define shared needs, and to trigger a process involving citizens in land governance policies where choosing the winning project has been only the first step.

The main goal is to preserve and enhance the existing agricultural landscape, the land’s historical identity. This led us to:
- Avoid encroaching on current farmers management
- focus the solutions, demanded by citizens, on three specific areas, using the typical language of agrarian landscape.

The new agricultural park becomes the “crossroads” of neighbourhoods life, creating the missing links between the main attractions and characterising the streets as public spaces:
the LEISURE PARK, with its leisure and sports grounds, connects the recent housing and commercial urban developments to the ancient farmhouse which will become the new Social-Cultural District Centre;
the LANDSCAPE PARK, a wide equipped lawn, that will allow people to appreciate the agricultural landscape, connects the University Sports Centre to the School Campus via the city bypass, across
the FORD - a pedestrian subway re-designed as an urban interior by the means of water and light.

The architectural project is closely linked to a Citizen Participation project: a Monitoring Acting Group has been created, in which participating Citizens have taken on responsibilities for all aspects of the park’s development including its design, realization and management.