Pilot project presentations: Start Park – co-design of green-blue infrastructure for building communities resilient to climate change

Speakers meeting link: https://bit.ly/36uVRwF | Meeting attendants: Facebook live at https://www.facebook.com/designscapesproject/

17:30-17:45 Welcome and introduction
(Francesco Molinari, ANCI Toscana)
17:45-18:15 Presentation of the pilot project
(Marco Berni, Codesign Toscana)
18:15-18:30 Q&A and Discussion (*)
18:30 End

(*) Other winners of the Designscapes call with similar thematic orientation will be invited to contribute

Our speakers

Francesco Molinari is an international researcher and policy advisor with a 20-years working experience in R&D and innovation projects and programmes at European, national and regional levels – notably on such topics as eParticipation, eGovernment and Smart Cities. Formerly he has been engaged for about 12 years in territorial marketing and the delivery of financial services to SMEs – including support to EU grants access for their green and brown field investments. For 5 years he has served in a top managerial position at a middle-sized Municipality in Italy. He holds a track record of successful collaborations with local/regional authorities and ministries on such topics as Pre-Commercial Public Procurement, Living Labs and Smart Specialisation.

Marco Berni is president of Codesign Toscana and project lead of Start Park. He has worked as design strategist and open innovation consultant for public and private organizations. His core areas are the design of services with social impact, circular business modeling and applied-research for sustainable urban design. Codesign Toscana (CdT) is an association and a network composed by professionals of collaborative design approaches and social innovation. CdT is specialized in research and co-design for socio-cultural innovation with its focus on resilient urban futures. CdT is based in Prato (IT) and together with IRIDRA is promoting Start Park.

Start Park is a project born to address the challenge of the Climate Change (CC) through the build of a resilient community which would be involved in the co- design of a Green-Blue Infrastructure (GBI). The traditional top-down approach adopted by municipalities in the past has proved to be insufficient when dealing with environmental challenges in general, indeed.

GBI can be defined as green and blue areas able to provide multiple benefits to the citizens and the society, and are recognised as one of the most interesting tools for CC adaptation. The GBIs considered by Start Park are urban parks designed to include Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), which are aimed to provide multiple benefits in response to the climate risks related to the CC driven by changes in rainfall patterns, such as increase in flood (“water bombs”), droughts and heat island events, as well as loss of biodiversity and deterioration of water quality in rivers.

Start-Park already started with a full bottom-up approach. Born during a Climathon event in 2017, continued with a workshop in January 2019 with active citizens, designers, social innovators and NGOs, and prototyped thanks to the Designscapes II Call award, Start Park is candidating to be a reality for a peripheral neighborhood of European cities, such as the city of Prato (IT) in which Start Park was prototyped. Indeed, IRIDRA, with the support of Codesign Toscana and the local association CUT, has prototyped the Start Park concept involving the local neighborhood committee, local primary school students and parents, artists interested in green and socially engaged practices and activists to imagine and design a Start Park in a green residual area of the Prato city.

The Start Park is prototyped in a minimum of five participatory events, to be developed in 6-9 months and divided among three typologies, animation, co- design and co-creation. A set of tools (in Italian) was developed and prototyped to support the Start Park replication: a Start Park guideline aims orientating future Start Park replicators; the guideline is supported by a Start Park toolkit, i.e. a number of tools (both online and offline) that can be used to codesign a Start Park, including the Start Card, a dedicated game to make every citizen a co-designer of GBI in response to CC.

The outputs of a Start Park process are multiple: firstly, the process permits to effectively reach a preliminary design of the GBI to be delivered to the municipality, in order to proceed in the next design and realization phases; secondly, and most important, the build-up of a local and creative community resilient to CC through the co-design of the GBI.