Rebuilding with Participation

Rebuilding With Participation

The experiences of AscoltoAttivo and MC Architects in Camerino, Italy

By AgneseBertello

From summer to winter 2016 numerous earthquakes struck the center of Italy, including the country’s Lazio, Marche, Umbria and Abruzzo regions. In October 2016 new seismic activity hit the town of Camerino, in Italy’s Macerata province. The town’s historical center, filled with medieval buildings, was heavily damaged and declared a “red zone,” forcing its inhabitants to leave.

In spring 2017 Vasco Errani, then special commissioner for rebuilding, decided to entrust elaboration of a strategic plan for the reconstruction of Camerino’s historical center to the architectural studio MCA (Mario Cucinella Architects). This plan called for participatory efforts that would involve the town’s citizens.

This decision resulted in creation of the first WSR Camerino: the “Workshop RicostruzioneCamerino,” or Camerino Reconstruction Workshop, a project by MCA and the SOS School of Sustainability.

The heart of the reconstruction strategy involved a profoundly innovative element: direct citizen participation. This choice was made well in advance, and was designed to take full advantage of Italy’s sole positive experience of post-seismic reconstruction, which occurred in the Friuli region following the 1976 earthquake.

The Friuli experience

In Friuli the positive outcomes achieved were due precisely to the direct involvement of citizens, who took part in open assemblies created to discuss the rebuilding proposals gathered by local authorities, and constituted committees and cooperatives in order to make a concrete contribution to rebuilding efforts.

Giovanni PietroNimis, the urban planner who coordinated work at Gemona, Venzone and Artegna, had this to say about the experience, forty years after the earthquake first struck: “The initiative was entrusted to the region, which was happy to delegate it to local municipalities. And the municipalities, put under considerable pressure by this decision, reacted by promoting intense citizen participation. Their participation kept our feet planted firmly on the ground. I was charged with submitting the different proposals to a popular assembly for consideration.”

The motto of these reconstruction efforts became “Where it was, the way it was.” According to Nimis this motto “sounded like the self-aware utopia of hyperrealism. But it was useful, because it induced the population to participate in every step of the reconstruction, sharing rules and disciplines in order to safeguard the identity of the locations.”

The Friulian experience became a point of reference and inspiration for Camerino, but the model was impossible to replicate perfectly. The four decades that passed in the meantime have brought enormous social, cultural, economic and environmental change. Therefore the motto “where it was, the way it was” has given way to a hypothesis of change and transformation in the town: reconstruction presented as an opportunity for development in response to new, innovative and never-before-seen trajectories.

Participated design in Camerino

In Camerino, MCA asked AscoltoAttivo to handle participated design meetings with the local population. The request arrived when the project was already underway, and through the architecture studio, which meant it was not possible to establish a direct conversation between the facilitators and local government.

Meetings began in May. Five workshops were held between May and July 2017, with between 60 and 150 people participating. An initial, spontaneous “meet-and-greet” including interviews was held in Camerino’s new commercial area. This was followed by more structured appointments that inspired reflection what the inhabitants wanted for the future of this area of their town; elaboration of a vision for the city’s future in 2030; creation of work groups for specific themes that were particularly important to participants; all the way to a re-elaboration effort of urban intervention units that involved both architects from MCA and local citizens. These meetings, which ran from 6 to 10pm, were held out in the open in an extraordinary setting: the Rocca di Camerino. Citizens and architects sat at the tables together, working on ways to transform seismic destruction into an opportunity for growth. How could they make Camerino even more beautiful, guaranteeing exit routes, open spaces, social environments and services; creating an historical center open seven days a week?

During this dialogue, participants shared thoughts on a future Camerino that included critical considerations extending well beyond the effects of the earthquake, for example the issue of repopulating the town center. (Camerino is a university town that has always hosted numerous students and whose economy is centered on students.) What could be done to repopulate the center, given these presuppositions? How could they encourage entrepreneurial initiatives and open up to other perspectives while still safeguarding their solid relationship with the university and its student body?

The inhabitants put all these themes on the table, discussing them lucidly and attempting to abandon any prejudice concerning the issues. They were even able to address issues with a certain detachment, the same detachment that characterized, for example, other considerations surrounding the city’s architecture and the possibility of demolishing several parts of the historical center in order to open up new exit routes and create new public spaces.

Work conducted on the Urban Units – a concept at the base of the strategic architectural reconstruction plan proposed by MCA because the “Urban Unit” approach makes it possible to progressively reopen safe zones once they’re completed, keeping the historical center from remaining an inaccessible worksite for years to come – involved even more concrete exchange between the architects and the town’s citizens. The Urban Units were initially delineated on paper by the architects, and only through discussion with the town’s citizens was it possible to focus on the real perimeters in a more precise manner. Furthermore, for each Urban Unit (and here the comparison with Friuli rises powerfully to the fore) attempts were made to create work groups made up of the owners of the houses within that Urban Unit in order to concretely activate the successive reconstruction phase.

As you can see, a key protagonist is still missing from this story: the local administration. The municipal government was happy to accept the commissioner’s proposal to send a team of specialists made up of architects and facilitators to help elaborate a plan. However, the local authorities stayed out of the planning and design phases. Later on, the mayor of Camerino motivated this decision by saying that he believed it was correct to “leave the architects alone and let them do their work.” This justification, however, reveals just how far the administration was – at least during the initial phase of the process – from understanding the deeper meaning of a participatory process and the importance of working right alongside its own citizens, sharing their preoccupations and their desire to move forward. In a word, co-designing the project.

A fire in Enschende

From this point of view, it is interesting to compare the Camerino experience with that of the city of Enschende, Holland, as detailed in the book Conflict, improvisation, governance by David Laws and John Forester. In 2000 an entire neighborhood of the Dutch city was destroyed by a factory fire. JoopHofman, an experienced facilitator, was called in by the local administration to manage a participatory process designed to define what the new neighborhood should become: “We want to have urban planners and architects really talk with the people. We want to have the best process in the world.”

The job was clear, and the administration was strongly and explicitly involved. But despite this, there was no shortage of difficulties. For Hofman, who organized an articulated process, it was key that the administration demonstrate first and foremost that it was interested in listening. For example he organized meetings during which local administration officials sat at each table together with roughly fifteen inhabitants. Each table dealt with a different theme, and starting from images, photographs and renderings set out on the tables, inhabitants were given a chance to talk about exactly what they wanted: How shall we build the playground? What kind of rides or games do we want in it?,and so forth.

What roles do the administration representatives play at such a table?Hofman is peremptory: “We trained them to be attentive, not preventive: you are not the leader of the table, you are the guest. You have to ask people more and more and more. Listen, hear, ask and shut up. Don’t talk. That’s your role! If the conversation is interesting, ask them some more and write it down.”

Starting from these and other encounters, they created a report with all the proposals. Once they’d developed the project, starting from the report, the architects sat down with the inhabitants again in order to answer a simple question: did we fully understand your input?

Involvement of the local administration, and not only the mayor but also his technicians, managers, experts and so forth, was considerable. Close attention was paid to listening and respect.

“I learned that every participation process is about mourning,” said Hofman, “because it is about change. Participation is about preparing for change.”

Where do we stand now?

In September the strategic guidelines of WSR Camerino were presented to all the different institutions involved in definition of the reconstruction plan. The mayor of Camerino, during a meeting in the Italian chamber of deputies, expressed his official support for the work conducted thus far. Camerinomay well serve as a model, pointing the way for a new approach in which citizen participation plays a central role in designing reconstruction plans. In order for this to happen, however, it will be important to address another complicated aspect of Italy: bureaucracy and self-referencing.

The tacit, yet ineluctable rule according to which Italy’s local governments move appears to be “if it’s not in the regulations, it’s forbidden.” Yet examples of good practices – from shared administration experiences to public debate tools and neighborhood housing in Turin (experiences we detail at length in the book Le nostrecittà: dallacorruzioneallademocraziapartecipativa (Our Cities: From Corruption to Participatory Democracy) – as well as different, pragmatic approaches that are based on common sense and organized around listening and mutual learning are out there and ready to be taken advantage of.

Camerino’s chances for moving forward in a positive way with this project depend on its ability to leverage these good practices. We’ll have a better idea, following an upcoming meeting with the Marche region’s reconstruction office and the new special commissioner, Paola De Micheli, of just how good the chances of that happening really are.