From urban creativity festivals to museums, the first national forum on regeneration arrives

A former slaughterhouse turned university. It is difficult to imagine a more suitable place to talk about urban regeneration through spaces created for something completely different. And it is right there, at the former Testaccio slaughterhouse, home of the Department of Architecture of the Roma Tre University, that "Re-generating with creativity", the first national forum on culturally based urban regeneration, will be held from 23 to 27 November. In five days, on the initiative of the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, led by Costantino D'Orazio, institutions, scholars, architects, artists, curators, administrators and cultural operators from all over Italy will arrive in Rome.

The basic idea revolves around the belief that culture is not an ornament of the urban transformation process but one of its drivers. This is why the ministry has chosen to build a moment of national discussion. Not a single conference, but a structured path of meetings, insights and working tables. With the declared objective of contributing to defining tools, directions and shared perspectives. The first three days take the form of a conference. They are organized into five thematic sessions, with around ninety contributions. The list of topics reflects the breadth of the field well, ranging from public policies, to tools and governance; from civic, philanthropic and cultural alliances to urban creativity and art in public spaces. And also ecologies, sustainability and common goods; ethics, inclusion and territorial justice; training and research; communication, documentation, transfer and experimentation.

We won't just be talking about buildings to be recovered, therefore. We talk about who decides, who participates, who remains excluded, how a change is measured and described. Then the register changes. On 26 and 27 November the Forum transforms into a laboratory: twelve thematic tables, in parallel sessions, with 115 speakers. Here the comparison descends into concreteness, starting from urban creativity festivals, which in many cities have become a tool for reactivating neighborhoods and suburbs. Curation will be explored not only as an exhibition practice but as a true tool for regeneration. And ample space will be dedicated to museums and cultural institutions, increasingly called upon to leave their walls and activate transformation processes in the territories that surround them.

Then there is the issue of planning with communities, in the sense of involving the inhabitants after the fact. And a question that anyone who works in the sector knows well: what happens to regenerated places when the funding runs out? The sustainability of the recovered spaces over time is one of the topics of the discussions, together with public policies, the skills necessary to manage these processes and the territorial experiences promoted by MiC itself. The method chosen is that of multidisciplinary dialogue because the Forum aims to connect experiences, practices and visions born in contexts that are even very distant from each other: large cities and small towns, institutional projects and bottom-up initiatives, academic research and field work. The assumption is that the solutions are not found in a single model, but in the comparison between different models.

The appointment doesn't come out of nowhere. It is part of the numerous activities that the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity has long dedicated to urban regeneration, recognizing culture's strategic role in the processes of social innovation, cohesion and sustainability, as well as in improving the quality of public space. Now, with the first dedicated Forum, that commitment is trying to become a stable place for discussion.