Bottom Up!
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
Category
Project Description
Bottom Up! is a new format of generative and replicable festival of architecture, which promotes practices of urban and social transformation arising from the real needs of the communities, from the bottom up. Through co-design with architects, crowdfunding and communication initiatives, ideas can materialize into projects. In 2020 Bottom up! involved 105 communities in Turin (Italy), with 11 projects selected through a call for proposals. The festival ended, the 11 projects are now underway.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
Shaping an architecture of relations
Bottom Up! has been an experimental involvement of citizens in actions of urban transformation. Through a call for proposals open to groups of citizens, schools, artists and collectives, committees and associations, companies, designers, the festival has selected new and concrete sustainable options for local transformation in Turin, inclusive and pleasant at the same time. Through the festival, these initiatives have been promoted, helped to find the required funding and move to actual implementation. The aim of these projects is to design and improve places for community encounter at the outskirts of the city, to open courtyards and school gardens to the neighborhood, build a social baking oven and turn squat orchards into public parks, set up a theater in a juvenile prison and found a Sino-Italian cultural center.
Every participating group has proposed a place, a project along with the required budget. The festival has identified the most interesting and qualified proposals and offered a training path to activate the crowdfunding campaign to launch the transformation.
Because of the pandemic, the original project had to be partially modified, although activities were continued relentlessly from remote.
At the end of the festival (January 2021) and of the crowdfunding campaigns 11 projects reached the goal, collecting a total of over 142,000 euros (thanks also to special donations). 105 different communities in Turin were involved. In February 2022, 4 transformation projects have been completed, others are nearing conclusion, only a few have been discontinued due to the pandemic delays.
At the end of the experience, a simple application kit was developed to make projects replicable in different contexts with 10 recommendations and 7 instructions. In March 2022 Fondazione per l’architettura di Torino will launch the second edition of Bottom Up! on a regional scale.
Key objectives for sustainability
The public selection of Bottom Up! was based on a series of requirements. In terms of sustainability, the project requirements were:
- interventions on the sites must adopt sustainability criteria and guarantee the architectural quality of transformations also in relation to the context, with positive repercussions on citizens’ quality of life;
- the sustainability criteria of the project must include circular economy elements, growing the self-organizational capacity of citizens, sharing of goods and services, any solutions building resilience at the neighborhood scale.
More specifically, the mandatory participation of at least one architect within the project group highlights the technical skills required to make sustainable and circular decisions about process, materials and construction methods. All the selected projects have met these requirements while monitoring of the achievements is underway.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The Fondazione per l’architettura / Torino has been working for many years to promote the quality of local transformation at all scales, from interior design to landscape. The implemented actions were often based on participatory planning and co-design.
Looking at the concrete outcomes of participatory processes in Italy, the Foundation has observed that very often, in the face of great efforts and really interesting and well-structured processes, the concrete outcomes are poor in terms of quality, aesthetics and innovation.
The objective of the Bottom Up! call was also to integrate architectural quality as an explicit requirement:
- each intervention must […] guarantee the architectural quality of transformations also in relation to the context, with positive repercussions on citizens’ life quality.
The inclusion of an architect in the proposing group ( ... the presence of an architect in the proposing group is a prerequisite for participation in the project ) was intended to upgrade the average "aesthetic" level of the participatory projects works.
Key objectives for inclusion
"We are looking for wishes / Ideas susceptible of building bonds between citizens for citizens / Real intentions to start sharing projects from the bottom"
These are the opening words of the call to action by the festival curators, Maurizio Cilli and Stefano Mirti. They were published in the call open to groups of citizens, schools, artists and collectives, committees and associations, companies, designers. The festival hopes for maximum participation and therefore does not set either minimum or maximum size of the interventions. The call accepts project ideas, even not entirely new ones, and possibly also projects that have already been started, to help them make progress.
The inspiring idea of the Bottom up! experimentation was very simple: the territory of the city is not a mere physical space to apply urban planning, functional and aesthetic principles a priori, it is instead a set of places inextricably linked to the communities inhabiting them. The clients of the project are the people who live and visit them every day and who should therefore be put at the core of it.
All the project proposals (48) that participated in the selection are the result of the work and ideas of the reference communities. The selected projects involved a total of 105 communities, the crowdfunding campaigns broadened the knowledge and interest in the projects in terms of public participation and involved a thousand individual donors.
Results in relation to category
The first interesting result is the very high number of projects submitted to the Bottom Up! Call: 48 projects in the city of Turin alone. The selected projects involved 105 different communities in the area (physical, non-digital communities) and nearly 1000 donors who donated both through crowdfunding and through so-called “special donations”. In particular, the “special donations” were an interesting outcome of the festival, which in its long journey has garnered so much attention, credit and affiliation as to involve further sponsors and stakeholders in the financial support of the projects.
The strongest result is that today, one year after the festival closing, the communities have completed 2 projects, another 3 will be completed by spring and the remaining ones are monitored and supported by the Foundation on their journey, so that they can come to accomplishment, despite the uncertainties and delays due to the pandemic.
The administration of the city of Turin in office till October 2021 had started a process to stabilize and integrate the Bottom Up model! within the possible range of procedures for urban micro-transformations and hopefully the current administration will also be willing to follow up on that commitment.
An important banking foundation in the area has already decided to support the 2022 edition of the festival, thus acknowledging the first edition for achieving a financial leverage effect of 1 to 4.
How Citizens benefit
The involvement of citizens and civil society was embedded in the very festival format. Citizens organized in various forms were asked to indicate a shared wish, to set up a client table, co-design with the architects the realization of the transformative wish, co-design the crowdfunding campaign and communication materials (video). Other citizens were involved as donors and to give further resonance to the project, they are also involved in the physical implementation of the transformations.
The scale and strong involvement achieved by the festival ensured work continuity despite the pandemic. The communities’ resilience enabled them to reach the crowdfunding campaigns goals, even if the repeated lockdowns due to Covid 19 were a concrete risk for an experimental format based on intense relations and community cohesion. The fulfillment of a shared wish strengthens the participating communities while ensuring the continuing care of renewed spaces.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
The Bottom Up festival! stands out from other architecture festivals for its generative character, compared to the more information-based / narrative approach by most festivals in the sector.
Architecture was put at the center as a practice of relations and shared construction of value, thus giving a new cultural meaning to the profession of architect.
The generative character has promoted the recognition and pursuit of wishes for the transformation of urban places from the bottom, up to their concrete launch. The concrete aspect is indeed highly innovative and disruptive, so much so that the festival was imagined in its extreme form as a real urban planning tool for small-scale transformations.
Research is underway by Politecnico di Torino, to highlight the transformative and resilient nature of the Bottom Up! Festival in times of pandemic.
Learning transferred to other parties
According to the bottom-up principle underlying the festival experience, the festival was conceived from the outset as an open and replicable format. The festival has therefore made available a simple application kit to organize a Bottom Up festival! where you wish. The Bottom Up! brand has been registered and can be reused for new festivals, suffice to follow a set of 10 recommendations and 7 instructions and apply to the Fondazione per l’architettura / Torino. Please find a summary below.
7 instructions
- The more, the better: activate a partner network
- Carefully select your crowdfunding platform
- Draw up the call for proposals
- Initiate support and information initiatives about the call
- Select a jury of experts
- Offer a training course to selected projects
- Combine crowdfunding with parallel fundraising actions
10 recommendations
- The journey is the destination
- If the festival is the process, each step of the process must become a communication opportunity
- The festival communication is the festival itself
- Communication is the pivotal element, the engine of everything
- Another key element is the network of relationships generated through the festival
- Each step of the process must be developed with third parties
- Follow an " omnichannel" approach
- Consider a long timeframe
- Work with multiple and differentiated subjects
- Results become visible through slow incremental processes over time
