YAK AROUND
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
YAK AROUND aims to connect Spazio Yak (a community driven theatre) with the Bustecche neighbourhood, contaminating and regenerating public spaces and community life thanks to artistic performances. The theater becomes a “permeable” place open to people's daily lives needs, while occupaying courtyards of public housing with performaces, transforming the neighborhood into the tableau for urban games, sharing ideas for new services. All this helps to generate an inclusive multi-cultural community.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
YAK AROUND is a two years program which experiments an innovative way to merge a cultural program with urban public space regeneration. Born at the intersection of the work of the cultural association Karakorum, based in north of Italy (Varese), and urban design researchers from the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of Politecnico di Milano, it aims to better connect Spazio Yak (a community driven theatre) with the Bustecche neighbourhood, a fragile peripheral district where it was settlend a few years ago.
In the first period of its arrival on the site, the Karakorum company, despite its success upon a wider public and a broader context, was not able to tackle the involvement and interest of the settled community. The project answer to this problem through the application, declined as a cultural/artistic program, of an open and incremental methodology developed by the university researchers, to achieve space improvement and community inclusion at the same time.
Graduality, test and redefinition, co-creation of shared tools are the main features of the project. Organized in different phases (sensing, ignition, catalysis, consolidation, release), a rich program of artistic actions was promoted to re-imagine the public space around the theatre, now conceived as a “permeable” place.
On the one hand, Spazio Yak went beyond the boundaries of its walls, in people's daily lives, staging shows in the courtyards of public housing and under the balconies, transforming the neighbourhood into a tableau for urban games, or sharing music and lunches with the neighbours. On the other hand, it has allowed the public to have an active role rethinking the space of the theatre together.
Spazio Yak has managing to improve its role in the community by many point of views: through YAK AROUND project it is today contaminating and regenerating public spaces and community life thanks to artistic performances.
Key objectives for sustainability
Sustainability plays a key role in the development of the project and guides it with different declinations. It is achieved following an overall sustainable methodology, the “Playtime concept”, for the transformation of urban space at the integration between individual and collective well-being, gained through circulation of existing resources, enhancement and the appropriation of open space by engaged communities, developed by a DAStU-PoliMi group of research (see: Moro A. et al. 2020, Playtime. An action framework for public space in fragile urban contexts: https://www.architetti.com/wp- content / uploads / 2019/07 / Playtime-ENG.pdf).
In detail, YAKAROUND works on sustainability through:
1. the capability to build and support a community through the reactivation of natural open spaces in the neighbourhood. The district is characterized by large green areas: some are remarkable, others underutilized, most of them unmanned or improperly used. The activation and connection of green spaces at different scales, suggested by YAKAROUND, has point out the presence and possible role of a green frame, capable of increasing the quality of the site. The project underlines these channels with some performative practices, lighting them up temporarily, sketching new itineraries and relationships;
2. the enhancement of economic exchanges. In a context of high socio-economic fragility due to the presence of middle-lower classes and of high-rate migration, but even in response to the Pandemic, the YAK theatre was proposed as a multifunctional hub for the development of a circular economy. Micro-actions are here undertaken in form of tests: from being a reference point for the delivery of grocery (through collaboration with local cooperatives), to proposing art performances as a bargaining for commissions and services, to hosting and supporting a local market. The idea is to facilitate a continuous exchange between communities through the artistic dimension.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The project deals with the redevelopment of urban spaces in a cultural and narrative key. In YAK AROUND the aesthetic dimension is activated in the gradual construction of the space itself: acquiring new meanings and a new form, becoming spaces to take care of, and finally therefore gathering quality. The project initially worked on the more peripheral spaces of the neighborhood − green spaces and interstitial spaces between social housing blocks − to get closer to inhabitants and bring them to the YAK theatre, affecting then De Salvo square where it is located.
Each project action had the goal to temporarily activate a space, involving different targets with different tools.
After the first triggering tests implemented on the district, the program envisaged five Sundays of activities oriented to families in which the participants were involved in the regeneration of De Salvo square, creating new spatial elements, traces and meanings. The interventions, inserted in a narrative, guided the children and their families to take part in a process in which they were protagonists. The participants were involved in a real, participatory and transformative artistic performance which has built new semantics about the multiple identities of the square, making the theatre recognizable and attractive.
During the experimentation phases, the research group suggests to imagine different spatial scenarios. Through temporary insertion of movable elements in the square, the envisioning of different layouts was achieved. Settling the new design of the square, some multi-dimensional street fornitures are provided to represent shared/self-narrations, play and movement and the ecological potential of the square. The process provides uniqueness and recognition to the square and endows it with new functions and meanings.
Key objectives for inclusion
The primary objective of the project is the activation of a community of users around the YAK theater, renovated according to a new perspective of cultural space, at the service and in support of the neighborhood.
The actions involve heterogeneous audiences and differentiated targets.
In detail, YAK AROUND wanted to reach:
• the inhabitants of social housing in the area;
• families with children;
• the students of the nearby Insubria University;
• the already loyal YAK Theatre public (coming mainly from outside the neighborhood);
• the stakeholders of the territory, such as: commercial and craft activities and related trade associations, the Insubria University, ALER, third sector entities active in well-being projects in the neighborhood, informal groups of active citizens.
The first phase of the project aimed to trigger a process of activation and involvement of the citizens, contrasting the social isolation of some marginal groups of the community.
This hook-up phase had to deal with the restrictions of the first lockdown. Online focus groups were organized with some part of the public. In particular, we choose adult people/public in the neighborhood and families with children. Trough them the project gather a qualitative survey about the socio-cultural needs and about the perception of YAK Theatre, revealing a high rate of ideal adhesion to the process, and an important fiduciary capital.
With the subsequent actions and events in the neighborhood, the project has activated new actions, as for instance "The window on the courtyard" performance, which took place in the courtyards of social housing and involved the inhabitants directly in the performance.
Over time and with the implementing of the artistic and cultural "palimpsesth", the project built a hybrid community, uniting different audiences. In fact, the project managed to consolidate the presence and transform YAK Theatre into a reference for local context.
Results in relation to category
In the current situation, the impossibility of implementing actions that involve a large number of people, has prompted the Karakorum association and the reearchers to anticipate the releaseof the process, which has seen in recent months through:
- the reactivation of the Spazio YAK square;
- the carrying out of some first transformative actions that have endowed the space with new elements;
- the creation of a group of “Ambassadors”, active citizens interested in giving a long-term vision in the development of the neighborhood;
- an ever greater agreement with the Municipality of Varese, which has shown interest in the project and has opened the dialogue for new projects, including the identification of an abandoned space owned by the municipality, which will be an extension of Spazio YAK. It will be at the full disposal of citizens and will host an artisan workshop to create urban furnishings and thus work on a continuous care and supervision of the spaces of the neighborhood;
- the start of a partnership with the local university in order to develop cultural and student involvement actions in synergy with the University Campus, with a long-term view.
How Citizens benefit
The project, almost completely finalized (not yet in the dissemination and evaluation part), seems to have repercussions on the entire community of the Bustecche neighborhood (about 6,000 inhabitants).
However, the most involved targets, as well as the focus on social housing areas, indicate that the greatest benefits are aimed at specific disadvantaged groups in the community.
The incremental actions carried out with YAK AROUND, however, allowed to trigger both a physical and symbolic transformation in the neighborhood that responded to the scarcity of services and places for socialization and inclusion in the neighborhood and also helps to change its negative perception (or fame).
The project has consolidated the bonds between citizens and strengthened a collective identity, also through a reconquest of public spaces.
In the long term, the project will be able to consolidate the activation of some disused spaces in the neighborhood, transforming them into places available to the community. The introduction of street furniture elements in underused public areas and in the interstitial areas between public housing, achieved through an innovative process in synergy with cultural and artistic activities in favor of residents, represents a multiple benefit:
- as an inclusion activity and at the service of excluded populations or who have further suffered from the widening socio-economic gap in the Pandemic;
-as the networking of several associative subjects of a purely social nature with other realities (economic, research, cultural), triggering wider projects that have a greater chance of bringing resources to the neighborhood;
-as redevelopment of marginal spaces.
Innovative character
The innovative character of YAKAROUND mostly relies in the action-research methodology achieved. The research on spaces and participatory artistic practice are two leverages of a synchronic and intersecting work. The combination of the two produces effects in the action "for and through" the public space. YAK AROUND was structured starting from the processes of citizen involvement and participation, progressively proceeding with the transformation of the spaces, in a material way, in terms of use and in terms of identity narrative. A specific methodology for narrative-design approach to pubic space has been testes and consolidated. The artistic skills work in an integrated way with the technical and design ones. The artists collect and rework life stories, tales of a possible future. The architects transform these stories into spatial visions, accompanying citizens in imagining possible transformations of spaces that respond to the demands that have emerged in the form of a story. Once again given back to the artists, the vision translates into collective actions in space, works of public art, both functional and representative of a collective experience, and performances capable of restoring transformation once again in the form of a story.
Moreover the role proposed for a cultural space as a "social multifunctional hub" is quite innovative aswell, and expecially considering the marginalized context of application. (Karakorum association is moreover part of a wider italian net of cultural indipendent spaces,called "Lo stato dei luoghi").
Then it is quite uncommun to combine everyday-life activities and jobs with art and theatre performances.
Those elements consolidates social links, depositing in the space and in the lives of inhabitants, beatiful unforseen elements, supporting a new identity of the neighborhood in which the citizen will be able to recognize themselves and which will help the taking care of placecs.
