Rome kicks off the seventh edition of Abitare il Paese - The Culture of Demand

On Thursday 28 November, at Università Roma Tre, Ex Mattatoio, starting at 10.30 a.m., the launch of the seventh edition of ‘Abitare il Paese - La cultura della domanda’, a project born in 2018 from an alliance between the National Council of Architects, Planners, Landscape Architects and Conservators (CNAPPC) in collaboration with Fondazione Reggio Children - Loris Malaguzzi Centre in synergy with the network of the 105 provincial Orders of Architects PPC.

Experts, scholars from the worlds of schools and architecture, students and teachers will be taking part in the initiative with a specific focus on ‘Activating educating communities: new generations, participation, cities’ in order to systematise, create and strengthen the school-city-territory network. There will also be an exhibition of the territorial projects carried out during the sixth edition of Abitare il Paese, which involved 31 Associations, 43 schools, 133 architects, 1,240 students and the cities of Genoa, Lecce, Modena, Ravenna, Savona, Trieste, Bari, Brindisi, Cuneo, Padua, Pescara, Taranto, Varese, Agrigento, Benevento, Pesaro, Pescara, Ancona, Latina, Reggio Calabria, Caltanissetta, Grosseto, Treviso, Venice and Vicenza.

‘Abitare il Paese - La cultura della domanda’ intends to generate a new demand for architecture, through an action of territorial co-design that starts from the school, the real propeller of urban and social regeneration, and strengthen that union between Architecture and Pedagogy with which the project itself was born.

In this regard, Cristian Fabbi, Director General of the Reggio Children Foundation - Loris Malaguzzi Centre states that ‘the alliance between architecture and pedagogy, and therefore between Cnappc and the Reggio Children Foundation with “Abitare il Paese”, which we are pursuing with increasing conviction, has now enabled thousands of students in Italy to discover the importance of space as a “third educator”, as Loris Malaguzzi defined it. Dealing with the theme of the city, of educating communities, and now of civic participation, different generations, young people, architects, teachers, have worked together affirming the value of learning together, of recognising being citizens, of sharing public places and improving them as spaces for relationships’. 

To achieve this objective, however, the active involvement of students is required because, as Massimo Crusi, President of the CNAPPC, points out, ‘the strong point of this Project is to make students protagonists of change and of the enhancement of their daily spaces inside and outside school, supporting them in being conscious citizens of today's city. It is an innovative path to foster urban quality and to stimulate territories to elaborate their own vision of the ‘city of the near future’, starting from the confrontation with the school community, through an intergenerational dialogue between different knowledge and spheres. It is a central element, among the policies of the National Council of Architects PPC, to promote a paradigm shift aimed at rebuilding the relationship between society and economy, with people at the centre of the project, and with a vision projected to 2030’.

Lilia Cannarella, Head of the CNAPPC's Participation, Social Inclusion and Subsidiarity Department, emphasises that Abitare il Paese is a ‘project of projects’ that promotes the culture of participation and has produced experiences that have become a wealth of ideas for the participatory planning of tomorrow's cities. An extraordinary journey from which emerges, through the looks, voices, desires and needs of children and young people, an idea of architecture that ‘improves life’, an idea of places that ‘exist because people exist’. ‘Inhabiting the Country’ is also a research project, anchored in the international scenario through the UN 2030 Agenda, that has entered into the making of schools by favouring the achievement of one of the three pillars of Civic Education: “Economic Development and Sustainability”.

It will be possible to follow the proceedings in live streaming on the CNAPPC YouTube channel bit.ly/YouTube2811

 For documentation on Abitare il Paese urly.it/312ynp