The Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity (DGCC) of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism is launching the third edition of Creative Living Lab, an initiative born in 2018 to finance urban regeneration projects through cultural and creative activities.
This third edition, for which the DGCC allocates over 1 million euros, is aimed at supporting multidisciplinary projects, which have as their objective the creation and redevelopment of proximity spaces within residential areas, in order to support a development model based on collaborative processes and social innovation, characterized by key words and concepts, such as: interaction, coexistence, everyday life, resilience to pandemics and sustainable communities.
The Public Notice is part of the institutional actions implemented by the DGCC in the field of urban regeneration in areas experiencing situations of environmental, social, cultural and economic fragility, not necessarily far from the physical urban centre, but characterized by difficult accessibility to services and infrastructure. Faced with the radical changes underway and the health emergency due to Covid-19, the DGCC intends to start a reflection on a topic considered to be of great urgency, such as the lack of quality services and spaces in the different urban realities of the country, useful for to welcome individuals and communities safely and under favorable conditions and to create opportunities for building relationships, discussion and integration.
“The great success of the first two editions of Creative Living Lab, which saw the participation of over 500 territorial realities, demonstrates the validity of an initiative in which MiBACT believes a lot, so much so that it has increased the budget again, bringing it to over 1 million euros” – declares Anna Laura Orrico, Undersecretary of State of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and for Tourism. “We want to give an opportunity to all those associations that actively work in the area to recover and return abandoned spaces, abandoned industrial areas and disused common assets to communities, rethinking them with creativity and ingenuity, transforming them into opportunities for sustainable development, social revitalization and cultural".
The public notice is aimed at public and private non-profit entities dedicated to contemporary culture and creativity and rooted in peripheral territories, such as: public entities, foundations, cultural associations, non-profit third sector entities, universities, non-profit research centres, social and non-profit community enterprises, organized civil society. The contribution of sector experts and cultural mediators such as, for example, architects, landscape architects, designers, artists, directors, film-makers, photographers, musicians, performers, writers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists is important.
Creative Living Lab supports innovative and quality micro-projects of immediate realization, capable of transforming residual areas and spaces into places of exchange and learning, accessible, usable and functionally differentiated, in order to create a synergistic relationship between the environment and the social fabric , cultural and economic; interventions aimed at the reuse and reorganization of areas dedicated to services, neighborhood equipment and common condominium spaces.
The objectives of this third edition of Creative Living Lab are:
– create spaces equipped for new destinations and for activities that can help transform the quality of services and community spaces through contemporary creativity;
– favor the involvement of local communities in urban regeneration processes aimed at strengthening the socio-cultural dynamics of participatory growth and improving the quality of life of local economies;
– experiment and disseminate inclusive and aggregative methodologies for resident communities, capable of developing a sense of identity and belonging to places.
The proposals must indicate new forms of use of the selected places in order to improve services, fruition and cultural functions, to encourage the activation of participation and self-construction paths through the involvement of institutions, professionals, artists, citizens and active subjects on the territory and to promote a system of self-organization from below which is such as to favor a process of empowerment and re-appropriation in the communities involved.
The public notice and all attachments are published on the institutional website of the DGCC at the following link: http://www.aap.beniculturali.it/creativelab.html
As indicated in the notice, proposals must be sent via PEC no later than 12.00 on 10.03.2021. For further information: creativelivinglab@beniculturali.it
