Journal 3 - The cohousing experience in Borgo Palazzo: Ready to go!

With the CAPACITyES project the city of Bergamo addresses the issue of urban poverty, specifically considering the lack of housing supply, educational poverty of children and spatial segregation. The solution is an integrated approach focusing on the child-centred perspective with a temporary cohousing facility for families with juveniles and a new children's centre.
The project attempts to achieve its objectives by:

1. Implementing an integrated and complex strategy acting on several thematic levels (inclusion, participation, fight against urban poverty, temporary uses, involvement of children and artists),
2. Activating several redevelopment zones (the Borgo Palazzo pavilion, Cascina Serassi, the streets, or rather some of the walls, of Borgo Palazzo),
3. Bringing together the various local actors in a dialogue with local institutions, but also with the superordinate ones, defining a rich and interactive governance scheme, thus generating not only financial sustainability, but also socio-cultural and environmental sustainability.

In this third Journal, we focus on the redevelopment of the former hospital pavilion, a building abandoned for years, which will constitute the first nucleus of a cohousing experience for families in critical conditions and extreme poverty. This project, which addresses the housing problem of the poorest classes, is located within an early twentieth-century structure that began as a centre for health services, consisting of several buildings. European cities contain many types of neighbourhoods that resemble the hospital structure located in Borgo Palazzo. Structures from the early 20th century, with large pavilions that either still cover the same functions, sometimes in regenerated buildings, others in buildings 'made resilient' by the many repairs made over the years to make them acceptable, or abandoned, as was the case with this regenerated building in Bergamo. The Municipality of Bergamo is looking at these types of buildings and the Borgo Palazzo district with a view to initiating an urban regeneration process that takes into account the value of re-use and re-functionalisation. The co-housing action begun in Borgo Palazzo aims to implement a new functional mixite that can enrich the way Bergamo's city and civic fabric functions. The Borgo Palazzo neighbourhood is the most populous in the city and one of the most multi-ethnic (9.7% of residents come from Africa, Asia, Central and South America), and, together with Boccaleone and Celadina, is the focus of the CAPACITyES project. Borgo Palazzo is at the centre of a regeneration process involving the settlement, green and infrastructure system. This process, supported by the actions launched by the CAPACITyES project, is an opportunity for families, children and the entire community. Indeed, the aim is to experiment with innovative solutions for urban and social regeneration within the city. Not a simple recovery of buildings and areas, but a path to create and strengthen relationships, social inclusion, new perspectives for the city that is changing and sowing the seeds of the city to come. Important interventions, in a district that alone accounts for about 8% of Bergamo's population, with about 5,000 households.  It is a regenerative process that seeks to respond to the pressing needs of urban poverty by bringing into play not only a physical heritage (abandoned areas or buildings), but also knowledge and practices (think of the participatory process implemented for CAPACITyes), a political message of creating a local society that aims to integrate and include those in difficulty through an approach that does not only seek to solve the immediate problem (having a house), and finally initiate a process of training and insertion into the world of work and local socio-cultural contexts. Working on abandonment through regenerative processes brings new life to European cities, but above all introduces the value of 'reuse'. A value that keeps cities compact and makes them adaptable to new socio-cultural and economic contexts, a degree of flexibility that increases both local resilience and promotes forms of sustainable development. Over the years different functions have developed in this structure, each building has had, or still has, its own history. The building in which the cohousing experience will soon begin was in a state of neglect; for years it was a women's hospital dealing with and treating mental illness. 
The redevelopment of the building also becomes a driver for a regeneration process involving the entire Borgo Palazzo area. The Borgo Palazzo neighborhood has many abandoned commercial and industrial buildings that could be reconverted into spaces to host craft workshops, social functions such as neighborhood housing and social housing. The same area, where the pavilion is located, has hosted functions related to health care for years, but it could undergo a functional reconversion towards a model that contemplates a mix of functions. In this sense, the CAPACITyES project is a catalyst for a regenerative process that goes beyond its punctual interventions and defines a broader context in which to found new urban regeneration actions.  The building will house 12 family dwellings with a series of shared spaces - kitchen and operating dining room, multifunctional meeting room, laundry room, bricolage room - and urban gardens outside. 
The initial intention was to house, from summer 2022, families with children, who find it difficult to remain in the private housing market. These families will be installed in the building, but the project will formally start in early 2023. In fact, this period we are living through, characterised by the 3Cs (Covid, Conflict, Crisis), has done nothing but cause delays in construction due to non-availability of material and inflation processes.  
Families will soon be the protagonists of an innovative collaborative living project, flanked by training courses that will enable them to obtain skills that can be used in socialising, cohousing and on the labour market. 

Localising the experience in this building means not only providing an answer to a pressing and urgent demand for housing, but also reactivating a strategic area of the city of Bergamo through temporary uses linked to training, job placement and inclusion. The regeneration of this district is based on a hybrid community, multicultural and attentive to intergenerational dialogue. Cohousing not only as a shelter, but as a generator of a new sustainable community that will substantiate the future steps of the regenerative process of the Borgo Palazzo area.  

The Municipality of Bergamo, as leader and proposer of the project, and the CAPACITyES partnership faced different and various issues. Recently on February the 4th, the families were able to move into the upgraded building prepared for cohousing. Obviously, this is to be regarded as very good news, but at the same time it opens the field to new challenges to be faced, which at this stage are somewhat expected, but not perfectly configurable in terms of the details, timing and how they will arise. The ten families, selected in February 2020, have come to the end of a journey that did not only involve finding a housing solution, but also a process of training and integration into the social, cultural and productive context of the neighbourhood, and more generally into the everyday life of the city of Bergamo. The families are thrilled to finally take possession of their new homes, especially after dealing with various pandemic-induced problems such as increased prices and lack of materials on the market, which caused some stress and strain on the partnership-beneficiary dialogue. These moments were always well managed by the Main Urban Authority, which never let its guard down and managed any externalities promptly and in a coordinated manner with the partners.

The completion of the 'physical' construction site, which included the redevelopment of the former hospital pavilion, marks the beginning of what might be the most crucial phase of CAPACITyES: establishing and operating the 'human' construction site to achieve positive results. This human construction site is characterised by a rich diversity. The real challenge of the CAPACITyES project, in fact, is to work together, to harmonise differences, thanks to forms of active participation and with the help of neighbourhood social networks, in order to foster the involvement of citizens, and especially the neighbourhood, and improve social cohesion. This experiment in cohousing is the end result of a lengthy co-design process during which the points of view of the children and their families were fundamental. It is worth noting that the space, where the ten families will reside, was developed based their needs, giving it a unique and personalized touch.

Getting to this point has undoubtedly meant running an obstacle course, many of which have been compounded by the fact that the degree of unpredictability of externalities has been very high over the past three years. Each new obstacle has provoked and configured additional challenges. Let us focus on the challenges that have arisen since the beginning of the rehabilitation process of this hospital pavilion in Borgo Palazzo, which had been in a state of neglect for years.

For the sake of simplicity, the challenges and the obstacles to their resolution can be grouped into the following typology:

• Challenges related to ensuring respect for equal opportunities and fair choices (e.g. determining the selection of families to participate in this innovative housing experiment).
• Challenges related to the relational context present in the Borgo Palazzo neighbourhood, but also in the neighbouring areas, thus linked to a fair involvement of stakeholders and local communities.
• Technical-participative challenges: cohousing is not a conventional form of housing, traditional top-down design techniques cannot be applied in these cases.
• Challenges related to the maintenance and activities to be carried out in the common spaces, but also related to the financial sustainability of the building once it is fully operational, hence management challenges.
• Challenges related to the spatial contextualisation of this project, around the building, in the Borgo Palazzo structure, which was created as a hospital or health-oriented service centre, there are other buildings that do not have residential functions.

As mentioned in the previous paragraphs, the challenges were of a various types, many of which were already anticipated at the preparation stage, others, as in the case of most urban regeneration pathways based on innovative and complex urban policies, emerged as externalities. The CAPACITyES project demonstrated early on the remarkable resilience of the project partnership, its ability to react quickly and to propose alternatives in response to changes.

In particular, the lead partner, the Main Urban Authority, always held the reins of the project in its hands and was always able to redirect it in response to changes. This capacity is, and has been so far, based on:

The presence of a reliable relational network, not only the project partners, but also the wider group of stakeholders revolving around the various initiatives.

• The existence of a valuable and well-structured territorial capital, both in the Municipality of Bergamo and in the areas of intervention is evident.

• The capacity of this network, of the various associations involved, of the technical Delivery Partners, who have always demonstrated that they have the necessary knowledge to face challenges and propose solutions, alternatives, ideas to overcome or circumvent the various obstacles.

• The continuous dialogue that the Main Urban Authority was able to maintain each and every problem that arose, never losing sight of the aspects that deviated from the planned path, but always being present to point out the responsibilities of the different roles with respect to tasks, target users, but also operational design aspects (especially in the technical design phase of the interventions).

These capacities, which include 

• previous urban and territorial knowledge, 
• economic and intellectual resources, 
• the ability to maintain short networks at the local level, and 
• the ability to project local problems into opportunities generated by long networks (national or international), 

have resulted in two of the three projects forming the backbone of the CAPACITyES project being completed, while the third is currently being implemented. With a foundation in a well-established, horizontally-governed actor context, this initiative effectively leverages the potential benefits of innovation. This context, its intrinsic structuring, but above all its ability to cooperate continuously, has made it possible not only to realise the objectives the project has set itself, but also to brilliantly overcome the obstacles posed by a decidedly not easy period. The ability to structure an open dialogue with local stakeholders was therefore a fundamental card in Bergamo to implement those ideas that would have had a more difficult life if implemented through ordinary programming paths; in this the UIA tool made the difference in opening up an alternative playing field for the partners and actors involved.

We could group these capabilities into three concepts:

• Careful management of participatory processes, both neighbourhood and inter-institutional.
• Continued focus on project management and ongoing monitoring activities.

• Openness towards sustainable development based on the principle of local rooting, i.e. identifying problems and solutions at the neighbourhood scale, where they are realised in daily life, through the implementation of a permanent dialogue based on workshops and continuous support actions, both formal and informal to the final beneficiaries of the project, but even with all others involved local actors.  

With these reflections, the second Journal of CAPACITyes concludes; the next issue will be dedicated to the implementation process of the Hub4Kids, which will be completed and made operational in the coming weeks. 

Follow the transformations of the project in real time on the dedicated website (https://www.capacityes.it/) and on the following social channels:

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