Introduction

Why working for and with the local community? Why working for and with the local community?

The vision of the project is to recover and strengthen the local community working on three vertical main topic (defined as pillars) which are Services & Commerce, Mobility and Requalification and two main horizontal dimensions of interventions: space and time.

According to Wikipedia – that proposes a commonly shared as well as easily understandable definition of the concept – a local community is “a group of interacting people living in a common location. The word is often used to refer to a group that is organized around common values and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household. The word “community” is derived from the Old French communauté which is derived from the Latin communitas (cum, “with/together” + munus, “gift”), a broad term for fellowship or organized society.”

The concept of community and, in particular, the one of local community is complex, not easily definable and, at a later time, not simple to be addressed by a project. However, building a strong and dynamic local community is necessary to give life to a 15-minute city and, in general terms, to create the conditions for a liveable city.

Thus, the effort of the project is, first of all, to understand what a community is and what the concept of local community means in the context of Vimodrone, and secondly to promote the enhancement of Vimodrone’s community through very different interventions working on the physical space of the City as well as on the times and schedules of its services and facilities. But why would be significant to strengthen local communities in order to bring about a 15MC? According to Carlos Moreno (2021) a 15-minutes city can be sustainable only if it is just, viable and liveable at the same time. This means generating an urban model able to create value through the convergence of three components: the environmental, the social and the economic one.

Moreover, the 15-minutes city is a model for reconnecting people to their locality, bringing activities into the neighbourhoods (not people to activities), restoring the concept of proximity. 15MC aims to engaging an inclusive approach to planning in order to achieve socially sustainable urban environments. Thus, a sustainable community is an important feature that should be built through equal access to facilities and opportunities, local social interaction, participation in local community activities, community stability, pride of place, sense of belonging and feeling safe and secure. ((Pozoukidou & Chatziyiannaki, 2021)

In short, a 15-minutes city is a place which environment enhances opportunities for residents to interact and built connections and a sense of familiarity.

Vimodrone ’s local community Vimodrone’s local community

Historically, Vimodrone has always been strictly linked with the agricultural production that took place in the territory and shaped it (particularly Naviglio Martesana is one of the main territorial assets of the area). Agriculture, that represented an important economic revenue, also helped shaping the identity of the city and the community: rural houses and courtyards represented, in fact, almost autonomous communities structuring the organization of the territory and society and defining its boundaries.

With the expansion of the historic centre, these buildings have been gradually integrated into a continuous built-up system. In particular, after the IIW W and during the so-called economic boom a very rapid and radical territorial evolution took place and heavily changed the structure of the territory. Vimodrone went from being an agricultural area – which assets were the main access road, the agricultural rural houses and the canals – to being theatre of periurban and industrial expansion that ultimately convinced many farmers to leave their terrains.

In the 60s, the introduction of the metropolitan railways brought a new major change in the physical, but also social, structure of the area. Being so close and, most importantly, so connected with Milan – not only with public transport systems but also thanks to very relevant street connections – is a major feature that had a very relevant impact on the Vimodrone since these days. The high level of accessibility, together with the lower cost of life compared with Milan, made the city the perfect place for working families to live.

Today, Vimodrone is characterized some key elements: its previously-mentioned accessibility that creates the conditions for a very relevant commuting phenomenon, the presence of medium-sized families, the very consistent aging of population (and the related risk of isolation), a good level of wealth and a generally positive environmental quality and services provision.

However, the city seems not to present many spaces and occasions for people to meet and built a sense of community: public spaces and services are often fenced or poorly accessible by some categories because of their localization or time schedules, green areas are almost lacking activities, Martesana itself – one of the most important historic and identity elements of the city – is not as valorised as it could be. Moreover, associations and organization, even if present, do not seem to collaborate much as well.

In order to reverse this process, our project proposes different interventions that works on 3 pillars (strategic topics that influence the everyday life of Vimodrone’s residents and users) and with two dimensions to give life to an urban system able to offer more activities and facilities to inhabitants and to work on different times to meet the needs of different types of users.

The Three Pillars The Three Pillars

The concept of local community is very difficult to be tackled directly, hence the project aims at reaching its goal of strengthening local community working on some key issues, the above-mentioned three pillars, that together define the organization of the work time and, most importantly, the free time of Vimodrone’s inhabitants.

Those themes are:

Services & Commerce. Services & Commerce. This pillar focuses on guaranteeing an equal access to commercial and public facilities to everyone working the way they are provided and the place those are located.

Mobility. Mobility. Mobility and accessibility are two key issues in the definition of a 15MC: the project aims at promoting more sustainable ways of mobility both promoting the existing services and creating support transport system that can promote intermodailty and can guarantee fair access to all daily-need activities in and outside Vimodrone.

Requalification. Requalification. This pillar will focus on the valorisation of the existing public spaces as a place for people to meet and built relations and a sense of community. The project will add new function to existing spaces to attract new users and promote a continuous use of the spaces by different populations.

“Commercial development, made up of retail and service uses, serves numerous purposes. It provides local and regional goods and services, provides employment for many Winnipeggers and contributes to the health, diversity and vitality of the local economy. It also plays a key role in both shaping the form of the city and defining public spaces. These combined factors suggest that commercial development is integral to the creation of complete communities.” (City of Winnipeg, 2011, p.100)

According to this quote, commerce has not only an economic role, but it also helps creating vitality and diversity in the local community. Acknowledging this, means understanding the central role that retail has both for the definition and implementation of a 15MC, and for the strengthening of the local community.

However, the recent trends of online shopping, accelerated by the covid pandemic and the consequent lockdown, put new threads to this sector. In order to overcome this challenge, shops and commercial activities in the future must broaden their scope, and opening up to new possibilities and approaches and being more flexible and attentive to the needs of costumers.

Because of the abovementioned trends and challenges, our project proposes and approach based on:

• collaboration between retailers in order to be able, together, to address more efficiently the challenge,

• promotion of local economic system through events and activities to inform citizens about the novelties introduced by the project,

• diversification and hybridization of the commercial offer, helping citizens to carry out multiple activities in the same places, • attention to the new and constantly-changing needs of the community, adapting the commercial offer to the needs in terms of time and services (promoting online shopping, home delivery etc.)

Similarly, services play a crucial role in achieving and maintaining a general good quality of life. In order to guarantee equal access to those services and reduce inequalities, it is necessary for the Municipality of Vimodrone to solve some issues. In fact, Vimodrone presents a good level and variety of services, however there are two main problems that worsen their accessibility: the first one is their localisation, it could be observed that almost all public services are located in the very central part of the city with the risk of marginalization of those who live away from them, and the second one is, as for commerce, their opening time, again here it can be observed a mismatch between the time schedules of public services and the time availability of inhabitants.

These two issues combined, represent a very important challenge for both the creation of a 15-minute city and the strengthening of the local community of Vimodrone.

“The 15-minute city is defined by its ability to provide access to all human needs by walking or bicycling for a quarter hour or less.” (Duany, 2021)

This very concise definition of the general scope of a 15MC is very helpful to understand why mobility is a relevant issue to tackle. The 15-minute city is not only about the ability to walk of bike, but also about the quality of the pedestrian or cycling experience.

Since Vimodrone’s city centre was built before the proliferation of car mobility, its overall urban structure was already meant to be a 15MC. Nevertheless, the shift from a local, agriculturalbased economy, towards a secondary and then tertiary economy, together with the intensification of the commuting phenomenon denatured this urban structure causing problems not only to the mobility system, but also to the local community of the city.

In fact, the commuting phenomenon has affected the local community on two main ways:

the strong car dependency has pushed up the share of space dedicated to cars, causing a reduction of the overall quality of life and the safety and attractiveness of slow mobility,

the high mobility of resident has transformed Vimodrone into a contemporary “dormitory town” in which services are present, but the mismatch between their time schedules and the ones of commuters make them inaccessible by many people, causing a reduction of their possibilities to access to administrative, recreational and gathering opportunities.

Since it is not possible for a local project to tackle the causes of the commuting phenomenon, since they are linked with supralocal employment trends, the project will work on this dimension indirectly. In particular, we propose to: • work on the relationship between car and other forms of mobility, reducing the imbalance and providing more and better spaces for people to move and meet and promoting sustainable mobility in different, coordinated and integrated forms,

• work on the services (lato sensu) provision and accessibility operating on their localization, time schedules and promoting new forms of usage (e.g. online).

Moreover, the diffusion of remote working could mitigate the abovementioned issues. However, working on this dimension in the project might be difficult. In fact, the share of remote working, does not only depend on workers’ will and on the preparedness in terms of digital infrastructures of the territories, but also on the intentions and interests of the employers, which is an information that we were not able to collect.

Requalification Requalification

Public space, in the form of streets and squares, where people meet and carry out their dailylife activities, green areas, that “contribute to the reduction of inequalities in health issues by providing access to infrastructure and benefits to all, regardless of social and age groups” (Pozoukidou & Chatziyiannaki, 2021, p.6) and promote “connectivity, recreation, community pride and urban beautification” (City of Winnipeg, 2011, p.104), or very important public social infrastructures like social housing; is fundamental for local communities and the concept of 15MC.

As said before, the streets and squares of Vimodrone are mostly dedicated to car parking and traffic, hence they are not walkable (more than 50% of the walkways are under the minimum width) and safe for pedestrian and cycling mobility. This has not only consequences on the attractivity of slow mobility, but also on the overall vitality of the city and its community. For what concerns green spaces, their main weaknesses are the poor accessibility (many of them are fenced and closed during a big part of the day) and their lack of activities. The project will thus work to unlock the unused potential of those spaces. Lastly, Vimodrone hosts a very big social housing that presents many problems from a spatial point of view. The buildings, almost 300-meters long, are definitely out of scale, surrounded by poor-quality green public space and not permeable at all. This type of space perpetrates the notion of a not welcoming space and thus increases the marginalization and isolation of its inhabitants. This strategy will propose mostly physical actions for these spaces, like adding furniture, requalifying the green areas etc. However, the proposal will also take care of expanding the number of activities that can be done in public spaces, with a particular attention to recreational, sport and gathering opportunities for all social groups.

Two operational dimensions Two operational dimensions In order to tackle so different aspects, the project will develop actions and interventions based on two operational dimensions: time and space. According to Moreno (2021), the city is a system both polyrhythmic (in which individuals have different social and personal rhythms) and polychronic (in which the uses of space vary according to the hours). Acknowledging this means working that the system we are working on is characterized by time, space, quality of life and sociability being strictly related. Thus, a project of a 15MC must take into consideration not only the intervention on the physical space – which are however very relevant – but also other intangible factors as times and human relations. Chrono-urbanism is a project approach based on the integration of the time dimension in the planning of the city to combine places, motion and time, in other world built-up system, flows and hours. To manage working on these different dimensions, the proposal will promote the concept of chronotope which establishes the possibility to use spaces in different ways according to the different times of the day and of the year. The uses diversification benefits people – which dispone of new places to gather and to do various activities – and owners – that are so able to optimize the use of existing spaces.