Open Vicoli: designing and activating a community network

Open Vicoli is a project that brings together museums, social cooperatives and groups, businesses and cultural associations that are based or operate in the alleys of Genoa’s historical centre. The project aims to combine the efforts made by different parties and create a stable alliance able to try out engagement and participation methods, introducing local citizens to the cultural heritage dotted throughout the area.

The challenge is to work together to build a new vision of the alleys: from a problem to a proposal, from an exclusion zone to a shared value. From burdens to places of importance.

The Via Prè, Via del Campo and Via della Maddalena are all alleys in Genoa’s historical centre that have had a bad reputation for decades. Despite this, they are also home to a priceless heritage – stately buildings, Baroque churches, shrines and portals, historical shops – and neighbours to some of the city’s most important museums: the Musei Civici di Strada Nuova and the Museo del Risorgimento, the Musei Nazionali di Palazzo Reale e Palazzo Spinola, the Galata Museo del Mare and the “Casa dei cantautori” on Via del Campo 29 Rosso.

In March 2018, the Compagnia di San Paolo launched the Open Community tender, designed to back public engagement projects presented jointly by cultural community networks and audience development professionals. On this occasion, an extensive network of parties operating in the area got to work on a shared project.

Planning

BAM! worked alongside the project leader, the Cooperativa Sociale Il Laboratorio, an organisation with more than thirty years of experience in running educational services for minors and young people and in promoting social and cultural integration, during all the planning phases following the publication of the Open Community tender and the specialisation process for candidate projects throughout autumn 2018.

At the end of this process, Open Vicoli topped the chart of the nine finalists, receiving € 100,000 of funding for an eighteen-month period, from February 2019 to July 2020.

Community management

During the project, BAM! will be responsible for:

• activating the community network
• training the network members
• facilitating audience engagement processes

with the objective of ensuring that the communities are able to carry forward the process on their own after the end of the activities funded by the tender.

Phase one: information and training

Between February and May 2019, during the first phase of the project, BAM! coordinated the partnership development, training and data collection activities. In greater detail, we developed and implemented:

• a series of interviews with all partners to map their needs, relationships and links with the local area;
• an audience survey campaign involving more than 1200 questionnaires administered to local museum visitors in order to study the relationship between the museums and surrounding neighbourhoods;
• two participated planning days, which involved visiting all the partners to encourage information sharing and getting to know each other;
• a training and meeting day with guests and audience development and audience engagement case studies, to bring the partnership up-to-date with the subject and develop shared reference vocabulary;
• a co-planning day to trigger the second phase of Open Vicoli: the launch of planning groups within the network, which encourage the various parties to communicate with one another regarding the development of activities to be carried out in autumn 2019.

Phase two: work groups

Between June and September 2019, BAM! will be closely monitoring the four work groups created in May during the co-planning day. The groups are each made up of organisations from different sectors (museums, social sector, cultural sector) and will be pooling ideas, experiences, communities and audiences in order to plan cultural engagement formats, workshops or courses.

The workshops will be held at the museums and will involve the communities in the historical centre in the creative re-evaluation of the heritage and collections, culminating in events open to the public.

The courses have been designed to emerge from the museums and connect them to the neighbourhood and the city. They will turn members of the community into qualified mediators and narrators for the cultural heritage to be found in the neighbourhood and will enable them to develop discovery routes, which can also be used by the museums, modernising what they have to offer.

The project comprises an initial workshop and course planning and development phase between summer and autumn 2019, and a second one between winter and spring 2020.