Suburbs are often very contradictory places. Despite great part of urban population live there, these parts of cities are mostly considered as degradation places. The topic of suburbs regeneration is relevant today. Nevertheless, often expensive interventions implemented by local authorities fail to regenerate their public spaces. This paper presents the experience of “Serpentone reload”, a workshop based on participatory reactivation of abandoned or underused spaces and buildings in “Cocuzzo/Serpentone” neighbourhood in Potenza (Basilicata, Italy). The workshop particularly focused on the reuse of the “Ship”, an underground building, completed in 2010, never used, because it has been perceived as an extraneous element, the result of an imposition and not the outcome of shared choices. The experience is particularly significant, because it shows how low cost interventions, realized with citizens involvement, could contribute to the regeneration of peripheral urban areas more than expensive and complex imposed interventions
The spread of information and communications technologies (ICT) and mobile devices is changing the relationship among citizenship and urban spaces. The use of the internet allows communities-either real or virtual ones-to produce an increasing amount of data about cities and their life. These assumptions were the basement for the "Urban Laboratory in Innovation", a workshop held in Potenza (Southern Italy), in which experts and researchers asked a group of volunteers to analyse life in public spaces of a neighbourhood and point out insights for its regeneration. This experience shows how social network and VGI are useful tools for the development of innovative policies, edemocracy and participation to decision-making processes. Nevertheless, even when specific tools are implemented to favour the inclusion of citizens into the policy-making processes, traditional participatory and design approaches are still a valuable instrument to synthesise their requirements and effectively support the development of site-specific urban planning tools.
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