On 23 May 2026, in Piazza Aldo Moro, the URWAN journey in Ferla came full circle with a day of learning, art and celebration
The urban regeneration process that SVI.MED. – Euromediterranean Center for the Sustainable Development began in February 2025 with the Municipality of Ferla (SR), as part of the URWAN project, has reached its conclusion with the whole town gathered in the very square it had spent over a year reimagining together.
If the climate crisis is also, as we wrote at the start of this journey, a crisis of the imagination, then Ferla’s answer has been to imagine, create and act, collectively and in public. The closing event held the entire arc of that process in a single day: from the co-design workshops that turned residents of all ages into protagonists of change through the Start Park methodology, to the artivist laboratories that, with the OCRA Collective, brought colour and biodiversity to the Green Wall and to Piazza Aldo Moro itself.
The day opened in the morning with an educational path dedicated to schools, a guided visit to the Green Wall (Wall2Water). Students from the “Luigi Einaudi” Institute of Siracusa took part in the visit, joined throughout the day by other visitors who came to discover the Green Wall – keeping learning and curiosity, which were at the origin of the co-design process, at the heart of its conclusion. The Green Wall itself continues to grow as a living infrastructure: through the Horizon Europe NICE Fellowship, it has been further enhanced with a rain garden and upgraded sensors for more efficient monitoring and new plants: concrete improvements that strengthen its role in circular urban water management.
At the heart of the day stood the open-air exhibition on the good practices of urban regeneration. The exhibition drew on the good practices gathered in the Urwan Catalogue developed by IRIDRA presenting NbS through the distinction between “snob” and “smart” approaches. For the occasion, the exhibition was enriched with dedicated panels produced through the Kassandra project, showcasing the virtual twin of Ferla, the Decision Support System (DSS) that allows the community to test and visualise the impact of its choices, alongside a series of posters retracing the full Start Park journey in Ferla – from the first co-design workshops to the final Master Plan for Piazza Aldo Moro. More than a display of outputs, the exhibition turned the square into a living archive of collective memory, making visible not only the technical results, but the visions and the sense of shared ownership that the process generated.
In the afternoon, the square came alive with itinerant activities and games designed to bring the exhibition to life. One of the most distinctive aspects of the event was the strong use of gamification and playful learning approaches to engage the local community. “The Treasure of Ferla”, a sustainability-themed treasure hunt co-designed together with local associations — particularly RiciCreo Ferla, the Civil Protection group and local sports associations — transformed the village into an open-air educational pathway focused on Nature-based Solutions, sustainability and community participation.
Organised into seven teams, children and teenagers became the real protagonists of the initiative. Moving through different stages of the treasure hunt, participants explored the exhibition, interacted with 3D scale models of Nature-based Solutions and solved riddles connected to the environmental and social benefits of the interventions presented. Each team was challenged to identify and understand a specific NbS and then explain it to members of the local community. In this way, younger participants unexpectedly became active ambassadors of sustainability, successfully engaging adults who would not normally take part in technical or institutional events, learning by exploring the solutions and the 3D scale models of different solutions, including those implemented in Rome (Italy) and in Cuba (Portugal).
In the early evening, the results of the URWAN, CARDIMED and NICE projects were presented to the community. The speakers included Giuseppe Vinci and Michelangelo Siracusa, for the Municipality of Ferla; Barbara Sarnari, URWAN project manager for SVI.MED.; Mark Cannata, for the Kassandra project; and Emanuela Giuffrida for the University of Catania, taking part through the CARDIMED project. Far from being a closing ceremony in the formal sense, this was a moment of restitution: handing back to Ferla the knowledge, the tools and the Master Plan for Piazza Aldo Moro — consolidated within URWAN through the town’s virtual twin — so that the community can continue to steward its own transformation.
The day came to a close in the warmth of a shared celebration: a community aperitivo and live music by Radio cashmere. What URWAN leaves in Ferla is not a single redesigned square, but a method and a relationship: a community that has learned to imagine its future, to design it through Nature-based Solutions, and to claim it as its own. As we wrote at the outset, global change can come from local action — and Ferla continues to be living proof of this.
Watch the video of the day here.
