The role of imagination in tackling the climate crisis: Ferla one step closer to a more sustainable future imagined together

The urban redesigning process that SVI.MED. started last February with the municipality of Ferla (SR) as part of the URWAN project continues. On World Water Day on 21 and 22 March, one of its milestones was reached: the co-design workshop involving the entire population, from the youngest to the oldest.

Through the Start Park methodology, which uses gamification to foster bottom-up processes of co-designing urban spaces, and thanks to the support of Iridra and Codesign Toscana, children and adults have been involved in a playful and imaginative process capable of combining rationality and creativity towards a common goal: the transformation of an urban space – the Aldo Moro square – by integrating climate change adaptation visions and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) to promote a more efficient and sustainable management of water resources.

“The climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination”, says Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement, because what is usually lacking after the awareness of a problem is the creative impulse to act, also caused by the lack of a collective vision of the future. In Ferla, however, it was the ability to imagine that was the focus of an intense but playful process that made people real protagonists of the change to be implemented, giving them the opportunity to build hypotheses and possible utopias, nourishing their knowledge of the world, both their own and the collective one, towards new visions of a more sustainable present-future. It is precisely this aware and visionary citizenship – but also attentive to the possible natural solutions that can make their country a more beautiful, sustainable and useful place for the community – that is the result of the effective and long-lasting collaboration with the Municipality of Ferla, as in the case of  the NAWAMED project that made the installation of the green wall for the reuse of grey water at school possible, now monitored thanks to the Horizon Europe CARDIMED project.

The two days of meetings have indeed brought to the fore the wishes and inspiring ideas of the students of the I.C.S. Valle dell’Anapo school, together with those of the rest of the community: greener, creative, safe, safe, innovative gathering places are the synthesis of common aspirations.

During the first day of the workshop at school, the students had the opportunity to give space to their imagination, and to rethink a space they know through their own eyes and needs, by promoting activities that stimulate reflection and creativity, such as the use of images, drawings and the creation of new narratives.

On the second day, in the Municipal Auditorium, plans for the area to be redesigned together with playing cards stimulated the creativity of the rest of the community in a more pragmatic way, following the Start Park rules. Vision cards, activity and decoration cards, and NbS cards were used to sketch out a new configuration for the square under analysis, considering the cost and maintenance aspects of the proposals in order to make even the most utopian ideas as realistic as possible.

The climate crisis is a multi-crisis, and with the URWAN project and the long-standing collaboration of the Municipality of Ferla, we are acting on several aspects simultaneously to tackle its root causes. The enthusiasm of the youngsters and the valuable contribution of the adults enriched the workshop, generating a comparison full of ideas and proposals that will soon be transformed into a real feasibility study of the Aldo Moro square, which will be consolidated as one of the possible scenarios thanks to the virtual twin created for Ferla within the URWAN project, measuring its impact on the town’s resilience indices.

Global change can come from local action, and the days that have just passed, along with those to come, are and will continue to be proof of this.

Watch the video clip of the 2 days here