Re-imagining The Future of Public Housing In Milan through Co-Design
Context
The city of Milan was facing a problem with public housing. First, there were a lot of underutilized spaces in and around the social housing complexes (e.g., basements, abandoned parks, etc.). Second, even though most of these housing complexes were located in relatively central and functional areas of the city, there was a problem with social exclusion in these neighborhoods. Since the majority of public housing residents were low-income people, a lot of them were immigrants that had not necessarily entered the country legally but had been living in these housing for many years and had always tried to evade paying for utilities. Among the residents of some housings, there were also some student gangster groups and street artists with drug abuse issues. All this was scaring away people living in the vicinity of these areas. Many avoided passing by, let alone conducting any form of economic activity in these neighborhoods.
Goals
Within the scope of its participation in Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Network, in December 2019, The Municipality of Milan launched an urban regeneration challenge aimed at:
1. Reactivating the spaces on ground floors and around the public housing complexes in 6 neighborhoods.
2. Promoting social inclusion and reinvigorating the economy of the public housing neighborhoods.
Approach
The Municipality approached some design researchers at Politecnico Di Milano to tackle the challenge together. To generate ideas that can make a difference in a regenerative process, Politecnico’s design researchers decided to use co-design. 5-day moderated co-creation workshops were organized to implement a bottom-up approach by inspiring the residents of Milan to visualize future scenarios for their spaces and neighborhoods. Politecnico’s design researchers were to facilitate the workshops, which would take place in Politecnico’s POLI.design lab. As a service design master’s student, I was among the organizers.
Process
Firstly, we recruited participants from public housing neighborhoods. 42 participants including citizens and representatives from local businesses and government agreed to participate. In 6 groups, they went through the entire design process — from research to ideation and prototyping.
The participants worked 6 days. They completed 5 design sprints and on the sixth day, presented their concepts to Piero Pelizzaro, Milano’s Chief Resilience Officer.
The process went as follows:
Day 1
The participants got acquainted with the project goals and the flow of the activities they would complete in the upcoming week. Before starting to work, they did an ice-breaking activity to get to know each other and break the invisible wall of communication. The activity they did was called “2 Truths + 1 lie”. Every participant had to tell two true things, and one false thing about themselves, and the participant sitting next to him/her had to guess what was true and what was false. During the activity, the participants moved around and changed pairs several times.
After the ice-breaker, they started to do problem mind-mapping. The participants individually and then in groups brainstormed about problems related to the public housing neighborhoods. Then, on a whiteboard, the facilitators collected and clustered the ideas from groups into 6 main problem areas. From the identified problem categories, each participant chose the one they’d like to work on during the upcoming days. Based on the shared interests, working groups were formed. Each group was randomly assigned a specific neighborhood with public housing.
Day 2
On the second day’s morning, the facilitators briefly introduced the groups to key design research methods and tools. Then the groups got a task to craft a research strategy and implement it. The research activities included both desk research and field research components. In the second half of the day, some participants from each group went to the neighborhoods for field research, while others focused on desk research at Poli.Design lab. As facilitators, we helped them to use the lab resources and find info and were passively leading the entire process.
Day 3
The third sprint started with the groups finalizing the research phase and starting to synthesize their findings. The participants listened to a brief presentation about research synthesis methods and boundary objects used in this process, such as personas, system and stakeholder maps, research walls, etc. Based on the collected data, the groups created personas of people living in and out of the neighborhoods and ecosystem maps of their particular neighborhoods.
Day 4
They started the ideation phase with an exercise called “Crazy 8's”. This is a fast sketching exercise that challenges people to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. They then did a dot-voting activity to collectively select the concept. The groups used legos, papers, etc., to visualize their concepts. Later, they would use the prototypes while presenting their concepts to the municipality to conduct desktop walkthroughs.
Day 5
During the 5th sprint day, they continued to finalize the prototypes and simultaneously started to work on presenting their concepts. In particular, they were instructed to create “Future Narratives” prototypes with a brief video and newspaper article from the future, describing how the media would present their concepts sometime after the execution and what would be the benefits of their concepts.
Day 6
On the 6th day, the teams presented the 6 prototypes and the presentation materials to the Chief Resilience Officer of Milan and the other representatives of the Municipality of Milan.
Outcomes
The groups had come up with 6 very different concepts. 2 of the concepts were chosen by the municipality as options for testing and possible execution.
The concepts were the following:
- Moving museums
One of the groups offered to turn the abandoned basements of the public housings into spaces for artists to organize moving exhibitions. The idea was to promote cultural activities and flow of people from the outside of the neighborhoods to the area.
- Community gardening places
One of the teams proposed to turn the open spaces into community gardening places managed by the municipality and run by the residents. The goal was not only to utilize the spaces but also to create opportunities for sustainable economic activities for the residents to improve their living conditions.
- Design studios
Since one of the public housing neighborhoods was in a neighborhood where several prominent design schools are located, one of the groups had come up with an idea for the municipality to partner with these schools to provide spaces for the design school students to create studios and also sell their work and also to involve the unemployed residents of the public housings in their projects.
- Sports complexes and inter-housing competition event hubs
One of the teams proposed to promote healthy lifestyles and create opportunities for inclusion by using sports as a unifying factor. With this concept, the group was trying not only to promote inclusion and a sense of belonging to a community inside the neighborhoods but also to promote communication between different public housing areas.
- Nursing homes with skill-sharing hubs
One of the concepts targeted the problem of an aging population that the city is facing and the problem of unemployment that many of the residents of the public housing areas were facing to create alternative day-time nursing homes, where the residents could be employed and could also learn from the elderly different skills that they possessed.
- Community libraries with book clubs
One concept was to create libraries with entertainment facilities where the elderly and the student population studying in the universities close to the public housing complexes could gather. In this concept, too, the residents of the public housing were to take care of managing the libraries, and the municipality was to employ them.
Challenges & Learnings
The project taught many valuable lessons not only about the value of co-design but also about the challenges of facilitation during co-design workshops.
• When facilitating co-design workshops, detailed planning and structuring are the “make it or break it” factors.
Working with teams of people from drastically diverse backgrounds and different expertise can be challenging. In co-design sessions, it’s crucial to clearly define the flow of the workshops to capture the collective intelligence instead of facing chaos. The participants will be confused initially, and it’s the facilitator’s key responsibility to make them feel at ease and provide them with the necessary guidance without pressure and too much leading.
• As a facilitator, you will have to adapt and be ready to improvise a lot. Better be prepared, and do not be intimidated!
No matter how structured and well-planned the workshops are — be it the timing, the structure, or the tasks, there are going to be contingencies. Some teams might not make it in time, some might face challenges, some activities may appear unsuited for the audience, etc. In these cases, it is crucial to keep an open mind and have backup plans to change and adapt on the go. If not, both the facilitators and the participants will experience a block, and the project results will not be as satisfactory.
• As a facilitator, it’s essential to be prepared to deal with the stakeholder skepticism by empowering them and giving them minor “wins” during the process.
Initially, the participants are going to be skeptical about the project’s value as well as about their abilities to sketch, design, or create anything. As facilitators, our role is to guide them so that they do not face uncertainty about their tasks and also so that they do not experience any major failures during the process. The small wins, praises, and some of their outputs will empower them and engage them more. This, in turn, helps mobilize the creative flows and have more diverse and functional overall outcomes.
