The co-design workshops, which were held during the first two years of work, have allowed the local community to strengthen its capacity to collaborate and starting from the analysis and identification of problems and needs, have contributed, not only to enhancing their propensity but also to test new solutions to the problems identified by putting their skills in place.
A solution imagined, and which in the course of this third year has begun to take shape, is that of the so-called Collaborator. According to the literature, Collaboratorio means an urban living lab, a place, not necessarily fixed, where the urban community meets, meets, creates new synergies, shares knowledge and experiences, experiences multidisciplinary and multistakeholder collaboration, to produce and generate shared solutions to common problems, personal services, new forms of collaborative, social, creative and circular economy. It represents, therefore, a strategic instrument for the constitution of a collaborative district and in order to supply of the services that the public in the last years often has difficulty to offer.
An example, already active in Italy, is the Collaboratorio di Reggio Emilia, that is an open laboratory where to experiment collaborative economy and social innovation projects, where to study and prototype innovative solutions to social needs. The open Laboratory, therefore, has been conceived as a place where citizens, associations, companies, research institutions, can meet and collaborate to generate new forms of local economic development and shared value.
In the Co-District, Collaboratorio has been conceived as a space for incubation of community enterprises for the so-called co-economies, that is, circular, cultural, social and solidarity-based economies, with the aim of providing job opportunities in an area with a high rate of youth unemployment. In addition, these incubated enterprises would produce neighbourhood services to promote a new model of community welfare.
During this third year of work, during which the Collaborator began to take shape, numerous open co-design workshops were organized in key places for their strong social and cultural value of Co-District.
These workshops allowed participants to acquire new skills and tools, in addition to strengthening the social capital already present and to bring out even more so-called civic entrepreneurs, that is, individuals able to transform traditional civic activism into energy to create new sustainable and social economies.
