Challenge of urban cultures: the project started by Pope Francis becomes a conference

Challenge of urban cultures - revealing the spirituality of places is the title of the conference of international importance that will be held in Parma on 5 and 6 November 2021 and of which italiani.it reports in an exclusive preview: an unprecedented initiative that conceived by Professor Dario Costi of the Department of Architecture of the University of Parma which will see the Church, University and Civil Society operating in organized synergy, starting "from the bottom", or from a shared path aimed at the participatory regeneration of a neighborhood for activate a reflection on the theme of the relationship between spirituality and the contemporary city.

The words of Pope Francis

The stimulus comes directly from a first strategic thought of Papa Francesco, contained in the apostolic exhortation The gospel of joy on the themes of the city. In the paragraph entitled Challenge of urban cultures, the Pontiff, perhaps for the first time in two thousand years of the Church, calls for a transversal reflection on the religious significance of the knowledge of scientific and humanistic culture as a potential in the contemporary context. “We need to recognize the city from a contemplative gaze (…) The presence of God accompanies the sincere research that people and groups make to find support and meaning in their life. He lives among citizens by promoting solidarity, fraternity, the desire for good, truth, justice. This presence must not be fabricated, but discovered, revealed ". These are the words of Bergoglio who adds: “An unprecedented culture beats and is planned in the city. This requires imagining spaces with innovative characteristics that are more attractive and meaningful for urban populations. Houses and neighborhoods are built more to isolate than to connect and integrate ”. Even outside the dedicated paragraph, the city is the protagonist of the apostolic exhortation in many passages in which it returns as the background of human life and the place of activation of human relationships: “How beautiful are the cities which integrate the different and which make this integration a new factor of development! How beautiful are the cities that, even in their architectural design, are full of spaces that connect, relate, favor the recognition of the other ".

The initiative

Based on an amazing correspondence between the words of the Pontiff and the experimental work of Regeneration, through the urban project, of a model neighborhood (San Leonardo in Parma), promoted by Dario Costi and generated by the collaboration between parishes, communities, students and teachers , this initiative was born: the comparison between religion and the city urges specialists to think of space as a place of poetic and spiritual revelation, to recover through planning the sense of a human relationship even before urban. It will be an international conference in which some of the leading exponents in Italy of Theology, Civil Economy and Culture, Political Sciences, Liturgy, Philosophy, Anthropology and Architectural Design will meet with the aim of producing a scientific reflection with the Universities, Diocese and religious bodies in order to develop a "National Degree Laboratory" that sees the collaboration of teachers of architectural and urban planning from all over Italy with the Catholic interlocutors of their cities.

The Committees

The Committee of Honor of the conference will consist of Francis Rispoli (Full Professor of Architectural and Urban Composition, Federico II University, Naples), Andrea Sciascia (Director of the DARC Department of Palermo), Nicholas Antonetti (President of the Luigi Sturzo Institute), Luigi Valentini (Vicar General of the Diocese of Parma), Stefano Zamagni (President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences), Franco Magnani (President of the Cariparma Foundation), Paul Andrew (Rector of the University of Parma).
The Scientific Promoting Committee it is instead composed of Paul Martelli (Vicar Protector of the University of Parma), Alfredo Alessandrini (President of the Parma Family Association), Dario Costi (Director of the Smart City 4.0 Sustainable LAB research laboratory of the University of Parma), Mauro Pongolini (Parish priest of the San Leonardo district, Parma), Matthew Truffelli (President of the Catholic Action), Carlo Mambriani (Full Professor of History of Architecture and Coordinator of the Architecture Unit of Parma).
To these, the precious interventions of Giuliano Zanchi (scientific director of the Adriano Bernareggi Foundation and Vice President of AMEI), Pierluigi Sacco (Full Professor of Economics of Culture at the IULM in Milan), Valencian Crispin (Ordinary of Liturgical Anthropology and Liturgical Spirituality at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute Sant'Anselmo, member of the Pontifical Council for Cultural Heritage of the Church and of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology), Carla Danani (Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Macerata), Ferdinand Fava (Professor of Demoethnoanthropological Disciplines and Professor of Urban Anthropology at the University of Padua) and Daniel Pezzali (President of the Order of Architects of Parma).

The beating heart of the project

Of great interest will be the visit to the "San Leonardo Heart of the city" exhibition in the exhibition spaces of the neighborhood school and the dialogue, to be held on the second day, between university professors and interlocutors from the religious world who are already collaborating through applied studies: Dario Costi with Don Mauro Pongolini for Parma and Francesco Valerio Collotti (Professor of Architectural Design) with Henry Vivian (Director of the Diocesian Institute for the Support of the Clergy of Florence) for Florence.

The work to be done

The National Laboratory of Degree Challenge of Urban Cultures provides the establishment of a national network of collaboration between universities, dioceses and foundations of banking origin which will have to be coordinated by a program for the enhancement of parishes in the suburbs of Italian cities through shared and participated degree theses starting from the 2021/2022 academic year. It will start from the Schools of Architecture of the Universities and Polytechnics of Ancona, Bologna, Cagliari, Florence, L'Aquila, Naples Federico II, Parma, Palermo, Turin to then extend the invitation to all the cities that want to join.

Considerations

Challenge of Urban Cultures was born within a work path in a small suburban neighborhood. And if the heart of the city was no longer the square in the historic center but a suburban school? A large heart-shaped table will be set up in the atrium of the Micheli school in the center of the San Leonardo district. Among its curves, elementary and middle school students will approach the places they live every day and will be able to carry out a daily work of understanding and affective appropriation of the context. Around it, the students will work on the discovery of the neighborhood aimed at the elaboration of proposals and ideas. Architecture undergraduates will be able to develop participatory architectural and urban design theses, interpreting the needs expressed by the Associations and by the neighborhood population. The inhabitants of the neighborhood will therefore be able to participate inelaboration of a shared regeneration proposal. The citizens of the cities in which these neighborhood projects will be implemented will be able to become aware of how the social fabric can be decisive in this transformation through the actors involved in the process: the school, the University, the world of associations, volunteering and parishes.