Abitare il verde a Venezia

Summary of the project

The idea starts from the desire to give back to the community a renewed green area and some games abandoned since many years. In fully coherence with the mandate of the association, the proposed project in a perspective of circularity, builds on the ‘worm farming’. In particular, the association will start to weed and to recycle part of the brushwood using the compost heaps with the worms to produce locally the compost ‘from farm to fork’. The compost will be then used to reactivate the land as it happened in another part of the area, where now there is a small vegetable garden and a meadow. In this way, a renewed green area will be given back to the identified target groups (residents and students of the neighbourhood schools), by minimising its degradation (presence of vandals, use as a dump, etc.). This activity will be accompanied with the realization of an educational path on the composting and vegetable garden practices, of an information campaign and of some final events with the aim to create synergies with those who live closer to the recovered area, to improve their awareness on the importance of the greening for the cities to be more sustainable and in the overall fight against climate change.

Beneficiaries

• 300 visitors
• 1.800 young people
• 300 students

Overall achievements

Three main activities carried out: a photo contest (27 photos); a participatory design laboratory (3 people) to concretely transform two squares of Venice; and the “Venezia green” multimedia exhibition, open for 3 days with 1500 visitors. The most important result was to raise awareness among the inhabitants on the theme of urban green spaces, which resulted in a high participation at the exhibition and in the establishment of a permanent group called “Green Venice”, which is continuing trainings, awareness and care of green spaces. Two important learned lessons: greenery is a transversal interest in the city and it aggregates communities; in the other hand, the information held by the inhabitants about the extension of the green spaces, its characteristics and importance in relation to climate change and health are very scarce.