The Making of Approdo Comune: A digital environment for the regeneration of Ravenna’s Darsena

The Ravenna Municipality’s DARE project was born to support the regeneration of the former port area. However, unlike earlier revitalisation projects of the Darsena that focused uniquely on the renewal of the physical environment, DARE invested in the skills of its inhabitants and the digital knowledge infrastructure of the area. In the course of the project’s three years, DARE cooperated with the Darsana's residents, businesses, initiatives and institutions to create an inclusive, accessible digital framework for the area that collects data, information, stories and allows citizens to share their own experiences and visions for the neighbourhood.

Knowledge about urban areas is a key to an informed discussion about their future; such knowledge includes data, stories, analyses, narratives as well inputs of all kinds from citizens. While DARE has built on existing projects, practices and policies it mapped in an earlier phase, and has been constructing a shared vision through a process of open calls for initiatives and online voting for the winning tactic for the area, consortium partners also put a strong emphasis on making knowledge about the neighbourhood accessible to everyone.

Such knowledge about neighbourhoods is usually collected, structured and presented in Urban Centers or Urban Labs: institutions working as intermediary spaces between municipalities, civil societies and private initiatives, popular across Italy. These centres, acting as documentation centres, libraries, local museums, information points or participation centres, are usually anchored in physical locations, with significant operational costs that makes keeping their independence from politics and business a challenge. DARE’s digital environment is conceived as if consortium members asked: what if the whole neighbourhood was treated as an urban centre, and a digital platform as its archive and media library?

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In the past years, I visited the Darsena several times to meet some of the project's protagonists to explore how digital tools can help in regenerating the area and how knowledge about the Darsena is collected and distributed through a digital platform.

During my first trip, I met Morena Brandi, the manager responsible for the digital transition of the municipality. “With the DARE project, the municipality wanted to do something that perhaps even citizens would have to digest well,” she explained to me as we walked along the Candiano Canal that lies at the heart of the Darsena area. “The question here is how to recompose the social and economic fabric of the neighborhood, starting with the creation of a neighbourhood identity through new narratives, with the help of data collection, digitalisation. The most important question of the project is how to improve the life of this community with digital means?”

Digitalization and digital tools are at the core of the data project, but how can they be used in a neighbourhood that is characterized by a low level of education and therefore also by limited digital literacy? In order to address this challenge, the DARE project had two responses. On one hand, it envisioned the creation of an accessible, user-friendly digital environment. As Emanuela Medeghini, coordinator of DARE explained, “it's really important to develop digital tools with the co-design of “digital” and “non-digital” people because very often the digital tools are designed by digital people and either they are not user friendly or they are not designed to be sustainable and usable over time.”

On the other hand, the consortium planned a series of digitalisation training sessions to various segments of local society. However, the originally conceived outreach plan had been severely compromised by the Covid-19 pandemic: the first public events had to be brought online and the first digitalisation training sessions were also held online instead of in-person. ”The pandemic forced us to turn the logic of our project upside down,” recalled Emanuela. “While we wanted to bring people together and connect them with digital tools, we had to start directly with digital."

DARE’s digital environment is organised around the project’s digital platform, Darsena Ravenna Approdo Comune (Common Landing). Approdo Comune was developed as a key interface with the broader public, as people’s first encounter with the project. Conceived as a showroom, Approdo Comune has been a means to bring people to the Darsena physically as well as digitally, by offering a great variety of information, ranging from news, events and opportunities to archive audio-visual materials, storymaps and podcasts. While the Darsena with its industrial buildings and canal has become a beloved area for urban explorers, attracting an increasing number of spontaneous visitors, the platform needed to develop its own attractiveness. “Communicating and inviting people to the Darsena is one thing, but to invite them to spend time on a website is not a simple operation," explained Emanuela. “We had to offer people the sense of discovery through Approdo Comune.”

 

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Digital platforms representing a city or a neighbourhood usually have a top-down approach, representing an imposed narrative and carefully filtered content. In contrast, DARE was conceived with the idea of building a community and a collective narrative about the Darsena. Such collective storytelling requires horizontal governance where decisions about what to publish on the platform and in what form are shared.

Telling the story of the Darsena’s transformation is coordinated by DARE Redazione, the governance body of DARE’s storytelling activities. DARE Redazione, composed of all project partners, acts as an editorial board that connects stories, content and narration, working towards a collective narrative of the urban regeneration programme of the Darsena, to involve people in the regeneration process. Using the Darsena Ravenna Approdo Comune website as its interface, DARE Redazione assembles many voices to tell the story of urban transformation of the Darsena, serving also as a press office to provide information to the public. Through its collective, DARE Redazione also helps individual actions find their place in a broader regeneration framework, thus empowering participants and helping further develop the Darsena’s ecosystem.

To understand how the DARE project's digital platform was managed and governed, I spoke with Saveria Teston, one of the initiators of DARE and director of DARE Redazione. Saveria explained to me that they met monthly with all partners to share what would happen in the project in a horizon of two months. There were also weekly meetings focusing on specific content to decide which Approdo tools to use to narrate a piece, to decide about all the work needed to collect the different elements to be published on Approdo. “Approdo doesn't want to be the blog or magazine that tells the story; it wants to be a space for collaboration and narration of the most relevant stages of the regeneration process in the Darsena,” explained Saveria.

Approdo Comune, as governed by the DARE Redazione, reflects the open structure of DARE, always ready to accommodate new initiatives and viewpoints from the partnership and beyond. The integration of data, stories and events is pursued actively throughout the platform, to allow for a more holistic picture about the neighbourhood. Such integration means that the editorial board conceives how a story that has its own specificity integrates with other stories that have their own specificity but are interrelated. DARE Redazione was trying to create an easy way to navigate through the platform and to make it simple to use and read what's in Approdo through links and connections.

 

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One of the objectives of the platform was to have “one place where all the information and the storytelling is collected about the Darsena district,” elaborated Emanuela.“Having all the information and stories together gives a better picture of the many things happening there, making locals prouder of their neighbourhood and making the area more attractive.”

Such ambition needs a peculiar interface, rich in content and inviting in its appearance. The digital platform’s presentation layer or the website that users can most easily encounter, is designed by the design agency Chialab, based in Bologna. I arranged an online call with Giacomo Nanni from Chialab to ask about the key design principles of the website. ”To put information in a unique space, grouping events in a kind of an agenda, serves the communication of both the project and the neighbourhood in itself,” explained Giacomo. “Instead of having a thousand different monothematic websites, this platform gives a face not only to the project but to the entire environment of the Darsena.”

The platform’s design also had the task to make knowledge about the Darsena more accessible and comprehensible, offering a representation of reality which is capable of stimulating the development of ideas, the creation of networks and the subsequent realisation of actions and projects. ”Visualizing urban changes, reading maps or plans are often for experts,” underlined Giacomo. “We believe that the role of design, visualising data and narrating maps is essential not only to educate citizens about what is going on, but also to be able to receive feedback from them.”

As the CEO and creative director of Chialab, Beppe Chia explained at DARE’s closing event in Milan, in December 2022, the goal was not to develop a logo or a brand for DARE or for the Darsena. Instead, the DARE’s visual universe was conceived as visual assets that can be used by anyone to tell stories, reflecting the specificities of the area: while the fonts of Approdo Comune are based on the diagonal of the Candiano Canal, the colours of the platform represent the colours of Ravenna’s mosaics.

 

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Darsena Ravenna Approdo Comune was launched in 2021, and has been serving as the main landing page for the DARE project ever since. By collecting a great variety of audio-visual materials, from archive photos and videos to maps and other types of narration, the platform has become the co-managed storytelling device of the project.

While Approdo Comune has been relatively inactive since the project’s closure at the end of 2022, it has remained an important structure to organise the communication of events as well as collect more materials about the Darsena. The database created specifically for the coordination and management of events is gradually becoming the municipality’s main tool for event management, to be completely integrated in the administrative operation in 2024. With a filter system that allows for advanced search options, the event management system will be the first interface for users to look for events in the Darsena and in Ravenna.

Approdo Comune represents the intangible side of the Darsena’s regeneration. Besides the industrial heritage, abandoned buildings and the wooden boardwalk, the other material from which the new Darsena is built consists of memories, images, emotions, desires, knowledge and connections. This is also the material that the DARE project worked with, for no real change happens without a shared story. It is the changing self-image of a neighbourhood and the improved opportunities of its residents that gives sense to physical development.