Resilience in action: The bottom up! architecture festival in Turin (Italy)

Abstract

This article describes the practice of co-evolutionary and transformative resilience through a case study conducted in Turin (Italy). According to a broad definition, resilience includes performing actions of urban design and planning, innovating community-based project procedures, and creating positive financial outcomes that are assessable because of the monitoring process of short- and long-term outcomes and impacts. Through the Turin-based case of the Bottom Up! Architecture Festival, this article observes processes in which resilience is in action in metropolitan areas, feeding urban projects and practices of self-organization of the social and financial actors involved. By applying the definition of community projects, the festival manages to take territorial problems and crises (the pandemic, inequality, etc.) and view them as an opportunity to change the system, recommending integrated action on the natural, cultural, financial, and social capital, innovating practices and holding society and institutions more accountable. The transformation of spaces relies on collaborations between social and institutional actors, operating spatially concentrated transformations in the city of Turin, and using flexible governance tools based on co-planning and crowdfunding for project design and financing.