What is Start Park
#STORY
Start Park was born as a concept during the Climathon 2017 promoted by Climate-KIC and organized thanks to the collaboration betweek GreenApes, Codesign Toscana and Impact Hub Firenze. In that occasion multidisciplinary teams challenged to come up, in 24 hours, with innovative solutions as responses for the mitigation of Climate Change effects and extreme wheater events.
In particular the design challenge, under the category “Resilience & Water” was “How might citizens and local actors contribute in raising city’s resilience to tackle the more and more frequent extreme climate events (from droughts’ period to intense meteoric events)?” From this challenge we came up with a systemic service that merged public/private interest and facilitate the growing of resilient urban parks and shared awareness about climate crisis.
#GROWTH & GRANTING
Start Park was born and we have been working since fall 2018 as a brand new team of professionals. We are committed in using collaborative design techniques and lean management tools to organize and orchestrate the development of Start Park project. During these 2 years, first, we organized a workshop open to professionals (architects, designer, engineers, social activists and social innovators) to redefine the concept (January 2019).
Subsequently, Start Park has been awarded with the winning of two Designscapes (Horizon 2020) | Design-enabled innovation in urban environments grants. Thanks to them, we have prototyped a Start Park in the city of Prato involving both the local community and the Municipality and we are currently scaling it in Lucca, again with the cooperation of the Municipality of the city and a group of local citizens.
#PEOPLE
Core team:
Marco Berni, Rita Duina, Ely Pacchierotti, Lorenzo Bittini from Codesign Toscana + Alessia Menin, Anacleto Rizzo from Iridra srl
Local team:
Start Park Prato | CUT – Circuito Urbano Temporaneo, Riciclidea, Prato Municipality
Start Park Lucca | Lucca Creative Hub, ASP Carlo Dal Prete, Lucca Municipality
