Elevator Pitch
“The Circle of water. Resilient communities for the rediscovery of the Sabbioneta embankments” is a 2y research on community-based UNESCO cultural landscape protection that uses a series of FOSS tools to build an effective ecosystem for CH decision making.
Description
Sabbioneta is a very small and rare example of walled newly founded renaissance town designed in the late 16th century by duke Vespasiano Gonzaga in northern Italy on a sandy bank of the Po river. Sabbioneta was inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008 also because of its uniqueness in representing the concept of ideal city planning, maintaining a structural relationship with the agricultural and water landscape. The “Water Circle” project (a 2y. research activity founded by private foundation, local and regional authorities) pushes the gaze of its citizens outside the superb renaissance walls to recognize and enhance the minute, but relevant elements of the landscape connected to water management as a significant part of the original project of the city. The project involved a multiplicity of stakeholders such as volunteer’s citizen associations, freelance practitioners, local politicians, municipality technicians and a research group of the Politecnico di Milano university. To realize new landscape knowledge and mapping tools designed to improve citizens involvement the project developed an approach aimed at the interaction between different geospatial free and open source software: an ecosystem that allows to map, visualize, share, participate. The first approach involved a detailed OpenStreetMap-based cultural landscape re-mapping. The geo data uploaded to the OSM DB enabled the implementation of a brand-new tailored FOSS geo-blogging app designed for the local community use to start shared maintenance processes, landscape self-protection, and achievement of effective recovery and improvement of the water embankments (“arginelli fluviali”). The FOSS geo-blogging app and the technical documentations made during the research (environmental, historical and geological analysis) have been disclosed through a website specific designed for the project (http://www.amiciambientesabbioneta.it/cerchiodacqua/). The shared boost of the cultural landscape has generated an interesting engagement of the local citizen. This was developed through collective meetings and walks outside the walls along the huge water embankments system: this is why it was necessary to think about the use of a free web-based tool able of stratifying the ‘ways of looking at the landscape’ that citizens have experienced during the project: the result is a massive visual survey, inside and outside the town, developed through Mapillary and integrated into the communication channels of the project. This experience is a good example to cultural heritage knowledge dissemination through the strong interaction between open data and free tools. The FOSS used in the project allowed us to achieve an effective result safeguarding the budget, in an historical context where funds available for the cultural promotion are less and less.
Notes
A research by: Daniele Villa, Assistant Professor, Politecnico di Milano, Cultural Landscape Information and Planning Lab P.I. and coordinator of the research group of Politecnico di Milano that have developed the technological tools implemented through FOSS. The general project management was carried out by Officina11 (an innovative startup composed by territorial experts).
Giorgio Limonta, Politecnico di Milano Marco Vedoà, Politecnico di Milano