Trame di un quartiere. Pratiche e narrazioni per ricostruire un diritto alla città

This contribution analyses the process of empowerment and collective engagement which is taking place in San Berillo’s neighbourhood in Catania, Sicily, as a result of the project named Trame di quartiere. Since 2015, this project has been proposed various social and cultural activities for involving inhabitants in the reshaping of abandoned spaces in their urban area. The project indeed aims to create new relationships between the “city of stone” and citizens, by definingan enabling space where cultural values, social practices and meanings produce a communitarian and incremental form of urban planning using a bottom up approach. The association Trame di quartiere connects research such as community mapping, oral history, participant observation and video documentation with action in the same manner with co-design, social aggregation in order to encourage material and immaterial space-making strategies and to strength the cooperative relationship among inhabitants. The tools and approaches used in the project are based on the idea that a public dimension of anthropology may have an effect on the neighbourhood. The cultural inheritance of local communities represents a way of regeneration in which forms of participation and empowerment respond to the needs of creating a process which leads to an individual and collective development. The activities carried out by inhabitants such as “Vai Via” and “Narrazioni di quartiere” represent a specific material and a symbolic resource for an inclusive urban project.