Back to (the Future) School. Reshaping the Relationship Between Mobility and Schools

This article contributes to the debate on the possibilities of “re-conquering the street”1 as everyday public space and inclusive infrastructure in relation to welfare spaces. Therefore, the authors retrace the project La mia scuola va in classe A (My School Goes to Class-A), with which they investigated the potential engagement of schools and educating communities as an opportunity for active mobility practices and policies on a broader urban scale. The promotion of active mobility systems, networks, itineraries and sequences of bicycle and pedestrian public spaces plays an important role in improving citizens’ health and well-being in cities. From a socio-ecological transition perspective, it is necessary to rethink public space as a fundamental right to mobility, responding to the need for accessibility, connection, and inclusion. The project to redefine the street as public space, therefore accessible to all, is meant to guarantee not only safe travel but also the possibility of encounter, confrontation and growth for children who cross it. 2 Improving and increasing the infrastructure for active mobility is one of the priority actions to be pursued for an ecological transition. It is central to radically change the paradigm that connotes roads as technical space for moving, reduced to their quantitative dimensions and configured as ‘corridors’ for cars. The design of pedestrian and cycle spaces contributes to preserving the soil, stitching up public spaces and intensifying relations between different parts of the city. Experiencing the ‘sense of closeness’ at the human scale plays a crucial role in re-Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale urbaine et paysagère, establishing a point of equilibrium between human and environment, which has been deeply undermined by the trend towards ‘motorisation’. A necessary first step towards this transformation is to adopt a change of mentality, habits and priorities. Therefore, a process of inhabitant involvement that starts with their actual needs and allows them to participate is fundamental, in order to nourish a dialogue of mutual learning in which the urban planner can be an intermediary between imagined spatialities and everyday habits. In this sense, the school can be an important interlocutor to start from, as it is recognised in its educational role, in addition to the variety of institutional and non-institutional actors that orbit around it. The great heritage of spaces, their recognisability and capillary diffusion in Italian territories constitute an important opportunity for the transformation of urban space and daily mobility habits of the youngest inhabitants, who are most impacted by the harshness of streets. The priority need for comfort, accessibility and safety, requiring a child to move, is being declined in a more general demand for “moving in the right way.” This is happening through a project of (ground made of new) architectural devices capable not only of solving specific problems for the most vulnerable populations, but also of constructing a continuous plot that can express a sense of public space. In retracing the Venetian case of research-action, the aim is to enrich an already varied national and international geography of school engagement experiences in the design of urban space, chosen for their spatial and human relational capital. The paper proposes a critical reading of the La mia scuola va in classe A project in Venice through the reconstruction of its two main operational phases, adopting different methodological approaches. The first was derived from children’s involvement, and in the second, the research group played an active role through their participation in the co-designing process. The contents of the various educational and participative itinerary sessions administered to some of the classes in the four primary schools will be retraced, through semi-structured interviews with municipal administration technicians, educator-facilitators involved in the process, and a reconnaissance of the main reports of the project activities. 5 The process will then be critically re-read through three different but complementary research trajectories, linked by a reflection on the emergence of new actor relations between the school community, the local government, universities and the third sector in terms of the governance of proximity processes oriented towards active mobility. The contribution ends with a look at ways of designing spaces around schools, in an urban perspective attentive to all the different “phases of life”.