Magnete Community Hub. Culture as care

How can we give life to a new model of community hub within the Adriano neighborhood in Milan, actively involving the territory and redefining the relationship between care and culture?

To build the model and strategy of the Community Hub, we initiated an open and multi-stakeholder process based on the unique characteristics of the context: Adriano, a suburb of Milan perceived as a dormitory, with the presence of a nursing home acquired by the cooperative Proges, attached to an old disused auditorium.

The process was also marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, which required a significant rethink of the strategy. The long process of listening to the territory and the stakeholders involved made it possible to develop a concept based on the idea of “culture as care, care as culture,” regenerating the relationships between people and activating the neighborhood communities.

Magnete is a community hub located in the Adriano district of Milan. The project is the result of a long process of urban regeneration and participatory design focused on rethinking the former auditorium attached to the Adriano Community Center, today an innovative nursing home managed by the social cooperative Proges.

The first phase of the process saw us engaged in devising a new model of spaces and functions with the aim of redefining the relationship between care and culture through the active involvement of various actors in the area. We started with collecting needs and analyzing the context: two moments that allowed us to launch the co-design process and develop a new concept, a future scenario, and a narrative capable of conveying Magnete’s shared vision.

Subsequently, Shifton guided Magnete and its partners towards the implementation and launch of the project. The subsequent phases saw the launch of two calls to action. The Call for Ideas led us to design the Adriano Community Days festival to collect diverse design ideas and map potential stakeholders; the Future Days served to select partners and projects that would become part of Magnete.

The prolonged closure period due to the Covid-19 pandemic faced by spaces dedicated to culture, as well as the crisis affecting the world of nursing homes, made it necessary to explore new horizons of meaning to give significance to the concept of space in a scenario of profound transition and change.

In this sense, the pandemic has been an opportunity to look at Magnete from a different perspective and initiate a medium- to long-term reflection on the entire project.

We started with redefining the concept of “culture as care, care as culture” to define the project’s macro-areas of action – culture, education and food – and the main target audiences.

Through the Future Days call for partners, we selected 28 organizations active in and beyond the area with which, through three thematic workshops, we co-designed the hub’s governance model and an initial activities calendar for Magnete.

The results of this process were presented during the Adriano Future Days, a two-days festival where the 27 partner organizations had the opportunity to present Magnete and its program to the public.

Subsequently, we worked on developing a detailed governance model for the hub, which was developed on several axes: business model and sustainability, places and layouts, identity and strategic positioning, tools, roles and responsibilities.

After Magnete’s opening, we embarked on a strategic support process in which, together with the partner organizations, we worked on co-producing a strategic matrix, defining the project’s macro-objectives, and organizing and facilitating thematic roundtables through which hub members operate and interface.

La cultura cura

Shifton’s commitment to the Magnete project, a six-year effort, culminated in the publication of the book “La cultura cura”, edited by Vita e Pensiero and curated by Noemi Satta.

At the center of this text, the desire to tell the ways in which one can design and regenerate the city by valuing the cultural dimension as a lever for the care of complex social fabrics. «The volume describes the stages of the path, the actors involved, the changing scenarios, the difficulties of designing in times interrupted by the pandemic, the pitfalls of access as outsiders in a neighborhood, but also the potentialities and elements that contributed to the success of an intervention».

Magnet represents a virtuous example of how to respond to the challenge of creating culture-based public spaces, enabling communities and territories to change.