Recipro-city: synergistic processes from informal actions...

Public space is the very soul of a city, expressing the community’s collective life. During the last decades its value has been often overlooked: it has been losing its nature as a place of democracy, freedom and diversity. Public space making is a collective action, which allows people to share (and to give life to) their feelings, behaviors and visions, helping them to reinforce the process of belonging to their city. In other words, public space expresses the complex relationship between urbs and civitas, physical and virtual, spatial and social dimension. This complex relationship is composed of mutual synergistic dynamics between a city and its citizens, and we can observe that the more is intense the reciprocity, the more we improve the urban quality: we summarize proposing the concept of ‘recipro-city’. Our research arises from a wide range analysis of unconventional participative urban initiatives (e. g. bottom-up and tactical urbanism), and its goal is to develop an operational methodology able to foster processes of urban regeneration and development, based on the strengthening and the recognition of all the possible dynamics of reciprocity.