RigenerAction | PopPark
RigenerAction | PopPark is an urban sociology project that is the result of the cooperation between Associazione Acropoli and Laboratorio Sociale Officina Piedicastello.
The project took place during the OltrEconomia Festival in Trento, Italy, under the supervision of the architect and urbanist Ignacio Gravalos from the GravalosDimonte Arquitectos studio.
The designed activity is triggered through a simple installation situated in the Aleksandr Isaecič Solženicyn park and it is developed in the span of a single day.
The urban installation aims at investigating how the citizens feel and perceive the park: visitors, following simple instructions, are able to interact with the park and its aspects in a personalized way.
The artifact consists in a wall formed by little cubes, which are obtained through the folding of a sheet of paper (credits to UniTrento DICAM LAMARC). Red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, blue. Each cube has a different color, contains different tools and suggests different actions that the visitor has to accomplish feeling completely free to approach the park individually and in a more intimate way.
For instance, the red cube is linked to the concept of friendliness: the visitor is invited to join someone else in the park in order to look for other cubes and colored balloons; the green cube brings to mind the idea of ecology, environment and it consequently contains little seeds the owner has to grow.
Cubes are extracted from the wall basement: as time goes by, the element is therefore dematerialized. As a consequence the installation is initially perceived as a real and physical obstacle, but is secondly recognized as a transformation element, which frames the environment giving it a new way of expression.
The activity is completed by the presence of some balloons. Each visitor has to decide the exact point in the park where to carry out the activity suggested within the cube. Afterwards, the visitor has to leave the balloon in that position as a sign of his accomplishment.
Thanks to the experiment, the organizers had the possibility to understand and identify the most and the less crowded locations within the park. The study represents a base in order to define a strategy for public spaces improvement.
Analyzing data at the end of the day, the result is that the green area is not homogeneously used by its visitors; it is easy to understand that shaded zones are privileged such as spaces with street furniture like bench seats or children play areas. On the contrary, isolated zones are much less crowded.
