Florence | Manifattura Tabacchi

Many Possible Cities - a festival dedicated to Urban Regeneration in Manifattura Tabacchi

The story describes how a festival on urban regeneration, hosted within a regeneration area, can become a relational and self-reflection practice for all the actors involved in the regeneration process. Many Possible Cities festival in Manifattura Tabacchi has been a three years long series of talks, workshops and exhibitions in which the challenges of urban regeneration and visions for its future have been presented by more than one hundred speakers and performers, showcasing their own experiences and offering real-world examples of how diversity can drive transformation for the city of the future to thousands of participants. Many Possible Cities also hosted a series of free workshops for citizens, to understand how we can make cities more open, inclusive and sustainable.

WHO

MTDM (MT developer company) and LAMA (in charge of temporary uses design and management)

WHAT

Within the Manifattura Tabacchi meanwhile uses program in Florence, three festivals dedicated to urban regeneration have been organised by MTDM (MT developer company) and LAMA (in charge of temporary uses design and management), respectively in the winter of 2018, summer 2019 and winter 2020.

The festivals, named “Many Possible Cities”, looked at how new polyfunctional spaces and open and fluid communities can contribute to the creation of cultural, economic and social capital, and investigated fundamental visions and models to overcome the traditional linear economy paradigm to move towards a circular model based on sustainability, inclusion and access to resources, promoting co-planning between the system's players and the use of collective intelligence.

The festival editions have been the occasion for Manifattura Tabacchi to enter in contact with a national and international community of practitioners in urban regeneration and regenerated spaces, somehow becoming not only a thematic festival but also a self-reflective practice of the MT regeneration project itself.

HOW

Many Possible Cities has been a three years long series of talks, workshops and exhibitions. Organisers invited experts, visionaries and pioneers of urban transformation to sit down with people who want to experience and be protagonists for this transformation, to start answering some of the most urgent questions that blossom along the way of urban regenerators and cultural practitioners seeking a balance between independence and sustainability. In its last edition the festival was enriched by Radio Papesse curation of a three-day live broadcast from Manifattura Tabacchi.

REFERENCES

2018 edition (with video interviews)

2019 edition (program only)

2020 edition (with podcast of all talks)

Video (of third edition in 2020)

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