Bottom Up! When the city is transformed from bottom up – Festival of architecture
Bottom Up! is the new Torino Festival of Architecture created by the Ordine Architetti Torino (Society of Architects) and the Fondazione per l’Architettura / Torino (Torino Architectural Foundation). The goal is to spread knowledge about contemporary architecture and encourage practices of urban transformation from the bottom, with ideas springing forth from the community and materialising through crowdfunding actions.
Bottom Up! is an urban experiment with the direct involvement of communities. Private citizens, schools, artists, collectives, committees, associations, companies and designers could nominate a proposal and participated in the call expiring January 16, 2020.
Starting from February, the authors of the selected projects offered a training course focused on urban regeneration, storytelling, crowdfunding and the social media: four key tools to make their concepts materialise. The selected projects have become the backbone of the Bottom Up! Festival which will support them all along the process and communicate their progress step by step. Indeed, the festival mission is to nurture successful projects.
The crowdfunding campaigns were scheduled to launch on April 1, 2020, but, as other festival initiatives, they were postponed as a consequence of the Covid-19 containment measures and would be for September 2020. During the lockdown period due to Covid-19 (March-June 2020) the festival never stopped. It continued training the groups and promoting the adaptation of the projects to the new times through periodic remote meetings. From the communication point of view, the festival organized 12 live streamings on the Facebook page and inaugurated a “laboratory of visions” through a dedicated Facebook group. In addition, the festival participated in the digital edition of the Fuorisalone in Milan through a 16-episode web series.
If confirmed, the programme of the final days will develop as follows. Starting from the first of the final three days (October 2020), Bottom Up! places will be opened to the public and be activated by the proposing teams with previews, unveiling, telling and sharing of the meanings of the proposed transformation. The second day will be devoted to the stories of people who have developed similar practices. Finally, during the last day, the projects of Bottom Up! will become the absolute protagonists of a major final public event, which will close the crowdfunding campaigns and reveal which projects have received the greatest interest.
