ProMondello

After years spent pedestrianising and regenerating the historic centre — from Percorsi Palermo to Verso La Favorita — with ProMondello we brought the same active-listening method to another side of the city: Mondello, the seaside district a few kilometres from Palermo that today is one of Sicily's most important beach destinations.

Mondello is a part of the city with a distinct identity: around 7,300 permanent residents, but daily numbers that in summer top 20,000 people. Against standard urban planning benchmarks, the district has less than a third of the public green space and educational facilities required by law, and public transport connecting it to the city centre is widely seen as inadequate. It's in this context — a seaside economy that generates both jobs and pressure, alongside a daily quality of life to protect for year-round residents — that we launched ProMondello: a three-phase process (listening, engagement, design) aimed at building a long-term vision for the whole district together, not just for the beach area.

The process drew on well-established qualitative research techniques: World Café, Open Space Technology, focus groups and the planning-for-real method. To keep the process transparent and methodologically sound, we also set up an independent guarantor role, tasked with overseeing the correct use of participatory techniques and making sure the results handed back to the community matched the data actually collected — a choice that isn't a given, and one that shows how much we value getting the method right over rushing to a result.

Between January and May 2017 we met residents, shopkeepers, restaurant owners and tourism operators from the district, gathering visions and needs through the participatory tools we'd chosen. The fieldwork led, in May 2017, to a first masterplan hypothesis for the whole district — a shared starting point to keep building on, rather than a closed, final design.

ProMondello stands, in our history of urban facilitation, as proof that the method we built in the heart of the Kalsa — listen before you design, hand back to the community what the community itself expressed — works outside the historic centre too, on a territory with completely different dynamics, economies and needs.