la linea rossa

Consultant project

2025 / in progress

Consultant project

2025 / in progress

problem

Borgo Roma is one of Verona's most populous and fragile neighborhoods. Despite hosting a major university campus and hospital, young people feel no connection to the area and community.

solution

A participatory urban research project that reads the neighborhood as a living body: mapping emotional perceptions, collecting qualitative data, and co-designing interventions to activate public spaces.

my role

I joined the project six months in by choice, without compensation, because the topic mattered to me. I brought co-design tools, helped reshape the project narrative, and designed the materials for field activities.

problem

Borgo Roma is one of Verona's most populous and fragile neighborhoods. Despite hosting a major university campus and hospital, young people feel no connection to the area and community.

impact

200+ students engaged across three days of on-campus activities. Around 1000 survey responses collected. Two intervention sites identified for physical transformation in autumn 2026.

Before designing anything, we spent time in Borgo Roma: walking its streets, mapping how spaces felt, noticing where people gathered and where they didn't. A pub crawl through a neighborhood with almost no bars made the absence of social infrastructure noticeable. When I joined, this phase was already underway. My first contribution was pushing to make these findings the center of the project narrative, not just background context.

We set up a three-day installation at the university campus. Using medical-themed posters and tools I designed for the occasion, we invited students to locate symptoms on a neighborhood map, rate their sense of safety, describe how the area made them feel, and imagine what a cure might look like. The medical metaphor opened conversations with over 200 students. A survey sent to the wider student population collected around 1000 responses. 

With data in hand, we ran co-design workshops focused on two sites identified as critical. Using maps, scenario cards, and inspiration boards, small groups of students worked toward concrete intervention ideas. The same process was applied to Spazio Link, the neighborhood's only youth aggregation space, through a live event with music and hands-on design activities. Two intervention directions emerged: making the park entrance welcoming and clarifying the pedestrian connection to the hospital.

The physical transformation of public spaces and Spazio Link will start in September 2026. This section will be updated when the interventions are complete.

The reframing of Borgo Roma as a body to be diagnosed, not a problem to be solved, changed the project's communication. It gave students a language to talk about something they felt but couldn't easily articulate. It made the data collection feel like participation, not extraction. And it gave the project a visual identity that was coherent across posters, workshops, and social media. 

Getting students to put a sticker on a poster is easy. Getting them to show up and co-design is hard. People want finished events to attend, not open processes to shape. This isn't a failure of method, it's a structural reality of how participation works in practice. 

Graphics designed by Micol Buffo, tools designed by me.