San Donà di Piave is going to turn into “San Donà d’Europa”

The ever-increasing speed of change in our world is a constant feature of our time, resulting in a high degree of uncertainty. Concurrently, the intensification of life and work pace forces us to continuously adapt. The development policies implemented by the City of San Donà di Piave and recently framed into an European context seek to encourage adaptation to change in order to create a new development model for the City and its community. To implement effective local development policy, the community requires the capability to identify and share long-term strategic visions. It needs to value two important factors, namely timing and vision that create the idea of a city, by consistently determining its projects and actions.

URBACT Programme calls for “Intergrated Urban Plans” and San Donà di Piave agrees. During the 3-days event scheduled from the 28th of June to the 31st of June 2017 in the framework of the City Centre Doctor project, the city will show to citizens, city managers and other stakeholders its idea of “integrated plan”, a mix of “urban development and human development”.

We want a city that grows on itself without consuming soil, guarantees a suitable environment for future generations. We want a city able to transform the typical throng of urban agglomerations into a community experience of meeting, relationship, and development of ideas, break personal isolation and all this results in a dramatic improvement in social conditions. We want a city that rejects the idea that there should be "dedicated" areas for the elderly, young people, migrants, the disabled, pursuing the myth of exclusivity, simply because exclusivity preludes to exclusion and therefore solitude. Finally, we want a city where large and small spaces should be thought as economic, social and organizational "systems of relationships" where we share new responsibilities, policies, methods, and services.

For this reason, the city's strategic vision translates the above mentioned “wills” into some actions related to urban policies. We drew four scenarios for urban development, through the methodological support of the Research Center "Giorgio Lago" (CIRN) of the University of Padua: 1) Improvement of housing services, 2) Requalification of some city hotspots (including the former Cantina Sociale – the wine cooperative building - with the project "Cantina dei Talenti" and a former military base less than 10 km from the center, 3) the regeneration of the city center, 4) Skills, Education and training development to facilitate the transition from school to work. This strategic visions had been built also thanks to European cooperation, through the participation in the URBACT program (with the "City Centre Doctor" project that also led to the activation of an Urban Local Group) and the H2020 project WeGovNow.

These are going to be the “main themes” of the international meeting linked to City Centre Doctor project: we will ask other 9 European cities, and URBACT experts too, to help us increasing the quality of our vision. It’s a challenging stuff, but crucial.