Curated by Luigi Benatti, Dario Fossati, Guido Bardelli, Francesco Cucco, Andrea Castellotti

Does thinking about the city, its birth, its evolution, the interventions to improve its livability, have anything to do with the title of the 2023 Meeting? 

What does inexhaustible friendship have to do with urban regeneration? 

It is precisely the city where a network of human relationships is expressed with greater frequency and intensity that find their scenario in the city itself. The city is the place of relationships. The relationship as a place of friendship, where everyone finds the meaning of his personal life: this is the key to the theme of urban regeneration. 

Because if we do not start from this assumption we run the risk, which finds countless documentation in terms of failures even in recent times, to build places and spaces that do not regenerate anything but rather de-generate and cause further problems of coexistence and socialization in our cities. To understand the function of the city again, it is necessary to accept to put man back at the center. Not the economy, not profit, but the person and his creativity. Economy and profit follow. It is important to understand what makes a built world of spaces and buildings work. And then you cannot start with the hardware, but it is interesting to investigate the software that is the network of relationships. This is the first theme to understand the nature of the city, what it also means on a social level to build a city. 

The work of the architect and in general of the professionals who deal with urban regeneration, have the task of building a container of relationships that already exist, which therefore must not adapt to a project that you already have in mind, but must be welcomed within an urban environment that enhances all its potential. From here regenerate rather than create new problems, paradoxically making cities less livable. This dynamic of relationships expands on all the most important themes that generate an urban core: the relationship with the environment, with energy, with the elements of nature. 

The exhibition offers a path of experiences that can each tell an aspect of the story, launch provocations, ideas that everyone can then find in his city. Generative cues of a look, which everyone can take home and use to transform even small neighborhood areas, for a progressive creative re-appropriation of the living spaces of our cities. 

The route will start from images and videos of life (sensations and emotions) that characterizes urban centers and gradually examples of Italian and international regeneration interventions will be shown with images, a short story and where possible the exhibition of project models. 

In addition, a series of interviews with architects and protagonists who in various ways have contributed to the itinerary have been carried out for the exhibition. 

In the final part, the visitor will be provoked with questions that suggest ideas that can then also be the subject of discussion with the curators: 

How to orient yourself, where to start, what is the reference point, the North Star to look at in the processes of urban regeneration? 

More than a final point, it will be a starting point.