An Ideal City is necessarily also an accessible city in its different articulations: economic, cultural and social, sensory, cognitive, and physical-perceptual.
Torino, UNESCO Creative City of Design, is working on this topic using design as a planning methodology that takes into account the needs of citizen and opportunities for them, starting from the ideation and planning of services.
(The Sense of Cultural Heritage: an Issue of Accessibility is the title of a document which Torino has prepared for the European Year of Cultural Heritage, that explains what Torino means by accessibility, a concept of inclusion not limited to physical factors but regarding expecially cultural, social and economic ones. In brief it can be summarized in the following sentences:
(…)The obstacles are innumerable and they are scattered across various domains, from architectural barriers that prevent the movement of users with mobility problems, to the financial contribution often required that proves challenging for some groups of users, to the cognitive difficulty of approaching specialized languages, to the discomfort which may arise when coming into contact with some rituals of cultural consumption. Moreover, different types of difficulty, constraint or obstacles do not act separately, affecting specific groups, but reinforce and strengthen each other by multiplying their dissuasive effect(…).
Torino, in its role of Italian City Coordinator of Design Pavillion, and in agreement with Detroit – Coordinator and Kortrijk – Deputy Coordinator of Design Cluster, asks the other UNESCO Creative Cities of Design for an exchange on this topic.
The aims are:
- to create mutual knowledge of projects – better if collaborative ones and developed in the four domains focused on by cluster cities – that have improved the quality of life of citizens, in the belief that sharing knowledge and experience can help to shape better cities, open to everyone.
- to promote the UNESCO Creative Cities of Design’s work to Italian audience.
- to show the activities pursued by the Cluster.