Daring to imagine alternatives: learning from Bologna and Emilia-Romagna

During recent visits to Bologna and the Emilia-Romagna region, we have been learning from researchers, practitioners and organisations working across urban planning, participation, culture and community development. The visits have helped us think about the civic imaginary not only as a concept, but as something that is shaped by local histories, political cultures, institutional arrangements and creative experiments. A senior leader in the city told us, civic imagining is “the culture” of Bologna and the wider Emilia Romagna region.

A particular phrase has stayed with us, spray-painted on a portico pillar: OSA IMMAGINARE UN’ALTERNATIVA – dare to imagine an alternative. The message was not part of an official consultation or public art programme. It was a small intervention in the everyday life of the city, capturing something important about the work of civic imagination. Imagining alternatives requires hope, capacities and resources – which are unevenly distributed – and it also requires daring. It means testing new forms, taking creative risks, and accepting that futures are often provisional, experimental and unfinished.

Bologna and the long history of participation

Bologna is well known for its porticoes and towers. These are striking features of the city’s civic identity, but they are also forms of social infrastructure. The porticoes shape how people walk, meet, shelter and gather. They make some kinds of public life easier and more visible. They also show how the built environment can support everyday forms of proximity and encounter.

With Martina Massari and Valentina Orioli at the University of Bologna, we have been learning about the city’s long history of neighbourhood action, participatory urbanism and policy co-production. Martina introduced us to the story of Giuseppe Dossetti, who ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Bologna in 1956. Although Dossetti lost the election to Giuseppe Dozza, aspects of his manifesto, e il Libro bianco su Bologna, were taken up by the administration. These included ideas of a “civic consortium” and planning processes that engaged peripheral neighbourhoods.

This history helped shape a longer tradition of decentralisation and citizens’ participation in Bologna’s municipal administration and is one reason why the city is an important reference point for us. Its civic culture has developed through a particular combination of political history, institutional commitment, urban form, territorial scale and economic resources. It cannot be treated as a simple model to transfer elsewhere, but it offers important questions for thinking about the UK context and our project’s place-studies. Civic culture cannot only reproduce established forms. It has to keep adapting. Even in places with strong traditions of participation, there remains a need for experimentation.

Relational proximity and trust

Questions of trust and proximity to decision-making are central to our conversations. As in many places, there is a growing context of dis/mistrust in Bologna, especially mistrust of institutions. One solution is to develop relational proximity by enabling methods and practices that respond to local contexts, rather than assuming that one model of participation will work for all groups. For example, Collaboration Pacts are a framework through which the municipality and civic actors can work together around the care and management of urban commons. These pacts are part of a wider civic infrastructure that supports collaboration between institutions and third-sector organisations. They show how civic imagination can become embedded in administrative processes.

Relational proximity is not only about physical closeness. It is also about confidence, recognition, familiarity and the quality of relationships between residents, associations, institutions and intermediaries. Different groups participate in different ways and on different timelines. Some may already be active through formal organisations, others may be involved through informal networks of care, mutual aid, family, faith, culture or neighbourhood life.

This is relevant across all of our place studies. In Frome we are interested in the ways independent political, economic and community networks interact with one another. In Southampton, we are asking what it means to be visibly civic in communities where citizen-led action may be present but unevenly recognised. In Hull, we are exploring how young people understand democracy and collective decision-making in a place often discussed through low voter turnout. Bologna helps us ask how civic infrastructure can support these different forms of proximity. It also reminds us that the work of participation is not only technical. It is emotional, cultural and relational.

Participatory budgeting and democratic experiment

One of the clearest examples of participation during our most recent visit was a participatory budgeting session in a Bologna neighbourhood house (a kind of community centre). The setting was important. Participation appeared not as an abstract ideal, but as a set of relationships and processes through which residents could discuss priorities and make claims on the future of their neighbourhood.

What was striking was not only the mechanism, but the atmosphere around it. Participatory budgeting depends on trust, patience, translation, confidence and listening. It requires people to believe that taking part will matter. It also requires institutions to create conditions in which neighbourhood knowledge can shape decisions.

This has resonance for our work in Hull. With local young people, we are exploring how democracy and collective decision-making are understood in a community with one of the lowest voter turnouts in the country. If participatory budgeting in Bologna shows one version of democratic practice — formal, neighbourhood-based and supported by civic infrastructure — Hull raises another set of questions. What does democracy feel like to young people who may not recognise themselves in existing political forms? Can animation, storytelling and youth-led creative work open different routes into civic imagination?

Creativity is important here. It is not an addition to civic life after the “real” work has taken place. It can be one of the ways civic life becomes possible. Creative methods can make democracy discussable, visible and open to different forms of participation. They can also help people describe feelings and experiences that may not easily fit into surveys, meetings or policy language.

Rimini, Chester and the afterlives of cinemas

We also spent time thinking about civic imagination through cultural reuse and the afterlives of buildings. In Rimini, we visited Ritorno All’a Storia, a project focused on bringing the former Astoria Cinema back to life through community-led cultural activity. The name suggests both a return to the Astoria and a return to history. People do not imagine the future from nowhere. They imagine from places that already hold memory, attachment, conflict and possibility.

Although it is a vast, iconic building, Ritorno All’a Storia treats the former cinema not only as a property issue but as a cultural and civic resource. It asks what can be tried before everything is settled. It works as a juxtaposition of memory, care and experimentation, exploring how performance, community activity, local history and reuse might help a building become public again.

This has particular relevance for our work in Chester, where Storyhouse also began with the afterlife of a cinema. Chester’s former Odeon has become a theatre, cinema, library, restaurant, festival space and civic meeting point. Storyhouse is now an established cultural institution at the centre of Chester’s public life, while Ritorno All’a Storia is working with more uncertain energies of return and possibility.

The colonie and difficult civic memory

Along the Rimini coastline, we learned about the abandoned colonie. The architectures of these enormous former seaside colonies speak to changing ideas of welfare, childhood, health, leisure and the state. They are not only ruins but archives of regional wealth and power. They raise questions about memory, reuse and responsibility. What should happen to the material remains of past social projects? How can difficult histories be encountered without nostalgia or erasure? How might the Rimini coast itself become a site for thinking about care, abandonment and the future? These questions are important for us because people imagine futures from landscapes already shaped by past decisions. Buildings, infrastructures and institutions carry histories of inclusion and exclusion, and shape what people feel is possible or desirable to them.

Making absence visible

The “Freak of Nature” of Emilia-Romagna is an anonymous artist who paints bamboo stalks and numbers the windows of empty and abandoned shops across the region. The intervention is modest, but powerful. As local press report on the spread of the bamboo, they also chart the number of abandoned buildings and absent landlords. The bamboo becomes a metric counting loss and makes absence visible. This question of visibility speaks to our work in Southampton where we are asking what it means to be visibly civic in a place where forms of citizen-led action may be present but unevenly recognised, supported or connected. Here again, creativity matters. It can provoke conversations about what is missing, what is valued and what alternative futures might be imagined.

Cesena, Frome and place-based independence

We also learned about independent place-based political organising, and how some people are turning away from national left/right party agendas. There are echoes here with Frome, where the Independents for Frome movement has reshaped local politics through a commitment to non-party, place-first decision-making. In a collaboration with the University of Bologna, we hosted a webinar with members of Cesena Siamo Noi, Bologna for Climate Justice and Frome Town Council, exploring the wider civic implications around the concept of ‘independence’. Cesena and Frome are not equivalents, but the comparison helps us ask what happens when local politics begins by asking what a place needs, rather than from the logic of national party alignment. This, too, is a form of civic experiment. It treats local governance as a creative field in its own right, while also raising questions about who has the time, resources and confidence to participate.

What travels?

Bologna does not provide a model simply to import into the UK. Its civic culture is shaped by specific political histories, institutions, economic conditions and urban forms. However, it does offer questions and perhaps some principles that travel.

How do municipalities and local authorities sustain participation over time? What forms of trust make co-production possible? How can informal civic work that is already happening yet is hidden, be recognised without being absorbed or flattened by institutions? What kinds of daring are required to imagine alternatives that are not yet fully available?

Bologna and Emilia-Romagna help us place our work in a wider international conversation, reminding us that civic imagination is not a singular thing. To return to Berger’s red cloth, the civic imaginary is something to hold to the light and think with. It is a form of urban fabric made from law, memory, architecture, administration, friendship, care, conflict, art, libraries and universities.

Daring does not have to mean dramatic rupture. It often means the patient, experimental and often unseen work of care and making another version of public life imaginable. Opening a room, testing a process, marking an absence, telling a story, hosting a meeting, painting a bamboo stalk.

Huge thanks to Martina Massari and Valentina Orioli, generous and welcoming hosts; to colleagues at the University of Bologna, Fondazione Innovazione Urbana, and the many people who shared their time, work, places (and gelato) with us. Thank you to the University of Glasgow international partnership development fund, Sunil Hutchin-Bellur – and the College of Social Science Research Development team for supporting these exchanges. Grazie a tutti.