How can urban design interventions support grassroots regreening projects?

Regreening Bolzano is a project initiated by the association Ambiente e Salute. In 2024, the association began a collaboration with students from the Eco-Social Design program, which led to the creation of the project Da Grigio a Verde.

Through this collaboration, a regreening plan for the area known as Regreening Bolzano was developed and later approved by the municipality. The project was originally created by a group of four students, continued the following semester by three, and is now being carried forward by me as part of my master’s thesis, titled Da Grigio a Verde. Campaigning for a greener and healthier city.

1. Creation of green infrastructure
2. Water & climate adaptation
3. Biodiversity support
4. Recreational and social functions
5. Accessibility & mobility 

The project has city approval and €350,000 in funding, but no start date or final plan. My work focused on promoting it to pressure authorities to act and inform residents about the delays. I explored many different design and research methods in this creative process to engage with the space and promote the project.

I also experimented with using artistic photography, graphic and poster design to support the initiative’s social media presence.

Surprisingly, sooner than expected, councilor Marco Caruso announced that work on Premstallerhof could begin next year. After four years, progress finally seemed possible, though my partners remained cautious. As the final plan is still uncertain and may differ from the proposal, the project’s focus shifted — I began emphasizing the people behind it and its grassroots origins.

An important part of the campaign was an exhibition in the Premstallerhof building during Bolzano Art Week. Open for four days, it attracted many visitors and helped present the project in a new light, highlighting its development and promoting it among citizens.

On the second day of the exhibition, we organized a press conference. The exhibition setup served as a perfect backdrop for our message, making the project’s current phase clear and visible. Journalists from TV, newspapers, and radio attended, and both TV33 and TV Alto Adige aired a 2.5-minute segment. The next morning, a full-page article about our project appeared in the Alto Adige newspaper.

The materials were later shared on the stations’ TV and Facebook channels. While it’s difficult to estimate the total reach, combining all viewership and readership data suggests we may have reached up to 147,000 people.

Our message came across clearly - the coverage highlighted the area’s extreme temperatures, the project’s goals, its grassroots, citizen-driven nature, the secured budget, and the planned start date for construction. A personal highlight was giving my first interview in Italian - completely unprepared, yet aired uncut. My strong, fluorescent green visuals worked exactly as intended, featuring in the broadcasts alongside the data visualizations, community participation, project plans, and future vision.

As leaving a mark on the site was important to me, I designed a street art piece based on the data visualization. On the fence in front of the asphalt, I installed 75 wooden flowers, each representing one of the people involved in the process.

To inspire visitors to keep imagining the future, I also hung a box containing a 3D collage of the project’s vision, a short explanatory text, and information directing viewers to further project details.

If the municipality keeps its promise, work on Premstallerhof will begin in fall 2026, and the facility could reopen in 2027. We plan to continue our involvement in the upcoming processes and intend to influence the final shape of the site's re-greening work.

• Projects instagram
• Video footage in TV33
• Radio NBC press note
• Projects materials