Recognizing ourselves in the narrative is at the heart of the best storytelling, regardless of the sound of your voice or where your narrative originated. Diaspora Dialogues is a Toronto-based literary project that supports the creation and presentation of new fiction, poetry and drama –specifically works that reflect the complexity of the city back to Torontonians through the eyes of its richly diverse communities.

The success of established writers such as Shyam Selvadurai (above), a Sri Lankan Canadian author whose 1994 novel Funny Boy won the Books in Canada First Award, helps animate the work of Diaspora Dialogues which brings established and emerging writers, poets and playwrights together at events such as Toronto’s annual “Word on the Street” Festival.

“Diaspora Dialogues began in 2005 as an answer to the question: if there was a program to stimulate the creative voices of Toronto’s immigrant writers what would it look like,” says Helen Walsh, President and founder. “Diaspora Dialogues provides an outlet for writers and artists who are new to Canada, who are under-represented and who may not have found their audience and market. It’s a two way relationship, since they provide longer term residents of the city with an up-to-date and ever changing picture of Toronto as it exists now, today.”

New Voices, New Perspectives

Diaspora Dialogues uses a multifaceted approach to cultivate both the diverse creative voice of the city and a broad audience for their work. To identify new and emerging voices of Toronto, Diaspora Dialogues holds an annual open call for submissions of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and drama. Selected participants are then brought together with established writers like best-selling author Lawrence Hill (The Book of Negroes) and others, such as Priscilla Uppal, Michael Redhill and Yvette Nolan, for a rich learning experience.

Through an adjudicated process, a shortlist of approximately 15 emerging writers is chosen. Each of these writers is then matched to an established writer for a programme of mentoring activities designed to help them develop their writing skills as well as learn more about their profession, namely how to get their work published or performed.

The mentoring program is free and designed to foster professional and artistic relationships. All program participants have the opportunity to read their work in Diaspora Dialogues’ popular multi-disciplinary reading and performance series that takes place at venues around the city. Emerging writers are actively promoted at these monthly events and event programming strategically mixes established writers with newcomers to ensure maximum profile and audience.

A selection of finished pieces by mentee writers are also published in the annual Diaspora Dialogues anthology, TOK: Writing the New City . The newest volume in the TOK series marks an expansion into Canadian urban spaces beyond Toronto. Drawing from culturally diverse voices in Toronto, Vancouver, Halifax, and Montreal, TOK: Writing the New City, Book 4 investigates what it means to live in the contemporary Canadian city through fiction, poetry and drama.

Diaspora Dialogues also hosts professional development seminars for the writers and artists (alumni) who have come through its programme, including sessions on practical issues such as tax planning for artists and how to find and work with an agent.

Supporting younger voices

Diaspora Dialogues has also successfully taken this mentoring program into the city’s high schools to support the growth of young creative voices in the city. Working collaboratively with local high school teachers, Diaspora Dialogues offers after-school creative writing workshops for students in Grades 11 and 12. These in-school workshops are led by professional writers and consist of three 60-minute sessions over a three week period. Each session focuses on a specific genre, such as fiction writing, play-writing and spoken word/poetry writing.

The Diaspora Dialogues secondary school programme helps students develop creative voice as well as personal confidence - and occasionally introduces them to future audiences. Some of these young writers go on to showcase their work alongside their professional mentors at local venues. Past mentors have included Griffin Prize nominee and York University creative writing professor Priscila Uppal, actor and playwright Marcia Johnson and Commonwealth Prize winner Olive Senior.

Success

Since its launch in 2005, Diaspora Dialogues has worked with over 350 emerging and established artists from a wide culturally diverse urban landscape through literature, spoken word, poetry and even theatre. Today, with large-scale partners such as the Toronto Public Library and international arts festivals such as Toronto’s Luminato and Nuit Blanche, Diaspora Dialogues is reaching new audiences, creating more opportunity and widening the lens on how Torontonians see themselves in the city.

Local success has also brought Diaspora Dialogues international recognition, including invitations to participate in cultural festivals like the London Literature Festival, the LIFT Festival of Theatre (upcoming in July 2010 in London) and Scotland’s Edinburgh Festivals (Book, Fringe, International) in August 2011.

November 9 was International Day Against Facism and Antisemitism.

UNITED for Intercultural Action (aka the ‘European network against nationalism, racism, fascism and in support of migrants and refugees’) has produced another great poster for this year’s campaign. To see a selection of posters going back to 1997, visit the UNITED campaign page.

If you have a photo that tells an integration story or conveys a key message visually, share it with us! at citiesofmigration@maytree.ca.

Our recent Cities of Migration webinar on Youth Participation and Migrant Voice  included opening remarks by Florence Laufer of the UN Alliance of Civilization (UNAoC) in New York and an introduction to the UN AoC’s exciting new project, PLURAL+, an international youth-produced video festival on migration, diversity and identity.

On December 18th, 2009, in honour of International Migrants Day, the UN AoC announced the three International Jury Award winners at the PLURAL+ Youth Video Festival Awards Ceremony at the Paley Center for Media in New York.

Over 150 videos produced by youth age 9 to 25 from 39 countries representing all areas of the planet responded to the PLURAL + call for entries that were vetted by an international jury which includes youth representatives, film critics and critically acclaimed filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami.

The winning videos will be presented at a number of conferences and festivals as well as broadcast around the world throughout 2010.

For further information on PLURAL + and this year’s award winners, please visit: www.unaoc.org/pluralplus.

Albany Park Theatre Project - Upcoming Production

The process of sharing your story can life changing for both the audience but especially for the participants.

This is the belief behind The Albany Park Theatre Project (APTP), a Chicago based, nationally recognised and award winning initiative - and one of the good ideas that CoM is currently watching.

Albany Park is a neighborhood of 57,000 people on Chicago’s northwest side.  It is one of the most diverse communities in the country, with more than 50% of the residents having been born outside the United States.

The Albany Park Theatre Project is a multiethnic, ensemble-based theater company of teens and young adults that creates original performance works based on the actual stories of immigrants living and working in the Albany community.

The result is that they bring to stage voices that are either overlooked or too frequently have their stories co-opted by other organizations and media outlets.  Along the way, the lives of the youth participants are also changed.   In Chicago, where almost half of the students who enter a public high school never make it to graduation, more than 90% of the Albany youth who become a part of the Albany Park Theatre Project graduate from high-school (or earn a Graduate Equivalency Diploma) and matriculate into four-year colleges.

Since its founding in 1997, the Albany Park Theatre Project has performed over 50 original performances for more than 25,000 people and have shared the life experiences of Mexican indocumentados, Bosnian refugees, Bolivian revolutionaries, persecuted Ukrainian Jews, Palestinian-American Muslims, Persian Sufis, Polish domestics, Vietnamese refugees, and more.

Watch our site for more on this initiative…

Have a look at this new short film that tells the story of the City of Sanctuary movement, and showcases some of the wonderful stories of friendship and hospitality between people seeking sanctuary and local communities.

Cities of Sanctuary is one of Cities of Migration’s Good Ideas in Integration. Click here to learn more about this Good Idea: Cities of Sanctuary, Communities of Welcome.

Visit the Cities of Sactuary’s home base in Sheffield: www.cityofsanctuary.com

“Increasingly what we saw was a situation where communities were becoming isolated and were looking more and more inwards; fear and resentment were taking place over a generation.”

When Rajah Miah returned from university to the Oldham neighbourhood where he had grown up, he found a community dangerously isolated by its differences and headed for serious breakdown.

Self-segregation between the Asian and White communities had created a social divide that was now encroaching on the neighbourhood’s spaces. Public areas were increasingly occupied by one or the other group with little to no contact between the two.

There were housing complexes where white children had never met an Asian friend and vice versa. Most of the primary schools were single race and many of the secondary schools 99% White or 99% Asian.

When they did interact, it was with mistrust and suspicion.

Deeply concerned by the depressing slide into segregation, a group of young Asian men took action by forming a small voluntary organization with the simple objective of halting this decline by creating opportunities for young people to meet and befriend other people from different communities and ethnicities.

Community contact…

The PeaceMaker founders believed that when youth from the two communities began to interact, they would befriend one another and realize that their similarities far outweighed their differences.   They started by using their informal networks and youth club contacts to bring groups together and promote a culture of dialogue and interaction.

After the 2001 Oldham race riots which were some of the most severe that the UK had ever seen, PeaceMaker’s work took on an entirely new importance.  They emerged as the voice of hope amidst the tensions that Oldham and the surrounding northern towns were experiencing.

The importance of their message suddenly became clear.  Sitting back while different ethnic ‘communities’ developed parallel but entirely separate existences was no longer an option.

The human, social, and economic costs were far too high. Communities were waking up to the fact that, for too long, they had concentrated on what divided rather than what united them. Today, PeaceMaker is increasingly called upon by national government and by regional and national policy makers to find out what Britain’s diverse communities are saying about their lives and aspirations as British citizens.

To do this, PeaceMaker turned to youth. They had their young ambassadors enter communities and engage in debate, not only within Black and Asian neighbourhoods, but also directly with some of the most demoralised and disenfranchised White communities.

By going directly to the communities for input, PeaceMaker was able to create programs that directly addressed their needs. Since its founding in 1997, PeaceMaker has matured into a service delivery agency in its own right, setting up and running projects that formally recreated the opportunities for multicultural experience.

Youth Focused and Youth Driven
The challenge with all youth focused programs is making sure that they remain relevant to the groups they are seeking to involve.

With the foresight that first prompted their creation, Peacemaker began involving youth, their target audience, directly in their programming as well as the organization’s leadership. PeaceMaker prides itself on having real leadership by young people from their target communities and has two permanent youth seats on their Board of Directors.

To ensure the relevancy of their work, Peacemaker has had peer educators and the young people that participate in the projects conduct a comprehensive review of their work.

These young people work with trustees and senior members of staff to review the programs for relevance and impact both in Oldham and as it relates to the interests and concerns of young people across the country. This program scrutiny allows PeaceMaker to identify gaps in service delivery and create new project ideas to address the changing needs and concerns of young people both in Oldham and across the North of England.

Success

With the launch of a small grants programme, PeaceMaker is now further empowering young people from the local community to create their own initiatives and share their own stories. This work actively helps combat the stereotype that young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, do not care about their community. By putting young people from the community in positions of public leadership, PeaceMaker supports the view that youth are a valuable resource that can shape the future of the town.

To compete for this funding, the applicants had to explain what they would do with £1,000 to benefit their local community and then design a plotline for a documentary film about their community.

The three successful groups - a local football team, a white working-class youth group, and a local secondary school media group - each participated in PeaceMaker’s inter-community mentoring programme. Through this project, they were connected to PeaceMaker’s diverse group of mentors, participated in film lessons and workshops and then designed and filmed their own documentary about their community.

These films were screened to an audience of local service providers and decision-makers to allow them to hear young people describe their needs and concerns for both themselves and their communities, in their own words. The films were submitted to British and international film festivals for young people to showcase their work to a wider audience.

Two years ago, 24-year-old Shipon Uddin began to mentor Ryan Newton, 16, who lives on Oldham’s Holts Village estate. Through the Peacemaker programme, they made a video, Separate Lives, which documented the experiences of young white and Asian people in Oldham. The video has since been presented in Burnley, Bradford, Newcastle upon Tyne and London.

Uddin says: “Where I live is a mixed area. But when the riots started, I used to walk past the white kids and they used to put their heads down. I would also put my head down. I was not drawn into any of the trouble, but one of my friends was sent down. When you live in Oldham, you see how different people stick together. I didn’t like that. It’s just the colour of our skin that is making us live apart.”

“When we got together with the guys from the Holts estate, we noticed we did have a lot of things in common, like the sports and films we liked. And some had the same opinions as myself. Before Peacemaker, I used to see people differently. The project really makes you think about British people.”

Today Peacemaker’s motto is “All people, all communities” and their integration agenda is positioned as the “way forward for Britain.”

copyright © Manifesta, 2008

With sculpted scenes of exotic tropical life adorning the exterior and the building’s colonial origins, the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris, could be considered a controversial (or ironic) choice for a museum dedicated to immigration.

Inside, there is nothing historic about the animated gestures and lively exchange of young adults negotiating English, French and Portuguese with the help of simultaneous translation. The discussion covers issues from urban regeneration, finding space to “hang out”, to community relations with the police and plans for the future.

The topic?   What does it mean to “belong” ?

This is the central question asked to teenagers in Paris, Lisbon and London as they embarked on a new transnational ‘tri-city’ project to learn what it means to belong to a particular place or community, using intercultural dialogue and film to document their learnings.

The Belonging Project

BELONGING invited young people to talk about what belonging and identity means to them, especially when they are managing multiple, flexible identities (e.g.daughter, Parisian, Muslim, friend, French) and “belonging” can mean attachment to more than one place (France, Portugal),

Working in small groups with creative video artists and film-makers, the participants each made short films (up to 3-min.) on diverse topics under the project title (in three languages): Belonging / Chez Nous / Pertencer.

What is unique about the project is its inter-urban perspective. It involves young film makers from three cities -youth from culturally mixed backgrounds living on the ‘the margins’ of the cities of London (Newham), Lisbon (Casal da Boba) and Paris (20th arrondissement) filming in their own cities and then coming together to share and discuss their experiences.

The resulting 43 short films provide insight into the thoughts, aspirations and cares of young urban migrants and their views on “belonging.”

What emerged was a picture of young people whose experience across all three cities was as similar as it was different. They were all exuberantly young, unequivocally Parisian, Lisboner or Londoner, and also individuals who moved fluently from one identity to another within their particular community and place.

Cross Cultural Convening

The three locations chosen for organizing the workshops were the Cité des Amandiers estate in the 20th District of Paris, the London Borough of Newham and Casal da Bobalin Lisbon. These areas have similarities in their population make-up and histories. Common features to all the three areas include:

• “Young Neighbourhoods” or areas with a high proportion of young inhabitants. Those under 24 years of age make up 27.31% of the population in the 20th District of Paris, 41% of Newham and 49% of Casal da Bobal;
• Historically, these areas have seen the settlement of large numbers of migrants, often to fill labour shortages. As a result, all have high proportions of ethnic minorities and migrants;
• The areas all suffer from poor socio-economic conditions, with high unemployment rates and low educational attainment;
• Finally, two out of the three areas (Casal da Boba and the Cité des Amandiers) have experiences significant tensions between young people and the police.

While each film addressed individual experiences, a few geographical themes did emerge. For instance, in Lisbon belonging was defined by where you live, in Paris it was defined by how you live, and in London the focus was more on personal identities.

The young people discussed important topics like migration and community, but also loneliness, being bored, and how absurd it can sometimes seem to be asked to name a country to which you belong. The common experience that emerged across cities was a sense of identity within each group that was unifying, yet locally and culturally distinct.

One of the London attendees described how meeting the other groups at the Paris workshop had helped him think about the issues in different ways: “The Portuguese and the French people welcomed us with open arms, and the language did not stand as a barrier … we found a way to communicate in other ways. It was interesting to see how their videos were different to ours. We showed how great it is to live in London, and did not really think about crime or any of the bad things… I think discovering this was the highlight of the trip, because it opened my mind to a whole new world”.

Discussions and messages from both the films and the dialogue between the young people also offer a unique opportunity to look at their perspectives through a policy lens. The films become a powerful channel for migrant voice, allowing these young people to share views on major issues and reach a wide audience of friends, institutions, policy makers as well as local community leadership.

Success

copyright © Benedict Hilliard, 2008

The Belonging video collection and intercultural dialogue were designed to be available for the closing celebrations of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue and to ensure that the voices of Europe’s youth were at the table.

The project produced views and recommendations by young people on issues such as migration, anti-racism, and community development that can be used to inform policy debates. In addition, the content generated from the project has been used to develop educational resources for the English national curriculum on anti-racism, identities, citizenship and making of new communities.

The Belonging partnership successfully combined Manifesta’s experience of devising and producing European projects addressing cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue and social exclusion/inclusion, using arts/culture, film and video production - with Runnymede Trusts’ experience on racial equality policy and research.

Belonging films have been showcased on the BBC London website, shortlisted at the StrangerFestival in Amsterdam and screened at the Roundtable on the Inter-Ethnic City organised by the UN’s Alliance of Civilisations (UN AoC) at its headquarters in New York. All the films will be broadcast by RTP, the national public service television in Portugal.

Breaking news: as of November 2009, six of the Belonging films have qualified in the first stage selection of PLURAL+, the UN AoC’s international youth film competition which will announce its finalists on December 18, 2009, on International Migrants Day -we are crossing our fingers for Belonging!

With slick graphics, high tech features and an urban soundtrack, ICED (I Can End Deportation) is engaging American youth on the issue of illegal immigration in a whole new way: videogames. Players choose from one of five characters and then live out the day to day life of an immigrant youth in the US - being chased by immigration officers, risking being thrown into detention and then facing unjust conditions while awaiting — often for unknown amounts of time for the random outcome of his or her case.

ICED is designed to spark dialogue and create awareness of unfair U.S. immigration policies (and is a deliberate play on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department). It is a free, 3D downloadable game available at www.icedgame.com

ICED was produced by Breakthrough an international human rights organisation.

Getting a snapshot into someone else’s experience and perspective is often the fastest way to realize how much we actually have in common.

That’s the idea behind the 43 short films below.

Organised by Manifesta and Runnymede, the Belonging Project brought together young people from Paris, Lisbon and London to make and then share short films that explore the themes of migration, identities and forming new communities.

The result? 43 vehicles that deliver the first hand voices of urban newcomer youth - and a global audience to share it with.

Recognizing ourselves in the narrative is at the heart of the best storytelling. Diaspora Dialogues supports the creation and presentation of new fiction, poetry and drama that reflect the complexity of the city back to Torontonians through the eyes of its richly diverse communities.

Diaspora Dialogues has successfully taken its mentoring program to Toronto’s high schools in diverse neighbourhoods as a way to support the growth of younger creative voices in the city.

Working in partnership with high school teachers, Diaspora Dialogues offers a customized series of after-school creative writing workshops for students in Grades 11 and 12. These in-school workshops are led by professional writers and consist of three 60-minute sessions per week over a three week period.

The Diaspora Dialogues secondary school programme helps students develop creative voice as well as personal confidence - and occasionally introduces them to future audiences. Some of these young writers go on to showcase their work alongside their professional mentors at local venues. Past mentors have included Griffin Prize nominee and York creative writing professor Priscila Uppal,actor and playwright Marcia Johnson and Commonwealth Prize winner Olive Senior.

Visit www.diasporadialogues.com

Natalia Chan

Interview: Natalia Chan, Research Associate, Young Foundation
City: London
Good Idea: Dealing With Diabetes: The Maslaha Project

1. Our project Cities of Migration is about urban integration, what’s the best example that you’ve seen recently?

Spitalfields City Farm where I was surprised to see the number of community activities happening. It felt like integration on a much bigger scale - not only bringing together groups of people from different communities, but also bringing nature into an urban environment.

2.Your projects, “Maslaha Engage” and “Thinking Allowed” are about engaging “youth”, so how did you get them interested in your work?

Maslaha has been built on and inspired by conversations with young people right from the start. Our early research showed a lack of accessible resources to answer the questions from young Muslims living within a western society.

Young people can be our harshest critics, but also our most important advisors, making sure we really address the key issues , and in a way that makes sense to them. For example, feedback from young people have informed the development of our website all the way through to ensure it’s something they will use and find interesting and exciting as well as useful.

3. With blogs and the web it seems easier than ever for youth voices to be heard, but who is listening to them? And if you asked them, who would they say they wanted to have listening to them?

Muslim communities have experienced a lot of negative media over the past few years. Many young people have told us that they just wanted to grab a camera and shout down it, to be given some kind of forum to have their voices heard. Maslaha ” Engage ” is both a window into what it’s like to be a young Muslim in Britain today, and also a mouthpiece.

Who they want to be heard by ? That would depend on the young person you talk to - some express a keen interest in politics, with others it’s about being able to open up other sectors, express yourself in the arts, or have the opportunity to participate in all areas of society without being labelled or stereotyped.

4. In person/online or over the phone - whats the best way to connect with this age group? Are you using Facebook or Twitter ?

Sure, you have to bring all of these media together, using the web and film , social media. But you also have to get out and talk to people who are already working with young people, organising events and discussion groups through schools, youth groups and more.

5. What have you learned from working with these different youth groups?

Well, they’re not backwards in coming forward ! They have been given free reign to criticise our website and tell us what they want ! They are great at reminding us about what really matters, in keeping us in tune with the real issues that need to be addressed by Maslaha. For example, one of our Engage films is essentially a health message around the use of Khat in the Somali community. This project was entirely driven by a young woman who felt passionate about that subject and it taught us a lot in the process. We are constantly blown away by their creativity and ideas. They are definately worth listening to.

For more on the Mashala Project see: Dealing With Diabetes: The Maslaha Project  and Dealing With Diabetes and Other Everyday Dilemmas: The Maslaha Project

The experience of a 12 - 18 year old newcomer or migrant is very different from that of his or her parents or younger siblings. Age and life stage distinguish young people as a group willing to take risks and challenge the status quo, but also open to sharing their hopes, cares and aspirations and ready to experiment with new ways of doing things.

This month, Cities of Migration looks at the different ways that migrant youth are sharing their stories, both with each other and the larger community.  These profiles also show us the different ways that migrant youth are leading and contributing to social change, and what youth has to tell us about the migrant experience in our cities. Stories of identity and belonging invite us all to think about how our stories can shape, distort or reflect the communities we live in.

Youth-themed integration stories include:

• Diaspora Dialogues, a literary project in Toronto;
• Peacemaker, a community leadership initiative in Oldham and Manchester;
• Belonging, a tri-city film project from Paris, London and Lisbon; and
• from Amadora (Portugal), “The Generation Project: Community Partnerships For Youth.”

Do you have a story to share with Cities of Migration?  Let us know about it! Submit a comment or contact us at citiesofmigration@maytree.com.

On a typical Saturday in the city of Turin, 100,000 visitors descend on Porta Palazzo, Europe’s largest open-air market. For over 150 years, this sprawling market has offered a cornucopia of footwear, clothes, house wares, toys and food from across Italy and around the world.

With over one thousand merchants and 700 street vendors, Porta Palazzo is a commercial hub whose opportunities have always attracted newcomers to the city. This regular influx of new cultural communities also makes the market an urban lab for cultural integration. In 2000 nearly 20% of those living and working in the market were foreign born, compared to the city average of 4%. Today, over 45 nationalities live in this densely populated inner-city neighborhood.

Unique to Porta Palazzo is the Balon flea market and its mix of registered, formal and informal vendors. Since 1935 irregular migrants have had the right to ‘exchange’ goods on the market by a special city statute. However, in 2001, that right was temporarily withdrawn, and the relative stability and security of the area rapidly declined and threatened the commercial vitality of the market and the whole neighbourhood.

Hostilities between groups who were legally licensed as market vendors versus those who were not started to escalate, fueling tensions between diverse groups. Surrounding environmental and physical space issues were also exacerbating the tensions (each day the market was generating 15 tons of trash).  City officials recognized that an intervention was required.

Living, Not Leaving

The City of Turin recognized that a multi-faceted approach was needed to successfully address the variety of factors threatening the social and commercial viability of the Porta Palazzo market. Fortunately they were well-prepared to move forward quickly.

Since 1998 the Porta Palazzo had been the focus of Turin’s major economic development strategy, called “The Gate.” Its overall message was to convince residents to stay in the neighborhood and invest in its future while investing in their own futures - hence the project’s motto, “Living, Not Leaving.”

Initially financed by the European Union, the Porta Palazzo project identified the quality of urban space as an incentive to economic development, as well as the means to resolve high levels of local unemployment and crime. Unemployment in the neighborhood stood at 12.8%, compared to about 6% in the city as a whole, and barriers to formal entry into the labor force pushed many immigrants into illegal or informal work, often in the neighborhood’s daily market.

In 2002, the project evolved into a Local Development Agency project and involved both public institutions and private partners, and broad community representation.

Using a participatory community model, the project included the participation and empowerment of the “irregular” or unlicensed merchants”. This decision was the result of an assessment which showed that while tensions between the licensed and unlicensed vendors were at the root of many of the other social, security and space issues, this group of 300 vendors was a vital part of the local economy.

Results

Through a deliberate process and the engagement of informal and formal leaders (including the Deputy Mayor on Economic Development and the Municipal Police), the Porta Palazzo, Living Not Leaving project succeeded in having “irregular” vendors recognised in the new legal category of “non professionals.” This resulted in these vendors being assigned their own specific space in the market.

Formal legal status -and protection- led to an immediate decrease in the chaos and problems within the market as vendors assumed greater responsibility for their assigned areas.

This in turn resulted in the merchants taking on a greater leadership role, including increased cooperation with the municipal police. Each Saturday a rotating group of merchants took on the role of “Service Operators” to help control the inside of the market by overseeing vendor placement, transit in the areas and payment of public ground and street cleaning tasks.

With the creation of the VIVIBALON association (a collective body created to engage informal leaders from target groups), a formal forum was established to keep vendors and traders (over 200 of them joined the association) up to date on municipal decisions. It also created a common space to share concerns and discuss issues before they escalated. Operated as a nonprofit private-public partnership, the model was innovative by Italian standards; it was the first time that this flexible structure had been used to manage and implement a regeneration project.

Dr. Luisa  Avedano, Turin City Council,  concluded that the project “demonstrated the need to take time developing a new process step-by-step and the importance of a strong shared interest among stakeholders and commitment from the public institutions to developing participatory approaches.”

The overall result of this initiative was an integrated culture of respect and equity among market vendors and a revitalized quartier one again attracting tourists and visitors from other parts of the city, generating business for merchants, shaping a positive identity for the market, and reconnecting the neighborhood with the urban fabric of Turin.