Managing animals in the city is child’s play (and not only)

Find a suitable home for as many dogs as possible, the first to place four wins. This is the challenge of CityPets, a card game created in collaboration with LuccaCrea as part of the European project InHabit of the Department of Veterinary Sciences of the University of Pisa. The objective is, together with the Municipality, to make Lucca an ideal city for humans and animals, the first in Europe to valorise animals to promote quality of life and well-being for all and where animals ensure public goods for towns and citizens. Meanwhile, 19 classes from some primary schools in Lucca will be playing with CityPets. Boys and girls will have to find the most suitable matches between families and “four-legged friends” taking into account the needs of people and animals and the services offered by the city.

“Our project is built through the active involvement of everyone – explains Francesco Di Iacovodirector of the Department of Veterinary Sciences of the University of Pisa – with the schools, in agreement with the Municipality of Lucca, we have already started co-design activities (with the contribution of the partner Design For Change) in which we involve girls and boys in expressing ideas about the animals present in the city and what they consider useful to create conditions of profitable coexistence between animals and humans also to help us live better. The game, therefore, will represent a further useful learning moment”.

In Italy there are approximately 65 million registered pets, the general idea of ​​Inhabit is to create in Lucca the first European city with an integrated humanimal policy. That is, it is a question of rethinking the relationship between humans and animals to improve the quality of life in urban centres, places where 85% of the population and a very large, growing share of animals are now concentrated.

To take stock of the halfway project, an article has just been published in the scientific journal Animals in which, for the first time, the idea of ​​animals as solutions for improving the quality of life in the city is introduced.

Since its inception in 2020, InHabit has developed with an eye to the economy, society and well-being. The project, thanks to the support of the partner Bridge for Billions, has incubated around 15 entrepreneurs who are preparing innovative solutions to enhance the interaction of non-human animals in society (in tourism, in pet management, in innovative animal-assisted intervention services, in the preparation of targeted apps, in facilitating the building of relationships with their pets ). There pet economy it is considered among the great economic development opportunities of the future, ranging from food, to services for animals and their carriers, to the entire tourism sector. As regards thesocial sphere and healthcare, the Municipality of Lucca, in the inhabit project, selected and involved multiple associations in a co-planning work which led, at the end of 2023, to the start of animal-assisted interventions, still ongoing in two RSAs. The interaction of animals managed by competent teams with multiple groups of elderly people with different levels of ability and deficit has given encouraging results in terms of reactivating people, from a physical, mental and relational point of view, leading to an improvement in their daily routine of life. Still in the social sphere, InHabit then launched a new pet-care service aimed at ensuring support for people with temporary fragility who find themselves in difficulty in the daily management of their animals.

Among the other goals achieved by the project there was also the creation by the Municipality of Lucca of the “animatable”Meaning what smart urban routes in some areas of Lucca (Serchio river park and former hospital). The future is a 15 km walk that includes the Serchio Park, the walls and the Nottolini aqueduct. The idea is to design routes with different intensity of effort depending on the size of the dogs and the physical capacity of the drivers.

“Our ambition is to replicate elsewhere too the model we are developing in Lucca based on the concept of One health – concludes Di Iacovo – in this perspective we have already sent one proposed to the Municipality of Pisa, after an initial positive contact with Mayor Conti, while we intend to involve the National Association of Italian Municipalities to transfer the idea to a regional scale. Animals are with us, the constitution ensures them new rights and the valorisation of their capabilities opens up paths of social innovation capable of giving new responses to emerging needs in cities by valorising the resources already available, those of our animals”.