An appeal to ten candidates for mayor of Florence, to change direction in city policies. It is launched by the «Building community» groupintellectuals and citizens of different backgrounds and backgrounds — including the abbot of San Miniato al Monte, Father Bernardo Gianni, the sociologist Mariella Orsi, the demographer Lorenzo Del Panta and the president of Le Curandaie Sandra Cavallucci — who met to develop proposals on the future of Florence. At the center a new sense of community. «We need to place the liveability of spaces and places for all age groups of the population, for the different social strata and for all the different cultures at the center of city policies. And reserve significant portions of public construction and real estate renovations to homes for economically weak groups, for students, off-site workers and migrants”, urge the various Florentine exponents in the open letter.
«A first positive observation is that some areas of the city have been made more alive in recent years thanks to the commitment of population groups who have taken care of them to offer spaces for socializing and mutual help to children and young people, to migrants in looking for work and for the support of the elderly population, together with specific attention given to green spaces to guarantee their careful and safe use and avoid the abandonment of public areas to degradation or crime”, underlines the “Making community” group claiming the role played by the third sector in substitution for the administration before pointing the finger at the main critical issues.
«In recent years it has been recorded that abandoned or unused spaces and buildings, potential resources for the city, have unfortunately resulted in their sale to real estate funds which allocate them to super-luxury apartments or to predominantly tourist use». In the viewfinder is the real estate speculation which in turn aggravated the housing crisis in the city, producing «the fictitiously called “student residences”, properties which, once completed, were rented out to people with high incomes, avoiding the needs of the weakest and most fragile social strata of the population» .
For this reason the group’s invitation to candidates is to put the question of spaces and social connections is at the center of electoral programs: «It is considered necessary to identify with a participation process that involves citizens some areas of the city to be allocated to urban regeneration processes in order to identify methods and tools that make spaces available for social use and improve networks and relationships between citizens and its territory.” On the other hand, the attempt to “promote and improve dialogue between population groups residing in the various districts of the city, promoting aggregation nuclei, also through the associative and cooperative fabric that operates in those territories” is considered necessary.
