Maintaining the built environment through community engagement tools and strategies: playground as experimentation platform

The proposed research investigates community engagement processes in built and urban heritage care strategies, aiming to control the built environment quality with a view to users' involvement, awareness, and education. Focusing on places intended for school-age users, the research experiments with methods and tools for transferring a shared monitoring strategy, where parents and children experience tools to detect information about the quality of the playground system and its sub-systems (UNI EN 1177; UNI EN 1176-1; UNI 11123). These tools, designed according to the specific abilities and skills of the users, enable knowledge of their changing needs over the playground’s life cycle, guiding managers in planning maintenance and rehabilitation activities. Through the analysis of two selected case studies, located in settlement systems within the municipality of Naples different for physical, social, and economic characteristics, strategies for the activation of training workshops for playground maintenance and rehabilitation are outlined. Built environment is assumed in the research as enabler and maintenance as driver for the connection with the community: the user becomes an actor within the maintenance process capable of having an influence on the activities and their scheduling.