EMPaThY Spaces: creative ecosystem for a transfeminist city

Background Since the late 1980s, a new lens of intersectional feminism has provided an opportunity to enrich and capture specific nuances related to the mainstream debate on spatial justice (Israel and Frenkel, 2018; Marcuse, 2009; 2010; Pirie, 1983) and the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1968; Iveson, 2011). Which bodies move in the city and how many of them are excluded because of gender, race, class, sexuality and ableism? (Muxí Martínez, 2011; Federici, 2018; Kern, 2021) Starting from these questions is essential to read a double denial of urban spaces: on one hand, urban policies and decision-making processes often reflect dominant and privileged perspectives, which may ignore or minimize the needs and perspectives of marginalized communities (hooks, 1998; Criado-Perez & Palmieri, 2022); on the other hand, urban spaces are strongly affected by commodification dynamics (Harvey, 2012), which are destroying their collective and social values. In other words, urban spaces today are often neither inclusive nor collective. Project proposal EMPaThY SPACE is a project proposal designed for the city of Naples, placed at the intersection between urban and gender studies, and based on the integration of two approaches for developing/reshaping inclusive and collective urban spaces. On one hand, the transfeminist approach that could fill the lack of knowledge and awareness of marginalized communities needs; on the other hand, the research group, recognising the innovation that the network of emerging urban commons for civic and collective use in Naples is experiencing in terms of processes of self-determination, legal innovation, and democratization (Micciarelli, 2018; Capone, 2020), considers empty and/or underutilised urban space as a potential space for the production of commoning practices (Stavrides, 2016; 2022), and also for the development of new social economies —i.e. community,social, and , cooperative enterprise—, starting from the valorization of human and social capital. The aim of the proposal is to create an ecosystem of community-driven urban spaces where can be experimented: new methods of spatial design and production, the transformation of ideas into social enterprises in the direction of the self-determination, the potential impact in interconnecting existing practices. Methodology Phase 1- Data collection through collaborative mapping In order to identify all the spaces that the community of mappers needs to reshape, a collaborative mapping process will be implemented also through the use of collaborative tools, such as Participatory GIS (Brown & Marketta, 2014). This process will be based on a mixed-method research methodology, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Phase 2- Definition of criteria and spaces selection process Selection criteria will generally depend on the number of alerts on each space, alerts repetition related to a specific need, dimension of the space (micro will be privileged in a first phase) and other several ones that could be made explicit from the previous phase; constant monitoring of funding opportunities will be initiated and, depending on the time and economic resources available, a more or less limited number of spaces will be selected in order to support the informal communities of mappers in the next steps. Phase 3- Engagement, empowerment and co-design All the mappers will be invited to take part in the collective discussion moments and to tell about their experience in the urban space, their needs, their aspirations, their skills, and also their network. This process, will enable not only a better profiling of actors but also to forge new alliances and to expand and reinforce the original networks. After the ice breaking meetings, the research team will propose in-depth focuses on the two approaches: the transfeminist one, particularly linked to spatial outcomes, the commoning one, linked to the collective dimension of the process itself. Through these new lenses participants will be guided through theco-design process in order to achieve a common and shared project on the selected spaces. Starting from this phase, the new emerged alliances will work to search funds in order to achieve shared objectives. Phase 4.a- Co-production processes In order to fortify the group cohesion and encourage a rooting process in the new urban scenario, communities, researchers and the other partners involved in the project will work together to realize different objectives among which tactical urban furniture and art installations. Phase 4.b- New local and social economies An open call will be launched to surface the existence of social entrepreneurship ideas among the community and beyond. Skill profiling can be used in this phase to stimulate alliances among the community, with the aim of connecting and systemizing the existing human and social capital. Potential social entrepreneurs will be guided on a path where basic knowledge will be provided to turn such ideas into business projects, in term of business model, funding opportunities, and legal framework. Phase 5- Learning from the process: data representation and spatialization The data collected throughout the process will be analyzed to build a spatial representation of them. While some of them will be useful to give representation of the actors involved and their skills, re-shaped spaces, and local networks, others will be used to define what indicators are needed to classify an urban space as transfeminist space in order to build a new map for the city of Naples. Finally, still others will be indispensable for co-writing a vademecum for other processes inspired by the integration of transfeminist and commoning approaches. Expected Results The project's outcomes span multiple dimensions, strictly connected each other: on a physical-spatial level, the reshaping of the selected places, according to a transfeminist perspective and through a practices of commoning; on a social level, stimulate the creation and/or strengthening of social networks and the empowerment of the communities; on a advancement of knowledge level, the development of a new set of indicators, more up-to-date and effective than those currently used by Istat (Italian National Institute of Statistics), to capture and describe the social and urban complexity, and a new “Guidelines for Transfeminist Urban Design” —also useful for the other urban designers, planners and policy-makers; on a digital-spatial level, the creation of an interactive map, "EMPaThY SPACES map", to visualize and link co-produced spaces, and also to highlight existing transfeminist spaces or areas in the city.