Verso La Favorita

In 2013, neu [nòi] was still taking its first steps as an association, but one principle was already clear — the same one that guides us today: a city regenerates together with the people who live in it, not on their behalf. Verso La Favorita was one of the first large-scale participatory processes we ran — an attempt to bring Palermo's biggest park, an enormous green space that was often underused, back to life through direct citizen involvement.

The process culminated in a three-day event that brought, inside the park, side by side with residents, the mayor and the city councillors of the Comune di Palermo too — a level of institutional engagement that wasn't a given for an association that was, at the time, barely a year old. It wasn't a one-off: the media and social echo generated by Verso La Favorita lasted for years, helping change public perception of that space and laying the groundwork for the commons-focused work we'd keep building over the following decade, all the way to the 2023 Regolamento sui Beni Comuni and Orbita in 2025.

Verso La Favorita remains, in our history, proof that participatory design methodology — the same one we now apply through tools like Open Space Technology, World Café and Theatre of the Oppressed — was already working in our very first years, back when we were still figuring it out in the field, one park at a time.