The Body Goes to the City project: Research on safe route to school and playgrounds in Ferrara

The research activity presented here is the fruit of a co-operation between an association (UISP Ferrara, The Body Goes to the City project), a faculty (the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Ferrara) and local authorities (La Citta bambina [Children's City] project). The common objective - to regain the possibility of children gaining autonomy with regards their personal mobility - has stimulated common strategies of intervention. These projects started from sociological research concerning liveability as well as safety, and have involved both school children and the whole neighbourbood, and were further developed in workshops in schools. Finally, the data collected in the studies and the workshops was adopted by town planners for the elaboration of the final project. The particularities of this research action are the common long-term intervention methodology, which - also thanks to the common training of operators with different professional backgrounds - allows the conservation of similar educational approaches and critical viewpoints; the adoption of the body as an analyser of the quality of life; the particular attention that the planners pay to the perceptive and qualitative survey of the neighbourhood. The results of the sociological research, which has clearly revealed the children's lack of autonomy in their everyday movements, are in some ways similar to those obtained in other studies. However, they appear even more worrying considering that they have been gathered in Ferrara, a city considered one of the most liveable cities in Italy and a "city for cyclists" on the European level. The word that characterises the results of the study is "limit". We reckon that as the situation persists, it shall not only modify the autonomy of the children, who increasingly adopt their parents' models of behaviour and do not perceive the city as a place where they can live and play, but, in the long run, even their very desires are limited.