This is Woz, set up four years ago, it has already worked within the southern Italian microplises of Riace, in Calabria, and Ustica and Maletto, in Sicily. An open independent workshop of collaborative design. For a week architects, engineers, artists and designers from different parts of Europe meet local residents and, together, they make proposals, set up projects and prototypes for urban design which encourages the local host community to rediscover its capacity for self-determination.
The workshop will look at four intervention models: strategies, meta-projects, prototypes and intersections. There will be theoretical and formal proposals for each with a target communication. Woz participants, or wozzers, promote and sustain a dialogue with the community through a range of proposals regarding urban and cultural policies and economic and social strategies. Local administrators support the workshop, facilitate interaction and approve proposals and prototypes. But the real protagonists are, of course, the people of these micropolises, who suggest both which direction to take and which to drop. Kids, too. Just like the professionals, in the WozKiz section they presents their temporary guests with their own model for a town, their needs and desires.