The “Open Source Park”: innovating the design-build-operate cycle in bottom-up managed public space

The paper will present the experience of the “Open Source Park”, an experimental public space, furnished by systems digitally fabricated by small local laboratories and based on a bottom up community management. The project started as a collaboration between the Department of Architecture of Roma Tre University with the “Roma Makers” movement, that federates all Fab-Labs of Rome Metropolitan area, and the “Casetta Rossa” community, a social experiment of community-managed park called “Crazy Horse” and located in the “Garbatella” district, one of the most active and community-rooted neighbourhoods of the city. The Open Source concept aims at a “bottom up” design/fabricate/use cycle for public parks, where an open design is released to local facilities like Fab-Labs, and maintained by a community that participate to production of its parts, often vandalized or abandoned. But Open Source also aims at generating “open” forms, that allow for evolution and change over time, according to use evidence but also promoting, at the same time, its ambiguity, following up on a research on multi-sense sculptural space for kids originally developed by Sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The project focuses on a lightweight, sustainable material like wood. The result is a “collective authorship”, with a series a projects that provide a combination of uniformity of material, color, approach, with a great and urban variety of forms. After showcases in two editions of the European Maker Faire, the project started its “wild file” in the “Crazy Horse” park in Rome in 2018 and in a secondo space in Caserta, in 2019.