The aim of ‘A Vila da Mañá’ is to change the model of town or city, we believe that another one can be possible. This is achieved through the protagonist participation of local children and adolescents who, by working with fundamental concepts through tactical urban planning actions, become active citizens capable of transforming their spaces.

In this case, the village is worked on, like its habitat, its game board to be discovered. Understanding its structure, conformation, morphology, its voids and its fillings, its history, its traditions, and its symbolic and immaterial issues is essential to be able to reflect on how they move from one site to another, the routes, the points important where the lives of the girls, boys and teenagers of the community develop.

“At one time we were afraid of the forest. It was the forest of the wolf, the ogre, the darkness. It was the place where we could get lost. When our grandparents used to tell us stories, the forest was the favourite place to hide from enemies, traps and troubles. [At one time, we felt safe among the houses, in the city, with the neighbourhood. This was the place where we looked for our companions, where we found them to play together. That was our place, the place where we hid, where we organised the gang, where we played mummy, where we hid the treasure…. […] But in a few decades, everything has changed. There has been a tremendous, rapid, total transformation, the likes of which our society has never seen (at least according to documented history). [The forest has become beautiful, luminous, the object of dreams and desires. The city, on the other hand, has become dirty, grey, monstrous. […] In recent decades, and in the last fifty years in particular, the city, born as a place for meeting and exchange, has discovered the commercial value of space and has altered all concepts of balance, well-being and community to follow only programmes of profit, of interest. It has been sold, prostituted. […] The city is now like the forest of our fairy tales”.

FrancescoTonucci