This is it! On Wednesday 24 May 2023 P.arch – Playground for community architects, with its (almost) 4 years, comes to an end and does so with a double celebration and a new beginning: together with the educating community and the boys and girls of the school, we will inaugurate the Neighbourhood Collective Museum at the I.C. “via Maffi” in the Primavalle district of Rome.

With the collaboration of partners, teachers and students, representatives of local associations and institutions, we will tell the many activities of P.arch and map new visions for the creation of an innovative and inclusive school.

The P.arch project, supported by the social enterprise Con i Bambini, was born precisely from this intent: to make the school welcoming, open and an agent of change capable of supporting young people in their process of growth and discovery through creativity and play, and to contribute to the fight against educational poverty among minors.

Storytelling, gaming, architecture and creativity are promoted as non-formal education disciplines aimed at implementing the traditional curricula and promoting in young people a greater interest and affective bonding towards the school world. A process designed and implemented thanks to the collaboration of a complementary partnership made up of research organisations, companies, associations, sociologists and psychologists.

Within the project, the educating community and the link with the territory play an essential role. For this reason, the first part of the P.arch party will be dedicated to facilitating a round table that will bring together project partners, teachers, institutions, policy makers, associations from the Primavalle neighbourhood and representatives of the Municpio XIV. An opportunity to reflect and imagine change by following the paths traced by community education pacts as instruments of long-term impact for the socio-educational development of territories and the fight against school drop-out.

P.arch over these years has been a continuous process of creating, experimenting, collaborating and learning together. Among the many things that have been created in the schools involved, there are the neighbourhood Collective Museums, places that arise from the regeneration of spaces bordering or inside the three Comprehensive Institutes involved in the project. The P.arch festival will celebrate precisely the opening of one of the three Museums, the one located in the Primavalle district, an important milestone for the I.C. Maffi and the territory.

The collective Museums are the result of a co-design process that took place together with the neighbourhood associations and the classes involved, which helped to give an identity and a function to these meeting spaces. Music, collective study, cinema, and recreation are some of the activities desired by the classes and which have defined the redevelopment project of the former caretaker’s house space.

In the second part of the morning, the classes involved will guide us to discover the interventions and the many activities realised with P.arch in the I.C. “via Maffi” among murals, video games, comics and self-built wooden furniture. To conclude, a snack all together to celebrate the new Museum and the end of the school year.

We look forward to seeing you at the I.C. Maffi in Primavalle (entrance via Luigi Maglione). Don’t miss it!

Find out more about P.arch here and follow all the updates on the social profiles fb and ig @playparch