The Foundation promotes Civic Imagination, that is, a means of listening, collaboration, participation, and co-production related to projects and policies in the city, its neighbourhoods, and the entire metropolitan area. The specific focus is the care and regeneration of urban common goods.

Occasionally relying on methods and tools combined according to the objectives, places, and contexts addressed, our multi-professional team in the Office of Civic Imagination works as a research and development group to connect the resources, choices, and projects of the Administration with the needs, potential, and capacities of citizens and the community. With the strategies identified by the Urban Innovation Plan, the goal is to imagine new solutions so that city government is increasingly the fruit of exercising shared responsibility in caring for spaces and places, in the sustainable use and equal enhancement of local resources.

To this end, our task at the Foundation is to facilitate the activation and design of participatory processes and manage its monitoring. To perform these activities, the Foundation organizes campaigns, initiatives, and events regarding the territory in close collaboration with associates, neighbourhoods, and other public and private institutions. We also promote co-design and innovation laboratories, involving and enhancing the different skills characteristic of the territory of Bologna to develop and collect proposals for new ideas and solutions. Laboratory activities are organized both for places undergoing transformation (for example, the use of buildings and participatory budgeting) and for issues of community interest (for example, mobility, air quality, management of public spaces, etc.).

Our perspective aims to be increasingly oriented not only at mutual listening and collaboration, but also at establishing true ways for the Administration and citizens to co-produce decisions regarding public policies.