TOURiBOOST Business Model Canvas IT

This work aims at showing the tourist potential of Villaggio Artigiano and the 5 assets identified in it. The global canvas shows the elements that are common to all the 5 assets and the value they bring to the Villaggio. The canvas dedicated to each single asset highlight the peculiar value provided.

The Craftsman Village is located in the western part of Modena, in an area that until recently could be considered "first suburb", but which today is almost central to the structure of the city that has gradually expanded. The Village has an illustrious history. It was born in 1953 following the post-war economic crisis and the massive redundancies that ensued: the mayor Corassori and the architect Mario Pucci carried out a real public intervention of social innovation "ante-litteram", buying and urbanizing agricultural land and reselling it at low prices to many unemployed skilled workers, giving them the opportunity to become entrepreneurs. The workshop houses, emblem of an inseparable link between work and life, reflected the initiative of the inhabitants and the community bond of the village, constituted as a true and proper production chain.

In fact, it is the first model of a craft village in Italy.

The mayor Corassori believed a lot in this bet on the future, to the point of organizing meetings with the unemployed workers to convince them to take the risk, to accept the economic and personal sacrifice necessary to start a company. The physical union of medium, small and very small companies made their strength: the new artisan quarters began to function as productive systems, materials and semi-finished products travelled, productive and service relationships intertwined, trade union and professional associations developed. Next to the productive sector, a community of residents was born, which in the following decades became consolidated, experimenting with new forms of participation and sharing.

The project far exceeded the initial expectations of the Administration: the Village was extended to an area of ​​800,000 square meters, to then reach the current size, with about 200 activities established.

OvestLab is one of the dismissed workshops of the area of the Villaggio Artigiano in the west side of Modena. Villaggio Artigiano (Craftsman Village) is an area created in the mid-50s from an audacious political intuition during the socio-economical situation after World War II. It was the first model of industrial area in Italy: an area that sits in-between the city and the countryside, and that ties together life and work, know-how and industry, production chain and local community.

The OvestLab project aims to be a connection between different artistic disciplines, artisan productions, urban regeneration and citizens involvement. It is a multicultural center where training activities, artistic production, civic experimentation, urban transformation and buildings’ heritage are interlinked. All these actions activate new dynamics to increase the territorial quality of life and to restart a dialogue with the different territorial realities in the changing process. Amigdala is the cultural association managing this place and aims at creating permanent processes in the area, in the form of workshops and experimental project through artistic productions, creative residences, cultural calendars, publishing initiatives, training session, to foster new considerations on abandoned spaces – their role and their new possible identities.
Re-activating a former mechanical workshop – characterised by a strong artisanal vocation – fully complies with Amigdala’s goals to interweave every form of manual work and artistic experimentation

Tric Trac is a recycling and creative reuse laboratory for the sustainable city, promoted by the NGO "Together in the Neighborhood for the City" with the support and collaboration of Municipality of Modena.

It is an environmental and social project that aims at being a collection center for materials and objects still useful; a laboratory and a convenience store, where the materials and objects collected are made available to all to be transformed or exchanged; a place to carry out manual projects and realize ideas, open to all; a center for the promotion of cultural initiatives on reuse and respect for the environment; a place to give new life to objects.

Cesare Leonardi Architect Archive is a Cultural Association founded with the aim of preserving, protecting and disseminating the work of the Modena architect, making it accessible through the cataloguing of the materials in the archive and in the private library. It is located in the birthplace of the architect, where he is still living. Starting from the work of enhancing the archive, the Association is engaged in organizing exhibitions and seminars on architecture, the construction of the city and the landscape, design, photography and painting as fundamental fields of activity.

The most authoritative international publications dealt with the work of Leonardi above all in relation to single works, as in the case of the Centro Nuoto di Vignola and the design projects carried out between the 1960s and 1970s by the studio Leonardi – Stagi. It should be remembered that the Dondolo and Nastro chairs belong to the permanent collections of the most important museums in the world such as the MOMA in New York, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin. It is impossible to separate the design experiences from the theoretical models applied to parks, landscapes, cities; or the design productions of the 60s and 70s from the subsequent handicraft production – the "Solids" – furnishing elements obtained, in infinite variations, from a single material, the formwork for concrete; or photography, intended as a means of investigating architecture and landscapes, from the manual activity (The architecture of the trees, the unsurpassed tool of arboreal classification, and the Photographic Atlas of the Duomo of Modena); or even sculpture from painting, to which he devotes most of his time today.

Cesare Leonardi has interpreted the role of architect in contemporary culture in a unique and singular way. The commitment in the different fields is not only the result of an extraordinary ability and talent, but also the multifaceted expression of a single tireless design research and a constantly evolving practice, never intended as definitive and never fully satisfied.

In this sense his activity is a rare example of dedication to the profession: Leonardi has always worked tirelessly in his studio, giving priority to work on the project rather than the dissemination and publication of the same. The whole work, mostly unpublished, is contained in his archive: architectural drawings, models, design prototypes, sculptures, paintings, photographs, the vast personal library.

It is an archival and cultural heritage that needs to be protected, and possibly disseminated through concrete actions.

Massicciata indicates the old railway line that connected Modena to Reggio Emilia, now dismissed for some years, which concretely represented the division between the Craftsman Village and the close neighbourhood of the Madonnina. After the removal of the tracks, of this boundary line only the stones forming the embankment on which the railway line was placed have remained, and the inhabitants of the area have begun to use this passage as a link between the two districts, inventing pedestrian crossings and car cycle paths.

The redevelopment of this fascinating piece of the city has been at the center of a wide debate in the city in recent years, and indeed this place of transition represents a challenge for the transformation of this piece of the city, an opportunity to start designing public space again in a neighbourhood that is almost completely deprived of it.

A challenge that passes first and foremost through the re-appropriation of this long strip of city by the citizens, a space that from private progressively must become public. Some artistic and cultural actions have been staged on this abandoned embankment, in order to support the idea of ​​a new public space and to make citizens participate in the rediscovery of this evocative journey, showing at the same time how a single gesture can be amplified if repeated by many people.

The company is an artisan foundry active in this sector and on the market since 1947.

It is characterized by versatility in performing any type of fusion in terms of size and quantity. It is specialized in the production of gray cast iron, copper-gray cast iron and ductile iron. Starting from 1945 in Modena there is a fair number of small metalworking companies, founded mainly by former factory workers in the city and, in some cases, even by blacksmiths, tinsmiths, carpenters and even farmers. In those years the dismissals started in the major factories of the province hit thousands of workers, many of whom, possessing a high professional capacity, decide in their turn to undertake their own business. The Ponzoni foundry was created in this period and was one of the most active artisan production centres in the Craftsman Village: indeed, during the years of the "economic miracle" (1959-63) this new Modena engineering sector emerged in new productions, alongside those of agricultural machinery, cast iron castings and others that were already carried out previously.

In this way the young Modena engineering industry could quickly overcome the recession of 1964-1965 and in the second half of the sixties it experienced a new period of rapid expansion, characterized above all by a considerable increase in exports.