Cecco Rivolta is a house on the hills up to Rifredi that was occupied in year 2000 mostly for residential use, but since the beginning it has hosted also collective spaces and the hacklab / indymedia Italy node. Later it started a project of social gardening with the neighbours and a kindergarten in the nature. Using this house as a headquarter, the collective has been promoting important initiatives and represented an essential node in the network “Odissey for Space” that in the early 2000s reclaimed though several exemplar direct actions space for social use in the city of Florence.
During the last few years the experience has undergone a process of legitimisation through a program funded by the Tuscan Region for the recovery through self-construction of social housing. The inhabitants constituted the association Co-Habitat, designed the regeneration project with the support of some public funding and were assigned the building for collective housing with a 30 years contract. The inhabitants did most of the renovation work during what is currently considered a pilot experience of regeneration of housing through self construction, with the Tuscan regional regulation becoming a reference for similar processes in Italy.
Tesserae’s researchers have followed the story of Cecco Rivolta since its beginning and presented it as an exemplary case study in the study on Self Recovery of Common Goods for Civic e-State – URBACT
Find here the regeneration process condensed in one infographic (in Italian)
Here a booklet about the experience (in Italian)
