Volunteers Village
Lamole, Italy
2018
The Oslo School of Architecture and Design
Embedded Architectures Studio
This project-based studio offers practice-oriented design assignments focused on designing architectures specific to landscape, climate, terrain, and land use. This implies architectures that are closely embedded into their context. We seek to address locally particular conditions and circumstances and societal and environmental changes requiring architectural designs beyond current standard practice.
A village is a clustered human settlement or community; the dwellings of a village are relatively close to one another, not scattered broadly over the landscape. A ghost town is an abandoned village, town, or city, usually containing substantial visible remains. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, prolonged droughts, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, pollution, or nuclear disasters. The term can sometimes refer to cities, towns, and neighborhoods that are still populated but significantly less so than in years past; for example, those affected by high levels of unemployment and dereliction.
There are a few fundamental issues when designing in a small Italian town. First, people are moving away from them, leading to the “no one to take care of the area” problem. Secondly, there is no workforce to keep the area alive because of the aging society - this results in dying traditions.
The volunteering concept fits the best as a solution to those problems. To understand it, we must consider two definitions: ‘volunteer’ and ‘ecotourism,’ which are strongly connected. ‘As a volunteer, you live and work side by side to exchange knowledge, information, skills, and stories that develop meaningful common bonds with the global community.’ Therefore, the volunteering concept is highly beneficial for both sides: a local community and a volunteer, especially for local employment, knowledge sharing, and the international environment.
On a bigger scale, the whole country, there are only a few more effective volunteer programs supervised by volunteer organizations – in Naples and Rome. In the Tuscan area, there are only private offers like English lessons or gardening Tuscany, as much as the rest of Italy, has a fundamental problem with ghost towns. The example is extreme because a ghost town is an abandoned place with no inhabitants, but, in my opinion, a place like Lamole needs to start solving all of its problems when it’s not too late.
My idea of restoring Tuscany is based in Lamole. The place has it all to become a perfect volunteer destination – from an engaging local community to a solid architectural tradition.
