“Habitandando”: building bridges between Italy and Colombia
To inhabit a place in just two weeks, a place that is geographically and culturally far away from your home. This was the challenge of Habitandando: to build new bridges between, and on the other hand, a young and contrasted people, whose richness and inequalities are reflected also in its territory – made of megalopolises and immense regions. However, how do you build a bridge between Italy and Colombia in just fifteen days? How can you get to inhabit a place, to become familiar with it as if it were your home? Travel as a method therefore: to get to know a place by experiencing it, using as a testing ground for generating new and challenging ideas. And even this year, the experiences were the most diverse: crossing Central Italy by car, to distinguish how landscapes change from the coast to the mountains; living at Piazza del Campo in Siena, to observe how a public space has been functioning perfectly for centuries; walking for many hours around the centre of Rome, to distinguish each epoch in the thousand layers composing the city; exploring Tor Bella Monaca, a neighbourhood in the Roman periphery where failed architecture projects add up to a fragile social condition. 
The travel is the method and the territory is the classroom. Each stage of the travel was devoted to a specific issue: for example, the Tuscany countryside explains territory and landscape, the Amalfi Coast shows both the antique and the modern, the towns hit by earthquakes in Central Italy show the relationship between memory and catastrophe. Having the territory as classroom allows first-hand observation of each issue, but is it’s not simply a way of going beyond the simplistic explanations by tourist guides and school textbooks. Rather, it is an occasion to incrementally build by yourself the knowledge on a given place. In fact, the participants were asked to focus on each place that they visited by writing pieces for different audiences, taking photographs with different communicative aims, developing their own explanations on specific settings and phenomena. Day by day, the first ingenuous reactions leave space to deeper reasonings. Maybe Tor Bella Monaca, the neighbourhood in the Roman periphery, provides the most interesting example: the initial skepticism (“Is this a poor and degraded neighbourhood? If only all poor places in Colombia were like this!”) is replaced by all the new ideas that it can generate. The participants’ disorientated looks of the first days were gradually replaced by more relaxed ones, once a relationship was established with the visited places and also the challenges facing them. The tension between memory and innovation were the guiding thread behind this year’s initiative, and this emerged also from the comments made at the end of the travel. For a Colombian student, Italy carries with her centuries of history but does not know how to manage such heritage, does not understand how nowadays heritage can interact with the demands of the habitat. These reflections were developed in the last days of the travel, spent in Montefalcone Appennino, It was the beginning of a think-tank which can yield varying results, but which already demonstrates what can be achieved through a new way of studying the habitat, by going out of the classrooms into the territory, inhabiting it on the move so to speak: to inhabit a place is not just to know it, but also to start imagining it differently from what it is right now. Compiled by Dialogue in Architecture
They were from a variety of countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Uganda, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Burkina-Faso, Madagascar, Benin and Holland. The fifty five entrepreneurs wanted to put their 30 innovative entrepreneurial projects to the test, with an international force of “mentors” (seven African, five European and one South American). The first African StartUp Lab 2017 was held last June, in the heart of the African forest in Fontem, Cameroon. It consisted of five days of learning how to practice the values of the 
The workshop began with Anouk Grevin, French member of the faculty of the Polytech University of Nantes, and of the Economy and Management course at Sophia University Institute, who presented the fundamental values of the Economy of Communion. Argentinean, Forencia Locascio, expert in social communication, explained the “elevator pitch” that helps to present one’s own entrepreneurial approach to any possible client or investor, in a clear and succinct manner, and in a shor time. French entrepreneur, Pierre Chevalier, presented a workshop on innovative ideas and project analysis, as well as the resources required. The image of an iceberg is perhaps the best way to explain all the effort, work and sacrifice that lies hidden beneath the surface of any successful entrepreneurial project. 
Many people have continued to work after the earthquake in central Italy last year, standing by those who were affected by those who were so awfully affected by that tragedy. It was such a vast catastrophe that it tested not only the physical infrastructure, but also the very social fabric and personal resistance of an entire generation of families. The Focolare Movement has a stable organism that works in collaboration with two associations: United World Project and New Families Association, but also other groups (AIPEC, B&F Foundation, Planetary Embrace, Dialogue in Architecture and local Focolare communities in Italy). They provide expertise in channelling the aid more effectively. “Our first objective was to come up with a way of linking and knowing the different projects so that we could keep awareness high and not forget…” says Cesare Borin from the Focolare’s Emergency Aid project. The financial aid that began to arrive immediately is only one part of many other forms of aid that have solidified the assistance, which involves many people from the Movement in being close to the people who have lost everything in this dramatic event.” The project is comprised of two complimentary efforts: 
“RImPRESA Businesses” which consists in providing raw materials, machinery and small infrastructure to businesses and, where possible, to strengthen virtuous and ethical business processes and practices that allow for pairing with other businesses on a national level. This effort has focused on 60 small businesses in the four regions that were hit, and they are recently finishing the furnishing of 25 agricultural and handicraft businesses with equipment. The second activity: “RImPRESA GAS” promotes the purchase of products from businesses affected by the earthquake, through the creation of the Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale (GAS) that supports local tourism. Currently, there are 13 agribusinesses with a total of 90 enrolments with a total of 17,000 euros in orders. The response to the people in need was quick, like that for several families from Amatrice that had asked for a sheet metal container. In March they received 10 containers for themselves and many other families of Amatrice and the surrounding areas, at a total cost of 19,000 euros. A summer camp is being set up for the end of August in collaboration with the Italian Caritas, which will be based at Torrita di Amatrice. Activities will continue during the months of July and August with plans for a summer children’s community centre, recreational activities for teenagers from the area, and for the elderly in rehabilitation centres in Borbona. Borin concludes: “The people from these beautiful regions never ask us to rebuild their homes, but they do strongly ask that we don’t leave them all alone! Amongst the lessons learned has been the importance of never marginalising or suffocating the contribution from civil society. Alongside the competent intervention of these state agencies, we need a more vast and programmatic inclusion of social agencies and groups precisely because of their ability to make the work of institutions more efficacious also in restarting the process of production.” Contacts: emergenzaterremoto.italia@focolare.org
“Re”-turn, “Re”-cognize, “Re”-view, “Re”-embrace, “Re”-member. Going back to Ostiense, I have butterflies in my stomach. I look for my friends in desperation. These past months I left Rome behind with its great beauty (the kind around the train stations, that is). To console me, some have used reassuring expressions like “never mind, you’ll find the poor, the least among us, the homeless, wherever you go.”But I don’t love the poor or the least. I love Samir, Fulvio, Gian Paolo, Gabriele, Jazmin… Ladies and gentlemen, this is called friendship. Claudio treats me with the tenderness of a whisper, although he has a past that is more rough, harsh and violent than anyone. When I was an ocean away, I realized that friendship had changed him, but above all it had changed me. I talk, I listen, I sit down, and I feel truly at home. This sense of “re”-entry and “re”-turn is a bit of a taste of what they call heaven… “re”-acquired after it had been lost. I “re”-listen to their stories and absurdities. Inside myself these past months, I found some pressing questions about the sense of life paths, the paradox of decisions, disrupted plans, and trepidation about my own mission. I tend to get lost in these pretentions, but I see that my friends do not have a path, mission, choices nor even know how to tell their stories. I had become lost in all these middle-class demands, but here and now, I stop getting lost. These are my friends, and it wouldn’t be right to have something for myself that they cannot have. Ladies and gentlemen, this is friendship. As I come out of myself, out of my will, my demands, I continually ask – for them, for me – for the thread… the thread that connects everything under heaven, our stories and all the stories, in a single plan. I ask for it humbly. I “re”-embrace myself, greet myself with wet eyes and say, “Hi Paula, welcome back!”
I had only been married a short while when my husband fell gravely ill. At the same time I discovered I was pregnant.” This is how one Nigerian woman’s story begins. Far from her own family and alone, she asked her husband’s family for help, but only found closed doors. “We lived through hell,” she said. Fortunately other doors opened soon after: those of Casa Alba. And for her, like many other young women in difficulty, a new day began. “I don’t know how I would have survived otherwise. Now, thanks to God, things have gotten better.” Casa Alba is one of the