Mare libero
Naples
INTRO
The Naples ULL grew as a space where people with different backgrounds could meet, learn from one another, and explore new ways of working together. Students, collectives, and local actors gathered around a shared curiosity for how a coastline can be lived as a common good, turning each session into a chance to exchange ideas and experiment with collaborative methods. What formed was a temporary community shaped by dialogue, creativity, and a growing sense of collective purpose.
STEP 0
Setting the scope
The Naples Living Lab was born from the desire to reconnect the city with its sea, today marked by decades of uncontrolled expansion, abandoned industries, and increasingly privatized access. We want to create a space where citizens, students, activists, and researchers can come together to imagine and test new ways of living the coastline, from Bagnoli to San Giovanni a Teduccio.
Our mission is simple yet ambitious: to give the sea back to the people, turning it from a barrier into a commons. To achieve this, we combine participatory processes, collective actions, and creative tools that bridge research and grassroots practices. Our values are rooted in the right to the city, the care of everyday spaces, frugality as a resource (doing more with what we already have), and mutual learning between research, civic, public institutions, and business.
The challenges are many: overcoming physical and symbolic barriers that exclude people from the sea, making visible stories and struggles for access, and building sustainable, shared solutions. We aim to produce concrete outcomes: collaborative maps of sea access points, a manifesto of shared values, open events for discussion and co-design, and public actions that bring the issue into the urban spotlight. Above all, we want the process to be fun, inclusive, and context-driven, because we believe urban change grows out of collective energy, relationships, and the joy of doing things together.
photo_camera LINKEDIN photo_camera INSTAGRAM DIARC photo_camera INSTAGRAM CNR photo_camera INSTAGRAM LIDO POLA photo_camera INSTAGRAM MARE LIBERO
STEP 1
Theme Choice
Picking what matters most
The Naples Living Lab began with a simple yet profound question: how can we reconnect the city with its sea? Along the coastline from Bagnoli to San Giovanni a Teduccio, decades of industrial development, privatisation, and restricted access have turned what should be common, open spaces into fragmented and often inaccessible areas. Our ULL emerged as a response to this long-standing divide, aligning with civic mobilisations such as Mare Libero, Pulito e Gratuito, which reclaim the sea as a collective right.
To identify our theme, we launched a series of weekly workshops, masterclasses, and open conversations involving researchers from CNR-IRISS and DiARC, students from multiple disciplines, activists from Mare Libero and the Lido Pola Urban Common, and representatives of the Municipality. These meetings became a shared learning arena where personal stories, legal struggles, historical knowledge, and everyday experiences were brought together.
Using collaborative tools—brainstorming, causal mapping, visual classification, stakeholder mapping—and guided by the Value-Focused Thinking method, we progressed through four key steps: Shared Values, Preliminary Objectives, Common Problems, and Stakeholder Mapping. This process revealed a strong common ground rooted in the right to the city, environmental justice, care, mutualism, frugality, everyday life, and the plurality of coastal territories.
A clear theme emerged: recognising and reclaiming Naples’ sea as a commons—a right that must be defended, practiced, and made genuinely accessible. This first step culminated in the PS-U-GO Naples Manifesto, which now guides the entire Urban Living Lab. More than a methodological phase, Theme Choice helped form a temporary community capable of imagining new ways to reconnect Naples with its sea.
Step 2 Exploration
Discovering places, stories, and challenges
Once the groups formed, it was time to step outside and dig in. Exploration meant getting close to the people, places, and stories that make the Madonie what they are and understanding the challenges hidden beneath the surface.
The Exploration phase was when the ideas and values defined in the Living Lab Manifesto took shape on the ground. With the “Era di Maggio” campaign (May–June 2025), the group set out to map the accessibility, usability, and overall enjoyment of Naples’s liminal coastal areas—those thresholds between city and sea where rights, landscapes, and everyday practices intersect.
Guided by four key concepts—liminal areas, accessibility, usability, and enjoyment—participants followed a shared workflow using collaborative and GIS-oriented tools. They first co-built a preliminary map on Google My Maps, identifying sea access points, coastal paths, and liminal zones.
Field explorations with Mare Libero Napoli across Bagnoli, Posillipo, City Centre, and San Giovanni a Teduccio allowed the group to collect geolocated data through Epicollect5, documenting barriers, environmental conditions, and the real state of each coastal segment. Back in the lab, the team collaboratively reviewed and enriched the dataset and used MIRO to organise evidence and classify issues and opportunities.
The main outcome is a collaborative map, an open and evolving layer that makes visible access points, routes, and liminal areas, enriched with photos and institutional data such as ARPAC water quality. It offers a clear picture of physical, legal, and environmental constraints affecting the collective right to the sea. From this dataset, the group built a Territorial Information System (TIS) organised around two units—Access Points and Liminal Areas—each described through structured dimensions (management, morphology, environmental quality). This system provides a scalable, comparable knowledge base to support future monitoring, shared governance tools, and collective action for coastal commons.
STEP 3
Experimentation and Co-Creation
Trying things out and testing ideas built together with local communities
The Experimentation and Co-Creation phase marked a key moment in the evolution of the PS-U-GO ULL Naples. After mapping the coastline and building a shared knowledge base, the group began transforming these insights into operational tools capable of informing public policies and civic practices around the collective right to the sea. In this phase, the Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) approach evolved into a participatory framework combining co-design, reflection, and iterative feedback. Participants revisited the objectives and critical issues identified earlier, testing emerging ideas and refining them through cycles of discussion and adaptation. Evaluation—traditionally a technical step—became a shared learning process.
At the core of this phase was the experimentation of a collaborative evaluation model based on Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), applied to the concept of enjoyability of coastal liminal areas. Using the Territorial Information System (TIS) developed during the Exploration phase as a common data framework, actors from the quadruple helix—public institutions, researchers and students, active citizens, and enterprise—took part in a participatory weighting exercise.
During the workshop, they collectively assigned a relative weight to each Criterion of the TIS according to its impact on the enjoyability of liminal areas, defining how strongly each dimension influences accessibility and usability along the Neapolitan coastline. The process was structured with the Best Worst Method (BWM), enabling participants to compare priorities, negotiate differences, and build a shared hierarchy of the most relevant factors shaping the coastal commons.
Overall, this phase represented a passage from shared understanding to collective decision-making, strengthening the role of territorial action research and highlighting the university’s public mission in co-producing urban policies oriented toward the commons.
STEP 4
Urban Showcase
Bringing it all to the city
The Neapolitan Urban Showcase included presentation and invited lectures at national and international conferences and events (among which ICCSA, SIU, INU, AESOP), participation at national workshop and public events, and it is culminated in the Local Multiplier Event “Politics of Hope for the Enjoiability of the Sea” organised by the CNR-IRISS jointly with the AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures on 6-7 November 2025. This latter marked the moment when the Living Lab properly opened its work to the wider public.
The first day combined presentations, discussions, and visual storytelling to share the outcomes of the process. After an introduction to the ULL and to the mapping of coastal enjoyability, the group presented the main findings of the exploration and experimentation phases. A central moment was the screening of a short documentary retracing the entire journey of the ULL — from the first reflections of the Theme Choice phase to the collaborative mapping, experimentation activities, and early co-creation efforts. It gives voice to students, researchers, and coastal users while also highlighting the crucial contribution of the civic movement advocating for free and clean access to the sea.
Through interviews, on-site footage, collective actions, and scenes from the “Era di Maggio” explorations, the documentary reveals not only spatial conditions but also the emotions, efforts, and everyday practices that sustain the idea of the sea as a commons. The agenda included also a keynote speech of Prof. Sophie Watson from Open University London that put on the table critical reflections on the cultural importance of water in urban life. Then a roundtable brought together different perspectives from research, civic initiatives, public institutions, and the third sector.
The discussion centred on governance challenges, collective rights, and the potential of imagining the coastline as shared urban heritage. An accompanying exhibition displayed maps, photographs, and visual materials created during the ULL. The second day featured a mobile workshop along the Posillipo coast led by members of Mare Libero Napoli Committee, allowing participants to directly experience the spaces object of the PS-U-GO Urban Living Lab, from the Lungomare Liberato to the Donn’Anna Beach and Le Monache Bay.
Together, the two-day showcase embodied the project’s spirit of mutual learning and collective imagination, reaffirming that reclaiming the sea as a commons is both a civic responsibility and a cultural act.
Naples event gallery
User led video stories
Vignettes from Sf:ius (opens in a new tab)
Along the coastline of Bagnoli and Pozzuoli, the dark volcanic sand shimmers against the blue sea. Its colour reflects the region’s geology: Vesuvius, the Phlegraean Fields, and the bradyseism that slowly raises and lowers the ground. These tremors have damaged homes, displaced hundreds of households, and shut down Villa Medusa, a volunteer community centre that once offered vital social and health services. As a local expert explains, the communities today call not only for emergency response and catastrophe management policies, but for long-term community resilience.
We discuss it with him, standing on a pier extending impossibly far into the bay of Pozzuoli. The public promenade, formerly an industrial pier, is a good vantage point in our urban explorations. Students and researchers look around: behind them, the remains of Bagnoli’s heavy industry sit partly hidden under a green canopy; the wide stretch of open land toward the sea is not a park but an industrial brownfield slowly reclaimed by vegetation. Participants sketch the landscape, photograph the remnants, and record the local expert’s insights.
Earlier, on Bagnoli’s small public beach, a resident cleaning trash by hand had complained that “nobody takes care of it.” The contrast between community efforts and large-scale industrial pollution becomes clear. Access to the sea follows this same unevenness: the nearby circolo, a former workers’ club, is more open than other — open to students, people with disabilities, retirees—but many private seaside clubs restrict entry to those who can afford it.
The walk to Lido Pola, a former restaurant, now a self-managed cultural and social space, cuts through a stark landscape. High concrete walls, abandoned pipelines, and the constant rush of traffic create a disorienting corridor. One local describes it as “an urban industrial desert.” Although the neighbourhood is coastal, the sea feels distant—unseen and unheard—its presence obscured by decades of industrial activity and fragmented urban planning. The struggle for a free access to a clean sea becomes palpable when, finally exiting the corridor and exploring the surroundings of Lido Pola, our exploration is limited with locked gates and fences.
STEP 5
Evaluation
Looking back to move forward
Evaluation in the PS-U-GO Naples ULL was not conceived as a final step but as a continuous, iterative practice running throughout the entire process. Participants were invited to reflect both before and after the Theme Choice phase and again before and after the Exploration phase, allowing the group to track how knowledge, expectations, and perceptions evolved over time. This pre- and post-assessment helped identify shifts in understanding of urban commons, participatory methods, and the political and environmental dimensions of coastal accessibility.
Equally important were the many feedback moments embedded in the Living Lab itself. Every meeting with the quadruple helix actors—research, civic movements, institutions, and the third sector—functioned as an open exchange. In workshops, plenary sessions, and informal discussions, the group regularly presented ongoing work and received comments, concerns, and new perspectives that reshaped the process. These interactions brought to light diverse needs and priorities, confirming the value of dialogue in navigating contested coastal issues.
Participants reported significant growth in both technical and transversal skills: from mapping, PGIS tools, and collaborative evaluation methods to active listening, negotiation, and the ability to work across disciplines and experiences. Many valued the opportunity to learn directly from civic actors engaged in defending the right to the sea, recognising how these voices grounded the learning in everyday urban realities.
Overall, evaluation served as a collective learning mechanism, reinforcing the Living Lab’s capacity to adapt, improve, and remain responsive. It demonstrated that co-producing knowledge requires not only methods and data but also reflection, openness, and the willingness to let feedback actively shape the path forward.
Psugo Naples Credits
Technical Organizing Committee
Stefania Ragozino
Coordinator and Senior Researcher at CNR-IRISS, Urban Planner
Valeria Catanese
Communication Responsible at CNR-IRISS
Stefano Cuntò
Postdoctoral Researcher at DiArc in Appraisal and Evaluation
Lorenzo Lodato
Activist and Researcher, Sociologist
Federica Morra
Researcher, Urban Planner
Scientific Committee
Stefania Ragozino
Coordinator and Senior Researcher at CNR-IRISS, Urban Planner
Maria Cerreta
Full Professor at DiArc in Appraisal and Evaluation
Gabriella Esposito De Vita
Research Director at CNR-IRISS, Urban Planner
Paolo Landri
Research Director and Acting Director of CNR-IRISS, Sociologist
Stefania Oppido
Senior Technologist at CNR-IRISS, Architectural Technologist
Maria Patrizia Vittoria
Senior Researcher at CNR-IRISS, Economist
Labor-actors
Gianmarco Apuleo
Legal Counsel & OIV for private companies and public administrations
Fabrizia Cesarano
Research Fellow at Scuola Superiore Meridionale; Honorary Fellow at the University of Liverpool; Jurist and Artist
Sofia De Petrillo
Architecture Student at DiArc – University Federico II Naples
Domenico S. Galluccio
Activist and Sociology Student at DiSS – University Federico II Naples
Mario Lavanga
Urban Planning Student at DiArc – University Federico II Naples
Giorgia Manfredonia
Research Fellow in Political Science at L’Orientale
Antonio Race
Civil Service Volunteer, Cultural and International Studies
Claudia Ruocco
Architecture Student at DiArc – University Federico II Naples
Michela Russo
Architecture Student at DiArc – University Federico II Naples
Andrea Simone
Researcher, Urban Planner