Cultural institutions as agents of urban and community regeneration in the (post-)pandemic city. The case of the «Laboratorio Zen Insieme» in Palermo

Although all cities in the world have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, its impacts on the territories, yet to be understood, are unevenly distributed, revealing extremely varied imbalances depending on the places. However, it is clear that the virus and its variants have aggravated pre-existing socio-spatial inequalities, creating new ones and bringing attention back to those implications between space, planning, public health and citizenship that are at the origins of contemporary urbanism. In a reference framework in which the crisis is globalized but unequal and in the absence of a welfare system capable of responding to the urgencies of the most marginalized social contexts and groups, a response to the new social and individual needs has been offered by cultural institutions that play a role of territorial agency, often independently or in the absence of political institutions. Far from the idea of entertainment and divertissement, it is in fact increasingly clear how the practices of cultural innovation, experimenting with various forms of action and participation, can in some cases play a fundamental role in the processes of social cohesion and community building, representing an antidote to the worsening of the phenomena of marginalization and socio-spatial inequalities within cities and territories (Colantonio and Dixon, 2011; Olsen, 2018; Sacco and Blessi, 2009). In the current (post-) pandemic context and through the lens of a southern European perspective, the purpose of this article is to critically reflect about the role of culture as possible vehicle of urban and community regeneration. In particular, we will focus on the activities of the no profit organization «Laboratorio Zen Insieme» in ZEN2, one of the last large popular and peripheral neighborhoods built in Palermo at the end of 80s, in order to explore and understand how cultural practices work as agent of urban and social transformation capable of addressing emerging issues, especially in the pandemic scenario we are experiencing. Thecasestudy has been conducted through analysis of documents, participative observations (Honer and Hitzler, 2015), and qualitative in-depth interviews with key actors involved in the conception, organization and management of the activities carried out by Laboratorio Zen Insieme, with representatives of local institutions and non-formal conversations with participants of the workshops heldin the neighborhood. The experience we narrate finds that cultural practices have re-conceptualized their design and functions as strategies of urban and community regeneration and at the same time have contributed to answer to emergent issues in developing proximity and local based strategies, facing up to problems inherent civil rights, educationalpoverty, socio-spatial justice and have changed the image and identity of urban places they inhabit.In this sense, the research provides a framework for development of strategies and legitimization for cultural practices and a point of discussionabouttheirrolein urban development.