A community of 34,000 people, including city authorities and residents, come together to help the municipality recover and develop – both during and in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic.
CONFRONTING CHANGE
Formigine 2020 is a project designed to offer new opportunities and strategies for lifestyle changes in response to the COVID-19 health emergency. In the wake of the crisis, the Formigine citizen services were urgently redesigned to meet the need for new organisational methods. The municipality developed this project to actively involve citizens and help achieve the sustainability objectives of the United Nations' Agenda 2030. Since the rules and controls of public authorities were not sufficient to achieve the proposed common objectives alone, citizens became the primary protagonists in this new phase. Formigine 2020 has been widely disseminated in the public and has received contributions and proposals from residents. Development, solidarity, and security are the three key principles of the programme.
PUBLIC SERVICE DURING THE PANDEMIC
The Municipality of Formigine took many steps to deal with the emergency phase of the pandemic, including strengthening online services through the Formigine Smart Community framework, setting up phone services for elderly residents (Formigine Ti Chiama), providing psychological assistance with the help of voluntary psychologists (Formigine Ti Ascolta), as well as launching a local e-commerce platform to support businesses in the area. The development of digital services has been crucial to increasing and improving communication with citizens. It marks a new era in the field of public service provision.
THE VALUE OF SOLIDARITY
Never have the participation, responsibility, sharing, and co-planning of an entire community of 34,000 inhabitants been so integral to finding new ways of development and gradual recovery of social, productive, and associative normality. In addition to the measures adopted by the government, various activities have been put in place to create sustainable improvements for citizens. The staff, together with a group of volunteers, gave vouchers to families, coordinated the deliveries of food, medicine, and meals, and created a solidarity fund for people with economic difficulties. The project also made it possible to reactivate two important public works (reconstruction of the main square of the village and construction of the new ring road) as rapidly as possible. This created work for local companies, who had been unable to work for several weeks, and was facilitated by a dramatic drop in road traffic in the historic centre.
It is absolutely necessary to be proactive in times of crisis, in order to grasp those aspects of the restructuring of a previous system that can be governed to build a new system, new opportunities and be protagonists of change without suffering only the negative consequences that the pandemic of Covid-19 will bring with it. We therefore want to develop a strategy for the radical change of the lifestyles that will be proposed to us. Development, solidarity, security are three key principles on which we intend to reprogram: at the center of the works there will be the theme of equity, attention to fragility and to old and new poverty, a vision of health protection that is not limited only to the treatment and prevention of diseases.
