Stato di attuazione del Programma Dateci Spazio: il confronto tra i casi di Bologna, Roma e Bari

Providing accessible, inclusive, and safe environments constitutes a fundamental prerequisite for fostering children and adolescents’ holistic development, physical, cognitive, emotional, and social. The design of an innovative playground, wherein users are free to choose whether to engage alone or with others, in structured or unstructured, competitive or collaborative modalities, entails a rigorous needs-based analysis of potential beneficiaries. In this regard, adopting design principles grounded in Universal Design, Community Engagement, and environmental sensitivity represents a strategic approach to align with national and European funding frameworks supporting the implementation of inclusive playgrounds. Within this policy context, the experimental programme Datecispazio, with a financial endowment of 5,000,000.00 euros, promotes the realisation of inclusive playgrounds characterised by innovation. The eleven projects selected for funding must address multidimensional criteria, including social accessibility, user safety, and the technical and performance quality of materials employed. Accordingly, an ex-ante multi-criteria evaluation methodology was applied to support the comparative analysis of proposals. Despite its partially reductionist nature, this approach enables a systematic and integrated appraisal of alternatives in response to a multifaceted decision-making landscape. To provide a preliminary assessment of implementation progress, this contribution examines three case studies: Giardino dei Pioppi (Bologna), the inclusive park Parco Modesto di Veglia (Roma), and Parcobaleno (Bari). Specifically, it presents a comparative analysis of the projects’ advancement by integrating ex-post output evaluations. This juxtaposition of ex-ante and operational phase performances, measured against consistent evaluative criteria, allows for identifying deviations between planned and actual outcomes, thereby informing future practices.