Throughout Europe, civic spaces serve as vital arenas for democratic life… These are the places, the platforms, the events, where individuals and communities converge to engage, organise, innovate, express dissent, and collectively envision the future. These spaces are not fixed; they transform over time, thriving in some contexts while facing constraints from political, social, or economic pressures in others.
Capturing their dynamics demands more than isolated case studies or static snapshots; it calls for a framework that reflects their complexity, interconnectedness, and continual evolution.
The B.RIGHT SPACES CARTOGRAPHY responds to this need, offering a living, interactive, and accessible map that charts these spaces as a shared landscape of civic activity, fostering understanding, visibility, and dialogue across Europe’s diverse communities.
The Portineria di comunità is a social space that mainly offers community services, allocated inside an old newsstand. It is located in the working-class neighborhood of Porta Palazzo. Although it is part of the city’s historic center, the neighborhood has historically been one of the districts that welcomed immigrants from Southern Italy throughout the twentieth century and currently hosts a large number of citizens of foreign origin.
Comala is a very active multipurpose cultural space and youth gathering place in Turin, located in the area of the former La Marmora Barracks in the former working-class district of San Paolo. This area was repurposed in the 1990s and became home to the Polytechnic University of Turin, contributing to the change in the neighborhood’s social structure.
The Bus de l’Initiative was launched by the association CREATIVE in 2011 in Garges-lès-Gonesse, to facilitate access to entrepreneurship, employment and training for residents of priority neighbourhoods in the Roissy Pays de France urban area.
POLEIS – the Polo Civico Esquilino (Esquilino Civic Hub) represents an innovative governance model for metropolitan social cohesion. Established in 2024 in a socially marginalised yet central district characterised by high ethnic diversity, the Hub channels strong community traditions of solidarity and mutualism into structured civic action.