FONDAZIONE DELLA COMUNITA DI MIRAFIORI ENTE FILANTROPICO E.T.S.

Their core work

Fondazione della Comunità di Mirafiori is a community foundation rooted in the Mirafiori district of Turin — historically home to major Fiat industrial plants and now a testbed for post-industrial urban transformation. Their core work involves mobilizing local communities to reclaim degraded urban spaces through productive green infrastructure: urban gardens, forests, commons, and regenerated soils. They bring to EU research consortia what laboratories cannot: a real urban neighborhood, active citizen networks, and the institutional capacity to run participatory co-production processes on the ground. In research terms, they function as a living lab — a place where scientific concepts meet social reality and are tested with actual residents.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their first project (proGIreg, 2018) was grounded in physical and social transformation of post-industrial land — soil, trees, community ownership, and bottom-up regeneration. By their second project (FUSILLI, 2021), the language shifted almost entirely toward governance, policy, and systemic change: food planning, knowledge sharing between cities, policy maker engagement, and Food 2030 frameworks. The trajectory is a clear move from site-level hands-on regeneration toward city-scale food system policy influence — from doing to shaping how cities decide.

They are moving from ground-level community intervention toward multi-city policy influence, which suggests future projects are likely to involve urban food governance, Food 2030 implementation frameworks, or participatory city planning rather than purely site-level greening work.

How they like to work

They participate exclusively as consortium members — never as coordinator — which is consistent with a community foundation whose value lies in local implementation capacity and citizen engagement rather than technical project management. Despite only two projects, they have engaged with 76 unique partners across 17 countries, indicating they join large, multi-city Innovation Action consortia where their role is to provide a real urban context for testing and demonstration. This profile suggests a partner that contributes authenticity and community access rather than technical outputs, making them most useful in consortia that need grounded real-world sites.

With 76 unique partners across 17 countries from just two projects, their network is disproportionately broad for a small community NGO — a reflection of the large multi-city consortia that characterize European Innovation Actions on urban sustainability. Their connections are geographically distributed across Europe, with proGIreg notably involving eastern European cities.

What sets them apart

Fondazione Mirafiori occupies a rare position: a community institution physically embedded in one of Europe's most recognizable post-industrial urban landscapes, giving them genuine, non-simulated credentials in urban regeneration that purely academic or technical partners cannot replicate. They bring actual land, actual residents, and actual governance structures to consortia — not case studies or desk research. For any Innovation Action requiring a socially complex urban living lab in a southern European post-industrial city, they are a credible and ready host site with a track record of citizen co-production.

Highlights from their portfolio

• proGIreg
  Their largest project (EUR 281,499, five-year duration) and the clearest expression of their core identity — a multi-city Innovation Action using Turin's post-industrial Mirafiori district as a living lab for productive green infrastructure and community-led soil regeneration.
• FUSILLI
  Represents a thematic expansion into urban food system governance and the Food 2030 policy agenda, demonstrating their ability to move from physical regeneration into systemic city-level food planning — a strategically valuable evolution for EU green deal alignment.