About us

Torino Stratosferica is a city-imaging project: a collective laboratory that wants to experience the creative power of urban imagination and the impact of visionary ideas on the city.

If we could change Turin, what would we do?

The activity of Torino Stratosferica revolves around a question that we ask ourselves less and less: what would we want our city to be like in the future? The whole experiment wants to feed the reflection on an ideal Turin and build original, courageous, contemporary visions – some feasible, others purely utopian – for the places, the inhabitants, the activities and services, the culture, the general perception of the city.

In other words, Torino Stratosferica wants to imagine a Turin at its best. Without constraints, preconceptions, and feasibility calculations. It is a project born with a generous and far-sighted spirit, sometimes even provocative. To affirm the importance of projecting forward and aiming high, contributing to a positive (and shared) narrative about the city.

Torinostratosferica is a Turin at its best, at its most beautiful in the physical space and values it expresses, imagined starting from our desires.

Whose wishes? Of those who take on the commitment and responsibility to do so, with the idea that “the city belongs to those who take that responsibility“, those who act independently and have the intention of creating connections between the best energies from various fields.

In addition to passion, the project starts from the conviction that city imaging is a right and a duty of the most dynamic and creative people at a time when cities are the engines of development and global economic and cultural competition. Not only: Torino Stratosferica believes that the way in which the city is told has a direct influence on its general perception.

One of the strongest inspirations of the project is the phrase “the city is a mental weapon” by Julian Beinart, Kevin Lynch’s successor during the Theory of City Form at MIT, which explains well the power of imagination in public discourse.

The aims of the association.

Following the first activities, Torino Stratosferica was formally established as a non-profit cultural association starting from 2016. The general objective of the association’s statute is precisely to promote city imaging, thus responding to a perceived lack.

Today Torino Stratosferica is an open container for visionaries, an experimental and research environment, a collector and generator of ideas: a thought that the city desperately needs.

True to its original vocation, the whole activity is based on the relationship with the most active and virtuous people and organisations of the territory at different levels: independent creators and publishers, designers, researchers, professionals, studios, associations and festivals, public and private bodies, entrepreneurs and innovators – with the positive effect of bringing out and strengthening these informal networks. The Torino Stratosferica method is by definition experimental, based on the encounter between disciplines, and consists of collective workshops with exponents of different contemporary cultures, according to phases of analysis and brainstorming oriented to project themselves beyond the existing. The reflections which animate the project are naturally linked to architecture, urban design (project, landscape, environment) and all the decisive components for the quality of urban life: culture, widespread creativity, enterprise, mobility, technology, innovation. At the same time Torinostratosferica is also a communication and branding project, in which copywriting – in the creation of names, slogans and claims – plays a fundamental role.

All the meetings are followed by a phase of selection and editing of the material that emerged, in view of the public return of the proposals, visions, quips and statements that form the main contents of Torino Stratosferica – constantly updated and available online in Italian and English (Torinostratosferica is necessarily a bilingual Turin). The association aims at reaching different dimensions.

• Torinostratosferica as a place. A permanent laboratory, open to collaboration with players from different walks of life, such as the world of school or university education. A platform in relation not only with the local creative and cultural industry, but with similar realities at European and international level.
• Torino Stratosferica as a vision. A passionate and collective contribution to the reflection on the city, its development, its cultural avant-garde. An invitation to share the values and ideas that emerged from the meetings, to be developed in the different contexts in which the future of the city is built.
• Torino Stratosferica as a brand. A “brand” with a defined image and a strong verbal identity – an innovative city-branding experiment – albeit on an imaginary place. A project that first and foremost thrives on communication with the desire to involve and broaden its audience.