Live from Prato-town centers Macrolotto Zero, a neighborhood situated in the immediate outskirts of the medieval city center of Prato, Tuscany (Italy), a city of 194.000 inhabitants, out of which almost 22% are foreign-born. Macrolotto Zero is in many ways emblematic of the inextricable ties between industry and migration from China since the beginning of the 1990s. The heated discussion regarding this area of the city and the multiple representations in the mediatic space have made it a concrete metaphor of how cultural diversity has been struggling to find a rightful recognition as a positive externality of global interconnectedness and urban contemporaneity.

Urbancopyleft is an operative cluster that explores new approaches to urban care for multiethnic cities. We celebrate specificity along with diffusion, adaptation and recognisability. We investigate spontaneous forms of inhabitation and their physical effects on the city - learning how they trigger a sense of belonging, to counteract the symptoms of urban dissatisfaction. We aim to design peculiar trans-territorial artefacts that challenge authenticity as a social, commercial and iconographical construct.