##Florence - a bit of background
Florence is probably one of the most famous tourist attractions in Italy, and it’s continuously visited by tourists from all over the world.
Beside its wonderful historical centre, however, the city itself is facing many issues mainly related to its current development model and its economic fabric.
As the city itself lies in a relatively small area surrounded by hills and mountains, there is little to no space for further developing the infrastructures and services needed to withstand the growing amount of activities going on in the area, from the industrial ones (mainly located in the so-called Piana, a 25kms long, narrow plain strip spanning from Florence to Pistoia) to the more service-related ones, such as the steadily-growing touristic sector focused around Florence.
The peculiar geographic and economical traits of the city and of its suburbs pose major issues to its future development. Those issues become even bigger when framed them from a sustainability and circularity perspective.
##The problem(s)
The first problem is more a methodological one, and it rises from the difficulties we have encountered during the OSCEdays’ preparatory phase.
While addressing potential sponsors and event’s stakeholders we have realized that there was very little familiarity with the concept of Circular Economy, let alone Open Source applied to Circular Economy. Therefore, we believe that the first problem we have to face has to do with the dissemination of these concepts. Luckily, we also believe that organizing for the first time the OSCEdays 2016 event in Florence for could be at least a part of the solution to this problem!
Beside this broader, methodological issue, we tried to identify three main areas in which we believe open source and circular economy’s approaches can help in designing innovative and sustainable solutions.
Given the “starting scenario” (as described in the previous section), we tried to break the issues identified into smaller, actionable bits that we believe we can address together with the OSCE community.
- How to reduce waste and pollutions. Waste management in densely-populated, highly-touristic areas (see for example this contribution)
- How to find suitable balances between cultural tourism and its social and environmental consequences;
- How to turn projects and initiatives already existing in the field of Open Source and Circular Economy into active nodes of an open, shared infrastructures that may help to provide innovative solutions to existing and future problems.
##The question(s)
How Open Source Circular Economy approaches and models can create viable solutions for municipalities that share the same characteristics as Florence?
How can we effectively help with the development of a demand-driven, project-based infrastructure of projects, initiatives and applications sharing the OSCE philosophy?