Counteracting marginality: The Associazione Quartieri Spagnoli, Naples: Fid-Bau Portal

Counteracting marginality: The Associazione Quartieri Spagnoli, Naples

Giovanni Laino

The Quartieri Spagnoli is a working class neighbourhood in the historical centre of Naples, characterised by many commercial and artisan activities. It is a "sponge" neighbourhood that since the Second World War has been hosting people living a marginal existence through irregular economic activities. The Associazione Quartieri Spagnoli (AQS) is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) established in 1986 by an informal group that has been working in the neighbourhood since 1978. For the first 15 years AQS was deeply involved in the neighbourhood reality. It immersed itself in local social networks and obtained hands-on knowledge of the neighbourhood and the trust of its residents. From the early 1990's, AQS initiated a number of projects paying close attention to networking with local and extra-local connections. The main activities were a social secretariat always open on the street, out-of-school education for children (which took place for more than 15 years in the neighbourhood education workshops), socialisation into teamwork as a key practice to improve the employability profile of adolescents with low educational achievement, and direct collaboration with women caring for children. With these activities, in approximately 20 years, the AQS attracted public funds of about L9 million into the area, and became well known as an innovative civil society organisation. Those in charge of AQS reached out to, and mobilised, various kinds of people -- those with special knowledge, artists, pioneers. For example, first as a volunteer and then seconded from the national Ministry of Education, Universities and Research to the Associazione, Marco Rossi-Doria created the "taking action" model to tackle non-attendance at school, with the "street teacher" project.