Restoration and restructuring of the "Santa Croce" building and relocation of the public library.

Investments in projects of urban regeneration, aimed at reducing situations of marginalization and social degradation (Mission 5 – Component 2, Investment 4)

Italy’s Recovery and resilience Plan provides municipalities with grants for investments in urban regeneration, to reduce marginalization and social degradation as well as to improve the social and environmental context of urban centres. 

The measure aims at supporting the reuse and re-functionalization of public areas and existing public building structures for public interest purposes, and at improving the urban landscape through renovation of public buildings, with particular attention to the development of social, cultural, educational services, including sports activities.

The investment consisting of EUR 2 billion is financed by Italy’s Recovery and Resilience plan. As part of this investment, the City of Cuneo intends to relocate at the building named "Ex Ospedale Santa Croce" the entire municipal library now located in Via Cacciatori delle Alpi at Audifreddi Palace.

The library will draw from the contingency of its relocation, the opportunity to reinterpret and imagine its own identity, recognizing itself first of all according to an updated perspective of "public library" able to fit into the reticular dynamics of contemporaneity both in terms of the organization of recorded knowledge and in terms of the conscious and reasoned openness to the demand for widespread and inclusive sociality.

Within this broad and flexible model, the new library will be able to qualify as a dynamic and interactive space to connect fragments of contemporary knowledge and which, above all, will be able to foster the activation of cognitive and experiential relationships between texts, information, books, documents and people. Starting from the development of the classical model of the reference library and adapting it to the new cultural, cognitive, documentary and technological contexts, the project envisages the use of new digital technologies to support bibliographic communication in order to foster the appropriation of information content, inserting classical mediation tools into a cognitive, experiential, emotional environment capable of strongly fostering relationships between people and digital information.

The completion of the renovation of Santa Croce should bring to fruition the reunification of library services in the City of Cuneo, which began with the creation of the Library 0-18. To understand it, it should be imagined within the "Citadel of Culture," which, along Corso Kennedy, brings together the university buildings, the Civic Museum, the former military refrigerator, the exhibition spaces of Palazzo Samone and the music classrooms of Foro Boario Square. The Toselli Theater is also within walking distance. 

The library should be imagined in dialogue with these spaces and  with digital, new technologies, social media and the extraordinary possibilities they allow, keeping in mind, however, that, at least today, readers of a civic library need both paths, paper and digital.