We meet Enrico Giraudi, partner at Brand for the city, a company that places urban regeneration at the centre, while at the same time reconnecting brands with social values.
It isn’t easy to imagine change.
When we step into an empty home, imagining how it could be furnished.
When we restore a piece of furniture, imagining what colour it could become.
When we plant a tree, imagining what it will look like in ten years.
There are people, however, who are particularly good at this. People who trust in a vision of the future and turn it into the present.
These people are part of Brand for the city.
They discover corners of cities, parks, neighbourhoods and outskirts spaces that are underused, barely lived in, abandoned and… they imagine.
They imagine what would happen if, instead of concrete, there were benches, planters for gardening with children, playgrounds, spaces for art.
And they do all of this in synergy with companies, public administration, the third sector and citizens.
We met Enrico Giraudi, one of Brand for the city’s partners. A former advertising professional and strategic planner in some of the largest communication agencies.
ML: Enrico, and then? How did you move from advertising to urban regeneration?
EG: I thought I’d take a sabbatical year! Advertising had already changed enormously. Culture had changed. I was already working on Corporate Social Responsibility back then in 2003 when it still felt like something avant-garde.
I ended up at a Tibetan monastery in Pomaia, Tuscany, where I discovered a counselling school. Before, I tried to bring values into companies through the window of Marketing; now, instead, I try to bring them in through the main door through people. It was the end of 2014. I resigned and started working, as I still do today, as a counsellor and corporate trainer.
At a certain point, Claudio Bertona (founding partner of Brand for the city, Ed.) told me about a project that would combine my passion for social values with my skills in the business world. And here I am: one of Brand for the city’s partners, together with Paolo Gregotti. I use my advertising background to build strategy, to ensure projects are consistent with a brand’s identity, while I use my present as a counsellor and trainer in the research and listening activities involving the communities of citizens and associations we engage.
ML: What is Brand for the city?
EG: It is an S.r.l. founded in 2021 from an idea by Claudio Bertona, the founder and majority shareholder a person with 40 years of experience as a media sales professional, but who has always been passionate about social issues, with a deliberate, value-driven approach rooted in substance.
Brand for the city creates collaboration projects between the territory (a city neighbourhood), citizens, public administration… and companies. Together, to deliver “urban regeneration” projects.
The bridge we want to build is between companies and cities: cities with needs, and companies that invest, provide resources, and do concrete things. Our focus is helping them approach social impact in the most appropriate way: we listen, we assess what is truly needed in a given territory, and we propose actions aligned with the company’s identity and values. We try to find shared value among different stakeholders. The purpose of Brand for the city is to create collaboration platforms.
Then there is a second element: creating culture around urban regeneration. Most of us live in cities, and everyone cares about cities becoming more liveable. Urban regeneration is not only about rebuilding a square or installing a new playground: it means making cities human again, accessible to everyone. But what does “living well in a city” actually mean? When I read newspaper rankings about quality of life in major cities, I always laugh. What are we talking about? What is “quality of life”?
Our answer is this: quality of life means having accessible spaces where people can meet. At its core, urban regeneration is about enabling the creation of neighbourhood communities. Creating places that are not an end in themselves, but where meaningful relationships can be built, where people can return to doing things together. It means rebuilding a social fabric that the city has historically, in part, dismantled.
It means bringing these spaces back to life.
ML: Guide us through the process: how do you work?
EG: When a company interested in investing in an urban regeneration project contacts us, we assess spaces and projects looking for sponsors projects we continuously map across Italy (over time we have built a sort of “catalogue”). If the projects we already mapped are not the right fit for the brand, we carry out bespoke scouting.
Priority is given to spaces that already exist and need to be fixed: disused places, neighbourhoods that have “gone a bit downhill”… Then there are cases where you need to create them from scratch.
What do we do? We identify the space, speak with the public administration managing it, verify that the space is available and that bureaucracy works in our favour, then we contact schools, parish youth centres, senior centres, citizens’ associations, non-profit organisations… all strictly local!
We then create a working table where people can speak, and we try to understand what is needed.
ML: Can you give us an example?
EG: Agos invested in a public space on the outskirts of Lecce, in Parco Bruno Petrachi. It was a concrete slab that had never been used. Nearby there is a school and a senior centre. We organised a meeting with these realities, together with the public administration with the mayor and the councillor: in smaller cities it’s a bit easier.
We created listening and working tables, and what emerged was that a sports court for volleyball and basketball was needed; the school needed a garden where children could grow vegetables; the senior centre wanted to screen films for an open-air cinema club on summer evenings; and citizens wanted picnic tables for evenings.
The space was large enough for all of it: we managed to create a multifunctional area. Now, after two years, it is very frequented by citizens of many different ages. Why? Because we started from what people wanted.
On that occasion, we realised that it’s not that administrators who already do a difficult job know exactly what citizens want, because they cannot always be present in the territory. We had privileged access to people’s needs because we went and asked. From ideation to implementation, it’s a process that takes 6–8 months.
ML: What drives a brand to invest in an operation like this?
EG: We need to start from another question: “What is a brand today?”
Over the last fifteen years we have witnessed a loss of meaning and value. In the 1970s and 80s, brands took a stance on social issues through advertising. Advertising was the medium through which you conveyed values. Then times changed. We changed too.
Today, for example, millennials people in their 30s and 40s no longer buy because of advertising. They want to see what you do; they pay close attention to a brand’s actions in society. Social media has cracked companies open like a nut. So corporates can no longer separate doing from communicating. Smart companies have understood that a brand without a complete sense becomes just a logo and is worth much less. Even in financial markets.
ML: And so… how do you fill a brand with meaning?
EG: You have to act first, and then tell the story of what you’ve done. In fact, at Brand for the city we often say: “Doing is the new communicating.”
Right now, companies are increasingly interested in investing resources for the benefit of territories. Take the Parco Bruno Petrachi example in Lecce: Agos supported nine similar projects across Italy a project through which they want to express their values and social sensitivity, while also maintaining a proper separation between CSR/sustainability activities and their business activities.
But even with that separation, over time this commitment-carried out consistently and continuously has a positive effect on brand reputation.
This type of activity can be particularly interesting for a retail brand with a network of stores across the territory, because once regeneration interventions are completed, they become an opportunity for dialogue with local stakeholders and for territorial-level communication.
ML: How much does the company stay involved in this regeneration work, and how much remains afterwards? Does the private sector spark regeneration that is then managed by the public sector in the future?
EG: When a brand proposes through us a regeneration project, the public administration is always well disposed and more than happy to support it, but it does not always have the resources to fund it and maintain it in the long term.
So our model provides that private investment keeps the project alive not only in the short term but also in the medium term. That’s why, in budgets, we always include two or three years of maintenance commitments. Commitments that can then be renewed, as Agos is doing.
Not all companies choose to commit in this way. It depends on corporate policies, which can change with management and leadership. One way to overcome this is the “collaboration pact” with citizens, who with the support of the Municipality manage the space themselves: maintenance activities (repainting benches, cutting grass, etc.) become actions of the community, making it alive and engaged.
For example, Agos is financing a twelve-month programme of activities. For one year, the brand provides the initial push. Then our hope is that, gradually, citizens’ associations become autonomous. That is the real challenge.
The financial outlay of a brand that makes such a choice is not meaningless spending or money thrown away. Because the value this choice has for those who live the space—for the neighbourhood is enormous.
ML: How are the actions communicated?
EG: This is precisely the area where there is still room for action. Companies could do more.
They are very timid. Basically, they are afraid of haters. They fear that even when doing good, social media might find something that could be turned against them. And that’s understandable!
For us at Brand for the city, what matters is that the project is done well, that it is honest, and that it is useful to the community. And, of course, that the company requesting it is aligned with the values of the community in which we operate.
ML: The word “regeneration” has increasingly rhymed with “gentrification” in recent years. Do you work with real estate development companies?
EG: Every time we have met brands involved in real estate development, they came to us with a sincere desire to understand what the neighbourhood truly needed. That is the right way to approach urban regeneration.
We carry out territorial studies—desk research, also online—to understand local demographics. We read social media a lot to understand what is not working. Comments and shares are incredibly valuable because they show concretely what people complain about, or what they value. Then we build working tables with local associations.
For Fondo Scalo Porta Romana, we organised a street art artist competition to beautify the construction site hoardings of the Olympic Village at Scalo Porta Romana. We tried to talk about the value of sport through urban art.
ML: How does Brand for the city experience the conflict between public and private, in an era where the public sector increasingly retreats from services, leaving them to a market that sometimes does not serve citizens but tries to profit from new customers?
EG: It’s obvious that public and private have two different roles. The public sector provides the rules and the vision for social life. The private sector aims to generate profit, create wellbeing, and provide jobs.
The advantage is when public and private manage to dialogue well together, while maintaining their respective roles. When I worked in advertising, what fascinated me was bringing non-profit values into companies.
It’s an exchange: the social sector contaminates the company and becomes a strategic factor, while the know-how, effectiveness and efficiency-hallmarks of the business world contaminate the social sector.
And it’s interesting to watch a manager speak with a public administrator. They have different sensitivities, but complementary ones. Think about what can happen when they work together, when values meet the ability to make them real.
This work has the ability to bring together different but wonderful people. And that creates an explosion, but a positive one.
Young councillors and marketing directors around a table get excited because the work of both gains meaning—for them and for the people working with them. And this is the third level: companies commit because they want their employees to build meaning through their work.
We must try, in the relationship between public and private, to rebuild a virtuous and enlightened relationship through the actions we take.
ML: How do you see the future of cities?
EG: The studies we know tell us that globally people are migrating towards large cities. On the one hand you think: what sense does it make? You spend three times as much to live there, you can work remotely instead of taking public transport to the office…
On the other hand, I believe cities are an extraordinary opportunity. Why? Because there are people, and without people nothing happens. Of course, cities are also where problems exist. But precisely because of that, there is urgency to find solutions. And to find solutions, cities need to be creative. Creativity is one of the energies at the core of life.
Of course, there are enormous challenges. One is the cost of housing. Big cities must be able to provide a good quality of life without citizens having to work twenty hours a day just to afford rent. Then yes, they can become a laboratory of ideas and values.
We are at a crossroads: cities will either become a hell to escape from, or a place of co-creation, building, innovation, vision. That is what is missing now in big cities: vision.
And then, respect for rules.
It’s a bit like what applies to a company. To be healthy, it must have a dream, an order (processes and rules), and then the courage to do things, to take action. Dream, order, courage and action. Without even one of these elements, you fail both in the public and private sectors.
ML: You mentioned dreams – what is Brand for the city’s dream?
EG: It is to see an unused space become a living place where people smile and are happy. We would love to create projects so beautiful that they become an example, that many other Brand for the city initiatives are born… even if that means we’ll have competitors so be it!
And then, that the topic of urban regeneration becomes free from rhetoric. That everyone understands spaces need to be filled with meaning, and that as many different realities as possible even very different ones can collaborate to create these small miracles.