Theory and Practice of cheFare: Between Design and Cultural Transformation

by cheFare

This post is part of an ongoing collaboration with cheFare

HEX #FF50FF - Because it is eye-catching, and in some cases it is essential to take the risk of being looked at.

"I think the most exciting, creative, and confident thing in human action is precisely disagreement."

(Zygmunt Bauman)

A Story of Transformation

The 2010s represented a period of profound transformation in the Italian cultural sector. There was a strong desire for discontinuity, rupture, and change compared to everything that had developed up to that point. New entities were emerging: grassroots organizations and hybrid third-sector entities that used deeply innovative languages, tools, techniques, and funding methods. These groups came from the worlds of academic research, social activism and movements, technological innovation, and cooperatives.

cheFare was born in this very period – in 2012 – not as an agency, but as a prize: an annual call that awarded €100,000 to innovative cultural projects.

The cheFare Prize served to identify, study, and above all, finance new realities in the cultural world. Over three editions, it funded five projects with a total of €350,000.

In its first edition, the €100,000 prize was awarded to Lìberos, a network fostering collaboration between writers, publishing houses, bookstores, and libraries in Sardinia. In the second edition, the award went to Casa in Casa, a network among the socio-cultural hubs Case del Quartiere in Turin to facilitate skill exchange and organizational growth. The third edition awarded three prizes of €50,000 each to: the peer-to-peer school La Scuola Open Source in Bari, the Baumhaus cooperative in Bologna, which promotes street culture to combat school dropout, and Tournée da Bar, an audience engagement project for theater in Milan.

During those three years, we discovered that the cultural landscape was vibrant and filled with associations, spaces, and communities that had not yet been mapped, met, or heard. We received over 1,800 projects from all over Italy, many of them submitted by collaborative groups and partner networks – a true atlas of cultural innovation.

These projects were deeply connected with local audiences and their communities, a fact we could verify during the online voting phases of the Prize. We collected over 180,000 votes, which selected and led the finalist projects to further evaluations by technical juries and cultural sector experts.

When the Prize project ended, the emergence of this national cultural ecosystem was undeniable. We believed it was worth ensuring that this network of contacts and relationships could continue to exist beyond the Prize, serving as a significant voice in the country's cultural landscape.

Thus, in 2015, cheFare transformed into what it is today: an agency for cultural transformation that connects cultural and social actors, institutions, public administrations, donors, individual artists, cultural operators, and activists. Our goal is to create transformative environments in local communities, leveraging the knowledge and expertise of our vast hybrid networks through an interdisciplinary approach.

A fundamental part of our current work consists of supporting cultural and social organizations in becoming more structured, resilient, and capable of facing contemporary challenges—and with vision and strategy, those of the future. We do this through strategic empowerment programs that also address technical aspects while always keeping the intrinsic characteristics of cultural and social work at the center.

Another key area of our work is research projects in collaboration with intermediary bodies (such as ARCI Nazionale, a network of over 4,400 clubs and one million members), public administrations (such as the Municipality of Milan), and donors (such as Fondazione Cariplo), to analyze emerging phenomena in the cultural sector and explore strategies to support their development.

Additionally, we provide policy advisory services for public policies, large organizations (such as Fondazione Terzoluogo, which builds libraries and local community spaces between Milan and Naples), and strategic partners such as Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo.

Finally, we develop dozens of independent projects on different scales: focusing on local interventions like Civic Media Art (a public art intervention in a Milanese suburb) or international initiatives like ENWE (a European network that increases the visibility of expert women in sectors such as media and science).

The Theory of Practice, The Practice of Theory

This growing orientation toward project-based work has always been accompanied—and still is—by our editorial production.

Over the past ten years, we have published around 3,000 articles on the cheFare website, written by 700 authors, with the clear intention of critically nurturing cultural debate.

There are trends and thought movements that originate in specialized cultural circles and gradually extend to public debate, policies, and practices: from urban regeneration to participation, from social innovation to the role of communities, from impact assessment to digital transformation.

In all these cases, we have always sought to anticipate trends and explore reflections—often uncertain, controversial, and embryonic—to give them substance and create a space where authoritative and expert voices could convey and translate complex content in an accessible way. However, it is important to stress that this process works both ways. We often start with highly complex content, transforming editorial development into an attempt to clarify that complexity. Conversely, we also navigate the opposite scenario: publications introduce new meanings and unexpected reflections, increasing the complexity of the debate and pushing concepts and phenomena to their limits to investigate their possibilities.

This approach has allowed us to expand audiences and raise awareness about topics that are often inaccessible yet crucial to people's well-being and society. This is why we never select an author and ask them to study an unfamiliar topic to produce an article. Instead, we choose someone who is already an expert, who has a strong passion and a deep, incisive vision on a particular subject, and we guide them in shaping their expertise into widely accessible content.

Examples of this approach include participatory editorial projects (such as Emersioni, a project with the Metropolitan City of Milan) and editorial tools like the Emotional Glossary, which we have used in recent years to translate complex and controversial elements related to specific projects and themes that, although seemingly intended for specialists, actually hold deep significance for much broader audiences.

Our entire editorial production is united by a single goal: to bring theoretical reflection into contact with reality and transform it into actionable projects. The effort is always to turn debate, proposals, and ideas into concrete actions.

In fact, there is a continuous relationship not only between theory and practice (i.e., the study of theories and the study of practices) but also between the production of practices and the production of theories. In this sense, cheFare is a space where distant worlds and fields of action that rarely meet come together to discuss, collaborate, and design. The complexity of our relationship network has only increased over the years. Today, nine people work at cheFare (seven in project development and advisory, and two in communication and editorial areas). On any given day, a single team member might engage in discussions with: a university professor, a social cooperative working on community development, a contemporary art museum, artists, activists, an embassy, and representatives from both a small-town municipality and a major city.

This constant interaction has taught us to continuously rethink our language and practices while maintaining core elements of our vision and methodologies. From this perspective, our editorial work serves to document and formalize this ongoing movement, allowing the complexity of relationships to become a real tool for meaningful change.

Four Good Reasons to Publish

We could say that there are four good reasons why we choose to publish an article.

The first is to identify emerging phenomena. This is an exercise in foresight, in detection—our agency acts like a radar, trying to capture the weak signals of complexity in the cultural and social world. Sometimes these signals evolve into real trends, sometimes they do not. But they always serve as a way to exercise the muscles of imagination toward the future.

A second type of contribution, which is crucial, serves to document the present: narratives of practices or theoretical insights, shared directly by associations, artists, and academics involved in projects. We host these reflections because it is essential that cheFare remains a reference point in Italy for those who want to discover what is happening in the cultural and social landscape.

A third category of articles fosters a process of updating or critically revising theories and practices related to cultural fields. We constantly question which concepts have become outdated or require transformation. For instance, in 2025, we are particularly reflecting on two terms that seem to have started rusting: urban regeneration and social innovation. Do these expressions still make sense? What do they leave out? And why?

A fourth type of content consists of theoretical and historical toolkits. We delve into other disciplines—sometimes seemingly distant ones—and extract insights and ways of reasoning that can be practically useful for those working in culture today. Along these lines, we have published contributions from figures such as Umberto Eco, Adriano Olivetti, Nassim Taleb, and François Jullien.

When we feel that a particular topic has reached a mature stage of discussion and we want a cultural phenomenon to gain credibility, we consider publishing in print or digital formats. Print publications are developed in partnership with other publishers, whose prestige contributes to the recognition process we mentioned earlier. This is what we did with La cultura in trasformazione, published with Minimum Fax, with Bagliore, our book on new cultural centers released with Il Saggiatore, and with series developed in collaboration with Luca Sossella Editore and Edizioni di Comunità. The volumes we curate independently, however, are free and digital to ensure the widest possible circulation: a digital publication on the cheFare website is downloaded and read thousands of times—something difficult to achieve with printed books sold for a price.

The goal, regardless of the format, remains the same: to turn reflection into policy, action, and experimentation. This has always defined our editorial work and the criteria behind our choices: theory of practice and practice of theory. They nourish each other, and in turn, they fuel the debate within the cultural networks that we have been actively part of since 2012.