Web 2.0 Hits the Streets with Augusto

Warning, Tram Crash

When a Milanese tram hit his office building on 20 May 2008, Augusto Pirovano realized that his creation, CriticalCity, was working. CriticalCity is a fun and active game that assigns missions to be carried out around the city, focusing on urban transformation. One of the open missions on the website www.criticalcity.org asked participants to make a creative street sign, and right after the crash someone made a sign that depicted "Warning, Tram Crashes into Building" and put it up at the corner. The sign stayed up for months, until it was replaced by an official right of way sign, which residents had been requesting for some time.

Augusto graduated from the Bachelor of Economics and Management in Arts, Culture and Communication in 2005 and is the founder of CriticalCity, a startup that brings web 2.0 to the streets and focuses on urban acupuncture. Participants register on the site, choose missions to carry out in the area either alone or with partners, document the missions by videotaping and photographing them and post the material with comments. Players get points for completing missions and through positive comments from other participants, as is web 2.0 custom. "Between visits to the site," says Augusto, "players hit the streets, meet each other and, in many cases, create prototypes for urban change that can act as a significant micro-stimulus, a little like acupuncture needles in Chinese medicine."

Augusto likes to remember a young player working on guerrilla gardening who, after planting a flowerbed, came back the next day to water it and discovered that an elderly man was already looking after it. "He found out that the man had been taking care of several plants that the city doesn't look after and the two got to know each other, breaking the generation barrier." Pirovano looked at creative innovation in urban settings when writing his thesis (with Lanfranco Senn acting as supervisor and Alex Turrini and Gianfranco Franz, who teaches architecture in Ferrara, acting as co-supervisors). The paper was the result of four months of work on the field at Curitiba, capital city of Paranà, Brazil, a true case study for someone who thinks it possible to have sustainable and creative development in cities. The concept of urban acupuncture comes from Jaime Lerner, the mayor that changed the face of Curitiba. In his second year of the Bachelor Pirovano started his own freelance business, developing management applications, dynamic websites and web advertising tools. Thanks to excellent word of mouth about his company, he organized an urban treasure hunt for the City of Milan in 2005. Then, in 2006, he organized an edutainment course based on handheld devices and wireless technologies in a natural park in the Marche region. In the summer of 2006, while taking a ferry to Sardinia, Augusto and Matteo Battaglia, a finance journalist and a friend of his, started to imagine a game which is "big enough to influence real life and uses an entire city as the playing field." They had precedents in pop culture in mind, like the novel The Magus by John Fowles, The Game directed by David Fincher and EXistenZ directed by David Cronenberg or the growing phenomenon of alternate reality games. But it was only at the end of 2007 that the two friends decided to do something about their idea, starting with market research to see if something similar existed. They created a prototype with the collaboration of young professionals with whom Augusto shared a large working space in Milan suburbs.

Augusto's office

Contact with a misunderstood gem in the Italian public sector followed, as the pair began to work with the Kublai Project, supported by the Ministry for Economic Development. The Kublai website is a community of qualified professionals which helps creative workers aimed at local development better focus and develop their ideas. Thanks to Kublai, Augusto was able to go to San Francisco for a short period to visit the offices of SF0, an initiative that is similar CriticalCity, and he also created a roadshow to present in Milan at the Chamber of Commerce, several foundations and a venture capital company, DPixel. The ventura capital encouraged CriticalCity to participate in the 2009 Techgarage in Rome, a contest for IT startups, where it won hands down, taking three of the available awards. "When things were already going great for us and we were being recognized, we received an invitation from Saeed Amidi to move to his accelerator in Silicon Valley along with the commitment of Marco Magnocavallo from Blogo.it and other several venture capitalists to finance us with €100,000," says Augusto. "A lot of the interest is due to the fact that the way the game is played potentially intersects with the Holy Grail that experiential marketing is becoming. It's a big step for us, since we started as a non-profit company and a website that didn't even have any advertising."