There is a place that has been adopting one of the most innovative pedagogical methods in the world dedicated to childhood education for more than fifty years. This is the Loris Malaguzzi International Center situated in the neighborhood Santa Croce in Reggio Emilia. It is located in an urban area past the railway lines, which used to be a working-class neighborhood. Today, it is the place of the most ambitious transformation of a socially degraded area with an industrial past into a Europe-wide Innovation Park. The Center Malaguzzi is the first element of such ambitious operation. The center guards, promotes and passes on a method that was created in the seventies by Loris Malaguzzi2 (Correggio, 1920 - Reggio Emilia, 1994). Loris Malaguzzi was an enlightened pedagogist and teacher whom, in the seventies, laid in the urban schools for every childhood the foundations of what today is an international approach. The Malaguzzi method is based on the premise that children’s learning capacity does not necessarily depend on a linear cause-effect relationship between learning processes and results. According to it, it is largely due to children, to their activities and resources. Thanks to this approach, children play an active role in improving and acquiring knowledge and understanding so that learning becomes a self-constructive process. According to Malaguzzi, the school is a “building site”, a laboratory where children’s and adults’ research processes intertwine and evolve on a daily basis. His method focuses on the space layout because it is also based on the aesthetics of knowledge. Malaguzzi’s great innovation is the insertion of the atelier in the school. According to the method, the traditional school should be replaced by laboratories and places where children’s hands can actually interact with their mind. It aims to enhance the best integration possible of all the different forms of human expressiveness with the numerous forms of language. Loris Malaguzzi had identified one hundred of them as he stated in his most renowned publication “The hundred languages of children”. The goal of the method is to get the future social actors accustomed to use all these ways to express. 

From a wider perspective, these goals could become the base of a broader reform of the 0-99 years old learning method. In addition to that, they also define an accurate and strong interaction between spaces and learning methods. The Reggio Approach became internationally popular in 1991. In that year, the American magazine Newsweek published an article about the kindergarten Diana situated in the public gardens of Reggio Emilia. The article stated that it was the best kindergarten and most innovative school for children from infancy in the world and aroused international interest. Given the interest shown by numerous American, Swedish and Australian academic institutions, in 1994, the Municipality of Reggio Emilia promoted the creation of the “Centro Internazionale per la Difesa e lo Sviluppo dei Diritti e le Potenzialità dei Bambini” (International centre for the defence and promotion of children’s rights and potentials) known as “Reggio Children”. This center aims to provide educational services and targeted advice regarding the problems connected with the education of infants and toddlers. The centre “Centro Loris Malaguzzi” dedicated to the diffusion of the “Reggio Approach” is the outcome of the conversion of an abandoned cheese warehouse. Today, it boasts a meeting center, a preschool, a food court, spaces dedicated to education, training and the permanent display of the exhibition “The hundred languages of children”. Every day, delegations coming from all over the world visit the center. The Center Malaguzzi incubated and developed Re Mida, an innovative centre that will have its own space where the waste material of the companies of the area is collected. Here, such material is selected and sorted in order to be sent to the ateliers of preschools to enhance children’s creativity. Reggio Children’s experience and great international success perfectly shows that the founding idea of the “Reggio Approach” can be implemented and adapted to other places in the world according to their local needs.