Open spaces, Walls and Housing. The Aesthetics and Politics of Social Order (original) (raw)
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PUBLIC SPACES AS A PLANNING DIMENSION: MILAN CASE STUDIES AND POTENTIALITIES
After a long apathy phase, a combination of increased real estate pressures and international initiatives like Expo or the latest Triennale revival, heavily activated in Milan the realization of new public spaces and revital¬ization of old ones. Which include, among others, starchitects new inner city neighborhoods and landmark build¬ings, new design and fashion urban network spaces, car limitation policies to extended urban pedestrian areas. However, Milan urban renewal path is concretizing through heterogeneous results as they were the proceedings which inspired these transformations. Indeed, each of these modified areas has been individually conceived, being absent any meaningful high scale planning indication outlining an overall transformative vision of the city. This is clearly reflected in the Milan increasingly fragmented geography (Secchi, 2013), where the collective urban dimen¬sion has been often degraded to the rank of a public spaces collection to be consumed, rather than an urban struc¬turing spatiality seeking connections. Such an attitude drives to the weakening of the heterogeneous but highly intertwined urban complex which has always characterized this city. The overlap of historical compact frames and contemporary fragmentations, as well as different densities, gave rise to the actual Milan spatial condition, where emerge considerable public spaces potentials that could lead to fertile experimentations. But if public spaces are trivialized, they end up becoming self-referential entities, missing the task to condense differences and relations of the city.
Urban Corporis X - Unexpected, 2021
Anteferma Edizioni, Conegliano, Italy ISBN: 978-88-32050-97-4 (printed version) ISBN: 978-88-32050-96-7 (digital version) www.anteferma.it Abstract The contemporary urban model, globally spread and characterized by a high housing density, from different perspectives is considered more “sustainable”, and therefore to be pursued, compared to an extensive development connected to low-density urban development ideologies. Indeed, phenomena such as urban sprawl become degenerations of an urban model that cannot be controlled and defined as a whole. High density avoids excessive soil consumption, minimizing the use of the car for travelling, and, consequently, the reduction in the emission of polluting substances. However, the health emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the shortcomings of a high-density settlement morphology. Since social distancing has become part of everyday life, following the health emergency, the most detectable effects are social. On the one hand, if the traditional urban convivial spaces are deserted (going towards an almost total cancellation of physical social relationships) on the other hand we are witnessing a multiplication and explosion of types of urban sociality, developed through new forms of expression and use of spaces. Therefore, this contingent situation offers the possibility to reflect on the role and importance of all those often forgotten spaces. Indeed, they have returned taking a key role within our quarantined lives: balconies, terraces, roofs, landings. Hanging spaces have become elements of sociality, bringing into dialogue a living microcosm with an external macrocosm, currently extraneous and detached. The paper intends to survey projects of the international architectural panorama that have been able to interpret these spaces with a new social vision. This vision does not lead to the oblivion of these relationships’ physical and spatial dimension but compares them with the new instances, and even emergencies, of the city of the future.
The Tradition of Open Spaces in Cities and Modernity (preprint)
Paper presented to the 2013 Berlin international symposium The Role of open spaces in the transformation of urban landscape hold by The Italian Institute of Culture. In it I summarize after the review of different urban landscapes that there is a need to recover traditional urban layouts in order to create a comfortable city and sustainable landscape, at least in concrete zones. As in all the processes I reviewed, the key still lies in open public spaces. Herein, there is a need for design, for guidelines of urban design containing appropriate rules of town planning and renewal, urbanisation and maintenance of open spaces
“Contemporary debate on public space in Rome: urbanity and public space on the edge of Rome
In: Perspectives on Public Space in Rome, from Antiquity to the Present Day. LONDON:Ashgate., 2012
Most commentaries on public space laments the death of public space. This narrative has conquered a considerable attention and seems able to explain most of the incumbent changes. City centres in particular have undergone a complex process of change where a whole set of new labels has been deployed: gentrification, commodification, privatization, touristization, even disneyfication etc. The main narrative on public space emphasizes the decline and erosion in front of process of market privatization. Elsewhere, I have warned against an excess of interpretative generalization. What appears true in some cities or some parts of the city might not consist in a general trend. What about public space in contemporary metropolitan developments? In this paper, I will address the issue of new public space in a few recent developments in the outskirt of the city of Rome (Italy). Over the last few decades, many countries have experienced the proliferation of large new neighbourhoods. This is a return to a design and social issue which has characterized the Thirties and Sixties, though in different ways. Neighbourhoods built in those periods have been transformed in ideological monuments in order to idealize certain normative forms of urbanity: the working class solidarity, for instance, or the middle class individualism. Though the results have been worshipped or hatred alternatively, those neighbourhoods had in any case been based upon intentional, though disputable, attempts to transfer a model of social order in bricks and stones. Is this attempt still viable? are cities – designers, social critics, decision makers, political forces – in the position of elaborating social and practical models for living together? Late urban neighbourhoods developed in Rome were started at the end of the ‘80s in a hurried modernist approach; refunded, yet not renovated in the ‘90s, in a broader ‘polycentric’ view. Later on, they have been endorsed as crucial steps towards the establishment of new lifestyle of the city of 21st century. These large urban projects are practical experiments of new urbanism, dealing with the issue of the new style of living on the edge of large metropolitan areas. Issues of identity, public space, and urbanity lied at the core technical choices affecting the lay-out, density, and design of spaces. Though the projects were not always innovative, they have raised issues of ideology, design, and theory. Besides, results have been framed by metropolitan trends, planning regulations, and people contrasting attitudes. Research findings might appear inconclusive, twisted between social trends and local arrangements. Actually, they allow to question the sheer need of public spaces when the public sphere has acquired immaterial and liquid properties. Besides, most analytical evaluations tend to underestimate the importance of social and material contexts; they vainly condemn a disappearance of a public space that have of necessity followed the change of the 20th century public sphere. This is the foretold chronicle that should give way to a better understanding of the new urbanity of cities, in the light of the changing nature of urban lifestyles and metropolitan edges.
New Urban Planning Perspectives, 2020
Scholarly interest and findings on public space is extremely wide, so I need to define some limits to this speech. Urban design, mainly influenced by sociology and behavioral sciences, is biased to public space performance study. It try to answer the questions: how public space contribute to community culture, to favor social interchange? How public space let feel safe, comfortable, free people that live in it? Here I am asking a different question: how is public space made? I suppose this may be a perspective necessary to urbanism, a field dominated by practice task: plan city development and regeneration. The method I follow is narrative, often used in social sciences to learn from human practice. Naples is an interesting study case for its more than two millennium development and redevelopment. This let us to go to the roots of urbanism, and after, have a closer view to last developments. From ancient time Naples was an important harbor in Mediterranean network of exchange and always a regional capital. These factors made it a complex and multicultural city, in any time linking European culture to Middle East. Rethinking the urbanist perspective on public spaces [ 131 ] The following talk cannot summarize so long city history, but want just peak up some significant achievement of general meaning on the issue of public space useful for urban planners.
2015
Deep changes in urban frameworks, challenge contemporary cities, where often, common spaces formerly central, risk an indissoluble physical degradation, due to processes of social marginalization. Architects are asked to face the developmental dynamics for spaces of anonymity, every day more numerous, working on previous attitudes as aggregation and relation junctions. Moving from the description of the design criteria that inform the rehabilitation for the ancient area of Corso Garibaldi in Naples, the paper introduces a critical thinking about the links between space’ performances and attitudes towards inclusivity. Urban and architectural solutions are privileged means in order to return to citizenship the right to public space, reaffirming the concept of common space as dwelling, residence of the community, with the creation of new social ties and the growth of local shared identities.
Contemporary Urban Landscapes: The Construction of Public Housing in the 1950s in Southern Italy
Arquitectura y paisaje: transferencias histórica, retos contemporaneos, 2022
The 1950s saw the development of a new perception of urban settings and reflection on the concept of townscape and the sense of the aesthetics of buildings. The idea shared, among others, by the Neapolitans Domenico Andriello and Carlo Cocchia, is that the urban landscape is the bearer of harmony and “beauty” in cities. This is also reflected in the design of the new working-class neighbourhoods, to the extent that the intention to avoid conformity by giving identity to places made the first suburbs distinguishable. Therefore, it is significant and relevant to recognise in the urban landscape the historical and cultural values sedimented in the collective conscience, as happens in the two cases examined: the neighbourhood of Agnano in Naples by Stefania Filo Speziale and that of Spine Bianche in Matera, where some of the best professionals of those years worked, such as Mario Fiorentino and Hilda Selem, Michele Valori and Federico Gorio.
PROCEEDINGS of the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE on CHANGING CITIES IV Spatial, Design, Landscape & Socio-economic Dimensions, 2019
This work considers the small town of Quinto Vicentino located not far from Vicenza in the Veneto region, Italy, as a case study, formulating proposals for a new urban design focused on the historic piazza. The piazza of Quinto Vicentino is characterised by the presence of Villa Thiene whose architect was Andrea Palladio, and which has housed the town council (municipal government) since 1871. Villa Thiene and its presence forms the basis of the regeneration proposals. The intention is to enhance the value of the building and develop the tourism potential of the town. The villa in fact nowadays seems to have been forgotten, inside the piazza which unfortunately is used as vehicular thoroughfare and for parking. The idea is composed of remodelling in the style of traditional Italian piazzas characterised by the shape of a recognisable urban space around which lie the public buildings of the town. Both the classical and medieval piazza are recognised by the presence of volumes arranged hierarchically around the empty space of the piazza. The piazza is the urban fact around which the minor building development is distributed. The methodology looks at the town as a result of its spatial structure. More than political, social, and economic systems, reasons for its special nature can be found because of its constancy. The method adopted is based on studying the history of the place to understand the urban morphology of it. The physical specificity of the urban form is explored with the aim of elaborating a design process to reinforce the public space as a reference point for the community. Our work is the result of students’ workshops, developed in the framework of the course on “Architectural and Urban Composition 2” taught on the master’s degree in Architectural Engineering at the Department of Civil, Environmental, Architectural Engineering of the University of Padua. Our research has been carried on with a more general purpose that is to debate about the urban image, applying the theories and techniques of building design.