Infrastructural Duality (original) (raw)

The City as a Process in Time and Space

2002

Understanding urban agglomerations as a collection of dynamic processes is discussed extensively in urban design theory. Although the importance of time in urban planning is recognized widely, most methodologies and available tools for the urban design process do not support the implementation and simulation of urban processes. Although, some elements of urban design, as for example the planning of transport systems, incorporate the dimension of time, there exists a big lack in understanding the dynamic behaviour of an urban environment in various scales of time. In the international design competition “Chronopolis”, initiated in Japan, the primary design goal was to view urban development in several time spans. Several universities participated in this competition, forming four groups to design urban environments considering four different time spans, ranging from the one-minute city, the one-year city, the onehundred-year city to the one thousand year city. As our contribution was...

TOWARDS A PRO-USER ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN PLANNING. Potential Chronologies

Academia Letters, 2022

This article analyzes studies on environmental perception and performance based on two chronologies of basic textbooks – one international and the other Brazilian – which consider the incorporation of the points of view of end users in the urban and architectural design processes. Without exhausting the subject, it is a bibliographical review in the form of timelines beginning in the 20th century, especially with regard to the environments in use. Keywords: user, environmental perception, environmental performance, textbook timelines.

The 15-minute city as a hybrid model for Milan

2022

With a special focus on Milan, we explore the interpretation of the 15-minute city as a hybrid model, where soft mobility is integrated in a holistic urbanism approach. Contemporary urban challenges, synthetized in the 15-minute city model, look for a sustainable "proximity mix": mix of uses (overcoming rigid zoning and building codes), mix of inhabitants and users, mix of time schedules and multi-purpose open space. The proposed hybrid approach considers the living-working urban experience as a whole: it proposes to consider, as a starting point for measuring the timeframe of 15 minutes, not only homes but workplaces as well. It welcomes innovative working facilities among those to be considered as essential services reachable within the 15-minute walking timeframe and it integrates open spaces within urban infrastructures by mixing the neighborhood "eco-system" –both of environment and mobility– and designing them around the central role of walking.

Temporal Urban Design: Temporality, Rhythm and Place

Temporal Urban Design: Temporality, Rhythm and Place, 2023

Temporal Urban Design: Temporality, Rhythm and Place examines an alternative design approach, focusing on the temporal aesthetics of urban places and the importance of the sense of time and rhythm in the urban environment. The book departs from concerns on the acceleration of cities, its impact on the urban quality of life and the liveability of urban spaces, and questions on what influences the sense of time, and how it expresses itself in the urban environment. From here, it poses the questions: what time is this place and how do we design for it? It offers a new aesthetic perspective akin to music, brings forward the methodological framework of urban place-rhythmanalysis, and explores principles and modes of practice towards better temporal design quality in our cities. The book demonstrates that notions of time have long been intrinsic to planning and urban design research agendas and, whilst learning from philosophy, urban critical theory, and both the natural and social sciences debate on time, it argues for a shift in perspective towards the design of everyday urban time and place timescapes. Overall, the book explores the value of the everyday sense of time and rhythmicity in the urban environment, and discusses how urban designers can understand, analyse and ultimately play a role in the creation of temporally unique, both sensorial and affective, places in the city. The book will be of interest to urban planners, designers, landscape architects and architects, as well as urban geographers, and all those researching within these disciplines. It will also interest students of planning, urban design, architecture, urban studies, and of urban planning and design theory.

The city as an extended network of public spaces: reconnecting the spirit of place and time through modeling of old realities and new virtualities

Proceedings of the 7th Conference of International Forum on Urbanism "Creative Renaissance", 7-11 October 2013, pp. 566-574, 2013

In the contemporary city discontinuity and diversity characterize the built environment: it’s recognizable at least a consolidated centre, while the rest of the urban structure is blurred, mainly lacking in public spaces. Two realities coexist in the same whole: one is the expression of the spirit of place through heritage, a static superimposition derived from history, the other speaks the language of time, containing all contradictions of modern planning theory with a dynamic acceleration towards the future. Just apparently this two parts do not share the same identity: the analysis, if based on a comprehensive approach, can reveal a more satisfactory and nuanced urbanism, taking into account new fruitions of public dimension. Nowadays, by means of technology, people can experience public life across real and virtual, communicate personal emotions, browse local historic documents, wish for neighborhood improvements, connecting the real public city to the ever-changing spirit of place and time.

Crang, M. (2001). Rhythms of the City: temporalised space and motion. TimeSpace. J. May and N. Thrift. London, Routledge: 187-207.

This essay is concerned with the intersection of lived time, time as represented and urban space - especially around everyday practice. As such it follows in a long pedigree of works addressing time and space in the city. However, what I want to try and rethink some approaches to offer a less stable version of the everyday, and through this a sense of practice as an activity creating time-space not time space as some matrix within which activity occurs. The essay thus addresses the paradox that Stewart identifies where the ‘temporality of everyday life is marked by an irony which is its own creation, for this temporality is held to be ongoing and non-reversible and, at the same time characterized by repetition and predictability’ (1984, p14). I want to thus look both at stability but also the emergence of new possibilities through everyday temporality. To do this I want to proceed through four circuits, each picking up and expanding upon the previous, developing and transforming it. The first circuit serves to locate the everyday through the study of temporality. The study of the chronopolitics and regulation of daily life serves as an entree into why ‘the everyday’ matters. The multiple rhythms and temporalities of urban life this form the back-cloth for this essay; what Lefebvre evoked, but hardly explained, as a rhythmanalysis. The second circuit picks up on this but to adds the insights of time-geography in the paths and trajectories that individuals and groups make through the city. Introducing a sense of human action and motility into the experience of time offers a new step while the combination of time-space routines serves to link the everyday to the reproduction of social regularities (Pred 1982). However, the sense of time-space created through time geography is rather rarefied, so the third circuit seeks to develop a critique and step sidewise through a concern with the differences between lived and represented times - a focus on experiential time-space that will lead to considering phenomenological accounts. Time and space cease to be simply containers of action. These it will be suggested begin to offer a sense of space-time as Becoming, a sense of temporality as action, as performance and practice; indeed the difference as well as repetition. The possibility as Grosz (1999) argues for not merely the novel, but the unforeseen. However, the fourth circuit suggests that these still share an idea of the self-presence of everyday experience, and will open up ideas of events as problematising the everyday. This attempts to both keep a sense of fecundity in the everyday without it becoming a recourse to ground thinking in an ‘ultimate non-negotiable reality’ (Felski 2000:15). The essay then argues for a sense of greater instability - or perhaps better, fragility - within the everyday. This essay thus focuses on the flow of experience for the social subject. It is also important to think through the topology and texture of temporality in the urban fabric, the city as well as its people, but that is a task for a different occasion (see Crang & Travlou, 2001).

15-Minute City: Decomposing the New Urban Planning Eutopia

Sustainability

As cities are struggling to cope with the second wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of 15-min cities seem to have sparked planners’ imagination and politicians’ willingness for providing us with a new urban planning eutopia. This paper explores the “15-min city” concept as a structural and functional element for redesigning contemporary cities. Methodologically, a study of three case cities that have adopted this new model of city vision, is carried out. The analysis focus on understanding how the idea of 15-min cities fits the legacies of different cities as described by traditional planning principles in the context of three evaluation pillars: inclusion, safety and health. The paper argues that the 15-min city approach is not a radical new idea since it utilizes long established planning principles. Nevertheless, it uses these principles to achieve the bottom-up promotion of wellbeing while it proposes an alternative way to think about optimal resource allocation in a...

The Ideal City: Space and Time (from the Renaissance to Smart Cities)

European Review of Digital Administration & Law - Erdal, 2021

The phenomenon of Smart Cities finds an important conceptual parallel with the idea of the "perfect city" that characterized the imagination, art and philosophy of the European Renaissance. This similarity can help to identify some key points that are essential to understand the Smart Cities from a legal point of view. In particular, it allows us to highlight the need to put the "space" and "time" factors at the center of the discourse, in order to "give them back to citizens" as privileged objects of the city government.