Regenerating Urban Spaces under Place-specific Social Contexts: a Commentary on Green Infrastructures for Landscape Conservation

This study investigates the issue of green infrastructures in contemporary cities, adopting a strategic vision for increasingly complex metropolitan regions. Green infrastructures play an important role in ecological services and biodiversity preservation, improving significantly the quality of life of residents and visitors. The social dimension of gardens and parks at local (e.g. urban district) scale and green infrastructures at larger spatial scales is also addressed, fostering the relationship between local communities and urban landscapes. With economic crisis, urban parks are increasingly considered a primary component of integrated strategies for urban regeneration with a bottom-up approach, addressing the demand for "natural landscape" in peri-urban areas. By recovering public spaces with social purposes and providing a comprehensive strategy for aesthetic improvement of common goods, the analyzed case studies give examples of specific measures for promoting environment-friendly urban regeneration strategies under place-specific social contexts

Re-sewing the urban periphery. A green strategy for fontivegge district in Perugia

The present study debates on the issue of urban regeneration in contemporary cities, adopting a strategic vision which includes the use of vegetation and green infrastructure to create a network of public spaces. Especially, urban periphery lacks of public spaces, meaning a public use of urban space for outdoor activities and social networks. The extraordinary program for the Italian peripheries, addressed to all the metropolitan cities and provincial capitals in 2016, inspired to Renzo Piano idea of “resewing” urban fabrics, has been a good opportunity for testing new approaches to urban regeneration. The case study investigated in this study is the financed project for the city of Perugia, which provides different interventions aimed at improving (and developing new) public spaces through vegetation enhancement and a large area destined to vegetable social gardens as a strategy for urban infill. By recovering public spaces with social purpose and providing a comprehensive strategy for aesthetic improvement of the city, the case study provides a representative example, how greening the city may promote together biodiversity conservation and urban regeneration

Spatio-temporal analysis of the urban–rural gradient structure: an application in a Mediterranean mountainous landscape (Serra San Bruno, Italy)

Abstract. The most recent and significant transformations of European landscapes have occurred as a consequence of a series of diffused, varied and often connected phenomena: urban growth and sprawl, agricultural intensification in the most suitable areas and agricultural abandonment in marginal areas. These phenomena can affect dramatically ecosystems' structure and functioning, since certain modifications cause landscape fragmentation while others tend to increase homogeneity. Thus, a thorough comprehension of the evolution trends of landscapes, in particular those linked to urban-rural relations, is crucial for a sustainable landscape planning. In this framework, the main objectives of the present paper are: (a) to investigate Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) transformations and dynamics that occurred over the period 1955–2006 in the municipality of Serra San Bruno (Calabria, Italy), an area particularly representative of the Mediterranean mountainous landscape; (b) to compare the settlement growth with the urban planning tools in charge in the study area; (c) to examine the relationship between urban–rural gradient, landscape metrics, demographic and physical variables; (d) to investigate the evolution of urban–rural gradient composition and configuration along significant axes of landscape changes. Data with a high level of detail (minimum mapping unit 0.2 ha) were obtained through the digitisation of historical aerial photographs and digital orthophotos identifying LULC classes according to the Corine Land Cover legend. The investigated period was divided into four significant time intervals, which were specifically analysed to detect LULC changes. Differently from previous studies, in the present research the spatio-temporal analysis of urban–rural gradient was performed through three subsequent steps: (1) kernel density analysis of settlements; (2) analysis of landscape structure by means of metrics calculated using a moving window method; (3) analysis of composition and configuration of the urban–rural gradient within three landscape profiles located along significant axes of LULC change. The use of thematic overlays and transition matrices enabled a precise identification of the LULC changes that had taken place over the examined period. As a result, a detailed description and mapping of the landscape dynamics were obtained. Furthermore, landscape profiling technique, using continuous data, allowed an innovative and valuable approach for analysing and interpreting urban–rural gradient structure over space and time

Systemic Design goes between disciplines for the sustainability in food processes and cultures

An healthy and safe feeding is the key element to ensure a sustainable development for the entire planet. The theme of food is one of the major challenges for the near future, indeed it involves every aspect of our lives. The paper investigates how the Systemic Design approach applied to the food sectors can contribute to decent life and, better, well-being for all, maintaining the planets ecological capacity for future generations. This research shows the social, economical and environmental benefits generated to real cases that apply the Systemic Design methodology in different food sectors and in different local context. One case is “EN.FA.SI.”, in which the value chain related to one PGI bean endorses the entire area involving the small family producers and the local SMEs. The other one is “Fondo Noir”, in which the spent coffee ground from the coffee bars in the metropolitan city centre are collected in order to generate many new businesses. The purpose is to give empirical and theoretical contributions, arising how the complexity of food systems impacts the simplicity of the everyday life solutions. The complexity involved in that kind of design processes interested a wide range of players and it aims to contribute the scientific debate on the role of design as mediator and facilitator among different specific disciplines. The polytechnic culture, at the base of design disciplines, guarantees a model for the eco-innovation also in food sector, with strong and solid approach

The Central Park in between Torino and Milano

This paper aims at discussing a possible legacy of Expo Milano 2015 by proposing a new idea of park based on different layered landscapes in the Region between Torino and Milano. This works is part of a wider research program developed at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Politecnico di Milano. The first research phase is focused on the analysis of the Region – moreover similar to most italian human landscapes - where: the cities and the villages (especially in their historical centers) are characterized by an outstanding spatial quality; vast portions of the open spaces, both natural or exploited for agricultural uses, are well set, maintained and already considered as parks, either by being formally protected or by being in fact used as leisure areas and therefore included within public and private actions of informal attention and care, responding to a more and more pressing demand from inhabitants (insiders) and “users” like the tourists (ousiders); several fringe areas like those between the built centers, their peripheries and the countryside, the borders of the infrastructures, the industrial settlements, the areas surrounding shopping centers are dramatically lacking in terms of spatial design. The case study is of particular interest, for the presence of two of the major cities of the Po valley, emerging from a system of medium sized and small cities, and where different entities are overlapping to create a complex layered landscape: • a bundle of infrastructure belonging to the “long and fast” network of European corridors, intersecting just in the middle of the area; • a thick network of “short and slow” regional railways conceived and built in the years 1850-1930s; • historical paths across the Alps (via Francigena); • a system of parks along the rivers and other unique protected areas like those of the morainic landscape around Ivrea, the Baragge, the remains of the planitial forest emerging from the rice fields nearby Trino, Ticino river, Groane Park, the agricultural park around south Milano and others; • close connections with Unesco sites (vineyard landscapes, Sacri Monti, the candidate site of Ivrea and Olivetti); • canals for irrigation and energy production (with the monumental Canale Cavour among all); • strongly structured agricultural landscapes (rice fields, orchards, vineyards); • important super-places like factories (Pirelli in Settimo Torinese), shopping malls (Settimo Cielo, Vicolungo Outlet), logistic poles, Malpensa airport, Fiera Milano and the Expo 2015 site. Considering the fact that the whole system, including the infrastructural network is today mature and complete in terms of infrastructure and settlement, the whole Region can be considered as an ideal ground of action, to improve its spatial quality by enhancing a system of inter metropolitan parks, well innervated in terms of accessibility. There is a concrete opportunity to re-connect and rethink the whole landscape, by producing a new kind of public inter metropolitan “Central Park”, considering the infrastructures and the in between left-over spaces as the most meaningful places where to intervene, even with light projects based on the improvement of the existing physical asset. To achieve this goal, two main perceptive and design approaches are proposed, to re-think of the role of the infrastructural system as a positive element of a complex human landscape: • to consider the landscape of infrastructures as it is perceived by travelers moving along it and by the inhabitants of the crossed territories improving in both cases their experience; • to improve the spatial quality of the places of interface between infrastructure and its environment (natural, agricultural and built) like the “banks” of the highways and railways, the stations on the regional railways network and the service areas placed along the main road and highways and to be considered as gates to this system of parks. • To consider the Torino Milano Region as a place of experimentation of a new kind of inter metropolitan park is possible, also considering that the event of the Expo 2015 in Milano has produced, as a positive legacy, some landscape design approaches and solutions (waterway through the Groane Park, parks and other linear open spaces around the site) that could be applied to other, somehow similar, areas like the logistic poles of Novara, Biandrate or Abbadia di Stura, the Vicolungo and Settimo Cielo shopping malls and others. As a framework, to support this idea could also refer to recent developments of the idea of smartness, extending it from the urban scale to the regional one, by experimenting the use of the ICTs and of specific digital services in marginal places as a tool to integrate the traditional spatial design actions, so to create better living conditions and contribute to better relationships between people and places

De-Sign Environment Landscape City Atti

La VI Conferenza Internazionale sul Disegno, De_Sign Environment Landscape City_Genova 2020 tratta di: Rilievo e Rappresentazione dell’Architettura e dell’Ambiente; Il Disegno per il paesaggio; Disegni per il Progetto: tracce - visioni e pre-visioni; I margini i segni della memoria e la città in progress; Cultura visiva e comunicazione dall’idea al progetto; Le emergenze architettoniche; Il colore e l’ambiente; Percezione e identità territoriale; Patrimonio iconografico culturale paesaggistico: arte, letteratura e ricadute progettuali; Segni e Disegni per il Design e Rappresentazione avanzata. Federico Babina, architetto e graphic designer presenta ARCHIVISION, e Eduardo Carazo Lefort, Docente dell’Università di Valladolid e Targa d’Oro dell’Unione Italiana Disegno la Lectio Magistralis. The VI International Conference on Drawing, De_Sign Environment Landscape City_Genoa 2020, deals with: Survey and Representation of Architecture and the Environment; Drawing for the landscape; De-signs for the Project: traces-visions and previews; Margins, signs of memory and the city in progress; Visual culture and communication from idea to project; Architectural emergencies; The color and the environment; Perception and territorial identity; Landscape cultural iconographic heritage: art, literature and design implications; Signs and Drawings for Design and Advanced Representation. Federico Babina, architect and graphic designer presents ARCHIVISION, and Professor Eduardo Carazo Lefort-University of Valladolid and Gold Plate of the Italian Design Union presents his Lectio Magistralis

Urban food strategies in Central and Eastern Europe: what's specific and what's at stake?

Integrating a larger set of instruments into Rural Development Programmes implied an increasing focus on monitoring and evaluation. Against the highly diversified experience with regard to implementation of policy instruments the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework has been set up by the EU Commission as a strategic and streamlined method of evaluating programmes’ impacts. Its indicator-based approach mainly reflects the concept of a linear, measure-based intervention logic that falls short of the true nature of RDP operation and impact capacity on rural changes. Besides the different phases of the policy process, i.e. policy design, delivery and evaluation, the regional context with its specific set of challenges and opportunities seems critical to the understanding and improvement of programme performance. In particular the role of local actors can hardly be grasped by quantitative indicators alone, but has to be addressed by assessing processes of social innovation. This shift in the evaluation focus underpins the need to take account of regional implementation specificities and processes of social innovation as decisive elements for programme performance.

Urban Metabolism and Construction & Demolition Waste. Life Cycle Assessment as a tool to support the territorial regeneration

The present research thesis aims to lay the foundations for the development of a model capable of supporting environmental assessment linked to the regeneration of the territory, through the union of two components: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and wasted landscapes. After a first definition of the field of research investigated, which has as its object urban ecosystems in relation to the metabolic flows that cross them, the instrument of LCA is introduced. LCA is born in the industrial field as a tool for assessing the environmental impacts related to the life cycle of products and services and can also focus on individual phases of this cycle, such as that of Waste Management (WM). This tool is linked to individual products, but in recent times, some research topics have investigated the possibility of extending it to one or more activities that characterize the functioning of the territory, in order to give life to a LCA of territorial nature. A first analysis of the territory is conducted through the concept of ecosystem health, that is translated from the ecological to the urban field in order to qualify the urban health from an economic, environmental and social perspective. Through a combination between Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and Geographic Information System (GIS), the territory can be classified according to its level of urban health. Three different perspectives have been considered: “vigour”, “organisation” and “resilience” and according to this framework, a system of indicators has been developed, identifying their territorial distribution. The application provides a subdivision of the Metropolitan Area of Naples (MAN) and the Focus Area (FA) contained in it in different zones with various degrees of resistance to risks and vulnerabilities. The main experimental application of the present research is the use of the LCA tool to evaluate the impacts related to the management of Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW) flow, integrated by a Life Cycle Costing (LCC) model. CDW crosses both Campania Region and the Focus Area (FA) selected within the Horizon 2020 project called “REPAiR - Resource Management in Peri-Urban Areas: Going Beyond Urban Metabolism”, to which this thesis is linked. Subsequently, it is introduced a second vision of territorial nature that concerns the territorial outcomes of Urban Metabolism (UM) linked to urban and peri-urban life cycles, which, by exhausting the available resources, generate not only waste, but also wasted landscapes (wastescapes). Wasted landscapes can be, as it will be seen in the following chapters, of various kinds and the attention is focused on the portion of territory characterized by the presence of abandoned industrial buildings. By identifying the abandoned buildings of the FA, a second experimental application examines the case study of the former Rhodiatoce factory, for which, through a calculation model, CDW deriving from a building renewal process is assumed. The same LCA model that was used to assess the impacts of the total flows produced in the Region and in the FA, is used to verify the environmental impacts related to this scenario at the construction scale. This approach represents an exemplification that could be repeated in relation to all the other abandoned industrial buildings, in order to assess the environmental and economic impacts linked to their regeneration. Definitely, the idea is to present a new utility attributable to LCA and to lay the foundations for the creation of an evaluation model which allows to make the decision making phase linked to the regeneration of wasted territories more aware

Rain(e)scape. La presenza dell'acqua come ordinamento e figura. Il caso degli Stagni di Levante a Ostia

L’area degli Stagni di Levante a Ostia è un territorio bonificato che presenta un elevato rischio di alluvioni: una piana sulla quale si stende un tessuto disomogeneo di case unifamiliari, un paesaggio orizzontale a bassa densità privo di servizi e di verde attrezzato. Nel PRG l’area è definita “nucleo non pianificato o spontaneo”, ma confina a nord con tessuti edilizi pianificati. L’unità di ricerca ha messo in connessione queste due differenti tipologie insediative, introducendo elementi di verticalità e mixitè funzionale in un territorio altrimenti orizzontale e monofunzionale; nel contempo, ci si è posti altri due obiettivi: qualificare la corposa componente di verde agricolo e risolvere il problema dei frequenti allagamenti, determinati dalle piogge stagionali sovrabbondanti.Stagni di Levante in Ostia is a reclaimed area with high risk of flooding: a flat territory where is an inhomogeneous fabric of single-family houses, a low-density horizontal landscape devoid of services and public green areas. In Urbanistic Plan (PRG), the zone is defined as “unplanned or spontaneous nucleus”, but it borders to the north with planned districts. The research unit has connected these two different types of settlement, introducing elements of verticality and functional mixité in a horizontal and mono-functional area; at the same time, the project aims to characterize the huge mass of agricultural soil and to solve the problem of frequent flooding, determined by the overabundant seasonal rains