An advanced design approach to support urban transformations through multi-stakeholder collaborations

Urban transformations depend on the uses of the city by “old” and new citizens (residents, workers, migrants, refugees, students, seasonal, homeless individuals, tourists, city-users, commuters), and on their relation within urban spaces and resources, triggering regenerative opportunities, networking and empowerment processes. Considering the city and its heritage as a common good, in which each citizen could access and play for the knowledge, management, conservation and transformation of urban contexts, the contribute illustrates the results of experimental actions in Bologna (IT) finalized to test new stakeholder engagement processes and to develop new tools for participatory practices and new productions for the reactivation of the city. In the last years Bologna represents a field of experimentation for different forms of collaborative approaches with the aim to test and innovate tools and policies for the public space. The paper presents the results of specific projects linked to EU funding schemes (ROCK project) and local multi-stakeholder initiatives, such as the Bologna Design Week, which are part of the research and experimentation carried out by the research unit team. This article illustrates a model to improve the regenerative capacities of the city, by reinforcing local identity and culture, fostering participation through active engagement of all relevant stakeholders, allowing a diversity of responses of groups of actors with different roles and different strengths

Research-Action-Research Towards a Circular Urban System for Multi-level Regeneration in Historical Cities: The Case of Bologna

Urban regeneration is a key topic in Europe as cities are asked to propose efficient actions for the transition toward a more liveable system. The singularities and specificities of each city urges for a flexible and multi-scale approach able to face and combine a mix of cultural heritage, social and economic constraints, climatic and architectural specificities. In order to work toward the definition of site-specific and flexible methods, the ROCK project investigates how to move towards a Circular Urban System Model to be applied to historic centres. The paper presents the concept and the pilot actions undertaken in Bologna to build a site-specific approach enabling local stakeholders to collaborate toward the definition of action plans for the transition into sustainable systems of places. The project adopts a multi- level methodology to create links among key areas, resources, stakeholders and tools in order to re-circulate local values for their valorisation and enhancement. The paper describes the elaboration and the research-action-research initiatives as results of Bologna\u2019s University area experimentations, deepening the relation among public spaces, local stakeholders and social exchanges. In particular, it presents the first experimentations of the project into this area: The Living Lab approach and co-design experiences

An advanced design approach to support urban transformations through multi-stakeholder collaborations

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Heritage-led ontologies: Digital platform for supporting the regeneration of cultural and historical sites

The increasing application of digital technologies to cultural heritage (CH) is wide and well documented, including a variety of tools such as digital archives, online guides and HBIM repositories. Several vocabularies and ontologies were designed to order heritage data and make CH more accessible and exploitable. However, these tools have often focused on a particular dimension of CH producing high value in separate sectors (e.g. access to conservation of historic buildings and data valorisation for restoration of heritage assets) but lacking ways for adapting or replicating the model to urban complex systems. Moreover, many studies and tools show large effort in cataloguing and archiving, but less in providing tools for designing and managing. The ROCK platform, developed within the Horizon 2020 (H2020) funded project ROCK (GA 730280), addresses the need for a management and interventionoriented interoperable tool, aimed at storing, visualizing, elaborating and linking data on cultural heritage. The use of already existing ontologies was not sufficient for developing a tool to deal with the complexity of urban systems and heterogeneous data sources. Instead, a participative methodology was set in place for the development of a context-based semantic framework to define the needs and requirements of heritage-led regeneration actions

A conversation on a paradise on earth in eight frames

Once known as the city of silk, Suzhou 苏州 has become the centre of wedding dress production, selling paradise on earth for one day, including copies of the last royal wedding dress, out of shops at the foot of mythic Tiger Hill. Suzhou is also the host of what is known as the Silicon Valley of the East. It has attracted millions of migrants searching for a better future; millions of tourists visit every year to experience the past, strolling through the gardens and courtyards of its Old Town. The contrasts could hardly be more apparent. Slow time, and fast time, and the time of the in-between, are woven into the city’s complex spatial fabric. This is a conversation by eight authors in eight frames on a city that connects them

The Matter of Future Heritage

In 2018, for the first time, the University of Bologna’s Board of PhD in Architecture and Design Culture assigned second-year PhD students the task of developing and managing an international conference and publishing its works. The organisers of the first edition of this initiative – Giacomo Corda, Pamela Lama, Viviana Lorenzo, Sara Maldina, Lia Marchi, Martina Massari and Giulia Custodi – have chosen to leverage the solid relationship between the Department of Architecture and the Municipality of Bologna to publish a call having to do with the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018, in which the Municipality was involved. The theme chosen for the call, The Matter of Future Heritage, set itself the ambitious goal of questioning the future of a field of research – Cultural Heritage (CH) – that is constantly being  redefined. A work that was made particularly complex in Europe by the development of the H2020 programme, where the topic entered, surprisingly, not as a protagonist but rather as an articulation of other subjects that in the vision of the programme seemed evidently more urgent and, one might say, dominant. The resulting tensions have been considerable and with both negative and positive implications, all the more evident if we refer to the issues that are closest to us namely the city and the landscape

The Measure of Turmoil: on Albrecht Dürer's Monument to the Vanquished Peasants

Dürer’s Monument for the Vanquished Peasants (1525) has presented itself as an interpretative enigma. Some have seen it as an act of mockery, as an attempt to discredit the misery of peasant life. Others interpret its forms as a passionate endorsement of the peasants’ cause. We are not interested in making another, even more precise interpretation of this design, in order to discover what Dürer might have really wanted to say. What we should ask is not “What does this monument mean?”, but “What is this monument capable of doing

The Architect as Producer: Hannes Meyer and the Proletarianisation of the Western Architect

With the foundation of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius advocated an end to the division between arts and crafts. Contrary to the idea of architecture as art, the programme of the school aimed to assimilate architecture with industry in order to satisfy collective social needs. Yet, despite this programmatic declaration, such a project was realised only after Gropius’ departure from the Bauhaus, under the controversial directorship (1927–1930) of the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Meyer achieved unprecedented success both in terms of academic production and financial performance. Yet his realisations were paralleled by the leftist radicalisation of the school’s politics: Meyer transformed the workshops into factory production units and the students into industrial workers. Eventually, the politicisation of the school cost Meyer his office and a negative reputation in historical records that still holds today. This article posits that Meyer achieved his success at the Bauhaus not despite his radical allegiance, but precisely because of it. The realism of Meyer’s strategy is evaluated through his capacity to anticipate many developments in the organisation of architectural production. In particular, his critique of intellectual labour in architecture is confronted with the contemporary proletarisation of architects in the Western world