ECLAS CONFERENCE GHENT 2018 Landscapes of Conflict

Producción CientíficaThroughout the twentieth century, Friuli Venezia Giulia, the north-eastern region of Italy that borders Austria and Slovenia, played a strategic wartime role. From the Great War to the Cold War, the installation of defensive works including barracks, fortifications and infrastructure distinguished the territory. A significant rationalization in the territory and modification in the organizational structure of the Armed Forces took place from the end of the Cold War, through the EU expansion to the countries located on the north-eastern border of Italy, and up to the Army’s transformation from conscription to voluntary service. The town of Casarsa della Delizia represents a case of important significance due to the presence of the “Trieste” barracks, a settlement of extensive and significant environmental impact, a part of which has not been used for years, becoming over time a landscape-abandonment issue, on which action is needed. The paper focuses on the proposals to recover this former military area as a new integrated part of the city, merging the necessity of saving the past heritage and developing a new landscape vision, bringing together the historical and contemporary ways of living and promoting urban regeneration complex operations.European Joint Doctorate “urbanHIST”. European Union. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 721933

Abandoned army barracks in Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy) as a potential for new time-shaped community landscapes

Producción CientíficaThe dismantling of the Italian Army Barracks in the Norther-East of Italy in the last 20 years has left a series of wide abandoned areas. In these places, nature has freely operated as a designer, creating new transitional landscapes in the places devoted to protect the Italian borders during the Cold War. We could talk about ‘auto-regenerative’ landscapes. This paper aims to illustrate briefly the process-making of this kind of unconventional landscape over the second half of the XX century in the Region Friuli Venezia Giulia through different scales of intervention that have activated multiple spatial relations over the time. This exceptional infrastructure-based landscape, sized-up by the Italian Army necessities, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has been reconfigured and gradually abandoned, becoming almost completely unused from the year 2000. Authors propose a reading of these derelict spaces and formulate possible new scenarios of sustainable regeneration and inclusive reintegration that aspire to promote a kind of open project to return them, as a social pay-back after more than 100 years of militarization, to the Friuli Venezia Giulia communities

Green Belt of Brescia, Lombardy. From Resilience Strategy to Sustainable Planning in Practice.

The paper focuses on the methods on which it is built the planning strategy for the ‘Parco delle Cave’ (Park of Pits) in Brescia (Lombardy, Italy). This research, begun in 2010 thanks to the insights offered by a master\u27s degree thesis, in February 2016 led to the approval of the variation to Plan of Government of the Territory of the City of Brescia. The authors, at the time, respectively, supervisor and author of the thesis ‘Park of Pits, from protest to proposal\u27 have gradually followed the different stages of approach to the proposed variant through a real multidisciplinary action. The argument that the study and promotion of the realities present in the Brescia area would give a sum of positive values such that they would automatically lead to a virtuous model for the creation of a territorial landscape system has proved partly correct and partly not. At the moment, this large area represents a great solution of continuity in the ecological green belt that surrounds Brescia, not allowing the basis for the correct development of a natural habitat hosting biodiversity and blocking the completion of town outskirts greenway. This research indicates in the ‘Parco delle Cave’ (Pits’ Park) as the necessary ring to complete the Brescia green belt that includes the ‘Parco delle Colline di Brescia’ (Brescia Hills Park), the linear park of the River Mella, and a strong vegetal system along the South Brescia highway (proposed also)

The “Vite Maritata” as a Landscape Catalyst. The Grapevine as Part of Edible Greenways

The grapevine on living trellises, or “vite maritata” in Italian, is an ancient grape growing technique that uses, instead of poles, trees as support for the grapevine to climb. Conceived by the Etruscans, it was a common element in the Italian rural landscape until the 1960s. As an agronomic practice, it has been abandoned mainly because of the ceasing of the socioeconomic forces that drove its expansion, summarized by sharecropping. Today, in evaluating the natural ecosystem and environment, we have the theory of ecosystem services as a powerful tool. This theory states that ecosystems impact human well-being. This impact affects four different categories that group the various services provided by ecosystems. These four categories are provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting. The grapevine on living trellises provides services in all four categories, with precise services regulating microclimate and supporting wildlife (Bigliardi, 2021). The linear arrangement of the grapevine on living trellises in the urban landscape could function as a helpful green infrastructure for wild species of animals and plants, but of course, also for human beings, contrasting territorial fragmentation and promoting biodiversity. As a greenway, it can be a source of recreational spaces and slow mobility and provide substantial food resources, becoming the protagonist of an edible landscape (Fabris, 2010). The Metropolitan City of Milan possesses already a substratum of dismissed railway yards that, united with the renovation of the Navigli canal system, define a favourable environment for the design of this kind of greenways that can contribute to the “ForestaMI” Reforestation Plan of the Lombard metropolis (Boeri, 2021). Moreover, the “vite maritata” fits well with this situation, being acclimated to the climate of the Po valley

GREENWAYS IN AN EMERGING CITY CONTEXT: A UTOPIA OR A CHANCE FOR INNOVATION?

Greenways today represent an already diffused practice in great part of the contemporary cities’ planning policies. This constantly growing phenomenon is undoubtedly due to the multiplicity of beneficial effects that they successfully exercise within different urban environments. The present paper aims to explore their potentialities inside a relatively new type of cities’ contexts, namely the emerging ones. Factors like rapid urbanisation and mobility fluxes intensification put under hazardous pressure one of their most vulnerable systems – the green one. That is why its timely reinforcement and integration could play a crucial role in contrasting the negative trends of cities’ ecological asset progressive fragmentation and deterioration. Furthermore, greenways will be examined in a broader perspective, that goes beyond their territorial dimension, conceiving them as important catalysts for cultural and ethical urban evolution

Greenways as a New Potential for Shrinking Cities. The Case of Milan (Italy)

The paper aims to illustrate the transformation of Milan, focusing on its relationship with (urban) greenways. At the beginning of XXI century Milan was deeply converted into a mere service industry centre. The change modified also its territory. Brownfields took place of industries and logistic compounds, places without a use dotting its urban fabric. In the 1970s, visionary architects, planners, and landscape architects started to design a series of parks surrounding the town, creating a green crown fading its outskirts. North Park and South Park together with Boscoincittà (Wood-in-town) created a continuous green curtain setting the basis for a circular greenway. In the 1990s some studies, including the PhD thesis ‘Post-industrial Green’ by one of the authors and the academic research ‘Metro-Bosco’ by Stefano Boeri, demonstrated how Milan, while becoming a shrinking town passing from 2 million to 1.6 million inhabitants, could be transformed in a town where districts could be connected through green corridors. These theories, even if they had good dissemination and were widely published, actually didn’t become real as Milanese Administration imposed an anachronistic policy based on the developing of new neighbourhoods, trying to ‘sprawl’ a city that actually was decreasing. This proposal however bore a series of radiant green corridors starting in the centre of Milan (Raggi Verdi -Green Rays, a project by LAND, 2005). In the second decade of the new Millennium, it was clear that Milan had to accept to decrease, enabling at the same time a way to foster the quality of life for its citizens. In the last five years, the new Administration’s policy encouraged the abandoned areas requalification (actions ‘Re-shaping Milan’ 2015, and ‘Re-shaping Milan’, 2018-ongoing, developed with the Politecnico di Milano), and asked Italian Railways (Trenitalia) to ‘give back’ to the town six unused railways-yards encrusted in the city territory. This request, endorsed also by the common people - asking more and more green spaces and slow mobility in the town-, became real with the visionary plan “Fiume Verde” by Studio Boeri Architetti (Green River, 2016). This proposal designed a net of inner green corridors able to increase deeply the city green surface. In 2018, the first international competition to transform two railway-yards has been launched. One will be a linear park, the other will host the widest Milanese public park). The first concrete milestones for a green-way transformation of Milan

How 15-min City, Tactical Urbanism, and Superblock Concepts Are Affecting Major Cities in the Post-Covid-19 Era?

Producción CientíficaThis chapter analyses three strategies proposed to redefine current urban policies to deal with issues inherited from the contemporary city evolution. The case study analysis focuses on applying the concepts of 15-min City, Tactical Urbanism, and Superblock in global cities such as Barcelona, Shanghai, and Milan. Have these cities changed the urban environment and mobility patterns dealing with health, social, and economic inequities? Which have been the impacts of urban regeneration, governance, and inclusion towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 11, emphasizing the need for inclusivity and equitability in urban areas? These questions find the answer in three main aspects. First, the regeneration of the existing built environment; second, short-, medium-, and long-term governance issues; third, the concerns about the possible risk of gentrification. An introductive part explains the adopted methodology, follows an analysis of the three case studies, and, eventually, remarks on what we learned. Two are the primary outcomes: a comparison between different global cities and diverse ways to deal with the impacts of people-centered solutions for urban environments and an evaluation of 15-min City, Tactical Urbanism, and Superblocks feasible solutions for sustainable urban transition

Challenges of recovery and resilience: ArhiBau.hr 2022 scientific conference proceedings

Producción CientíficaSince introducing the new urban planning instruments in 2012 – Piano del Governo del Territorio (PGT) – Milan has commenced a new approach to the definition of its urban environment, the services availability, and the redevelopment of the public spaces. The PGT aims to improve citizens’ and city users’ life quality by implementing various tools addressing the contemporary urban agenda’s ecological, mobility, and cultural challenges. In particular, Milan is trying to align with the global metropolitan vision of the 15-minute City concept and to cope with this objective by applying traditional tools (long-term planning process) and smart city strategies (tactical urbanism). In a context of an emerging global ecological and socioeconomic crisis driven by the pandemic and the war, this paper aims to evaluate the PGT ten years after its introduction by interrogating how public spaces have changed in quantitative and qualitative terms and the perspective for 2030 goals introduced by the PGT update in 2020. Green corridors and tactical urbanism plans may be an interpretative key to illustrate elements of success, weakness, and threats for the future development of the metropolitan city

The chinese ‘high and slender’ condominium

The vertical dimension in the urban structure of Chinese megacities is the unique key that has allowed to cluster millions of people in highly concentrated areas. The exponential growth of Chinese cities since the ‘80s of the last century has been possible thanks to social and land policies in support of urbanism developed through models of constructions that have favored the vertical dimension alone. The essay, after having retraced the history of vertical urbanization in the Chinese metropolis, puts a critical emphasis on the typology of the Chinese condominium

Urban Voids After the Pandemic. A New Chance for Greenway

Our proposal deals with the meaning of urban voids in the post-COVID-19 period to suggest new understandings of how urban green corridors can positively affect design for healthier and more sustainable cities. According to Secchi (1986), planning through the void involves a profound revision of the way we think about the city, reversing the points of interest, proposing as polarities the spaces that do not usually emerge. The void thus becomes an opportunity, a chance to improve the structure of our urban landscape (Lopez-Pineiro, 2020). A city is a powerful place, always in motion and transformation. It has an artificial spirit full of surprises and vague limits. It is the scene of remarkable transformations that in their wildness are partially ungovernable by the designers themselves. The desire to control them leaves a series of abandoned and unfinished spaces, “holes” that live from their discontinuity with the surroundings (Labriola, 2021). During a period of crisis, like the one that we are still living with COVID-19 (Fabris et al, 2020), it is common to re-think our cities to create better places for the community. After the long period of forced distance that we lived, an evolution of public space is recommended. During the pandemic, the emptiness of our cities permitted Nature to re-appropriate its spaces. Following this trend and thinking about a new kind of public space where Nature and its inside processes are the protagonists, it is possible to intervene in our cities. The porosity of the urban fabric in towns without humans, blocked at home by the never-ending lockdowns, became a new green corridor that revealed the presence of wildlife (both fauna and flora) as part of a forgotten urban layer that turned visible again. The preservation of this new asset should be possible. The spaces to allow this change can be the abandoned and empty areas present in the contemporary city’s sick body that we can finally heal. The so-called wastelands, voids, or terrain vague, have a significant value independent from the environment in which they are inserted, showing a relationship with the contemporary city extraneous to its rhythms. For this reason, they are the perfect place for experimentation in terms of greenways, a possible starting point to re-think how green can be part of the urban texture and how to conceive public and open spaces after the nowadays crisis. The paper considers the Metropolitan City of Milan as a remarkable case study to understand the pivotal role played by urban voids in the formation of greenways and their capacity of reshaping the environmental, aesthetic and healthy dimensions of urban landscapes