¿METRÓPOLIS DISPERSAS?

Urban sprawl has become, today, the topic theme of the speech for anyone who wants to debate the problem of urban groth; a problem on which disciplinary, political and institutional interest has been concerning for long. This interest mostly corresponds with the statistics (EEA, 2006) which confirm that: 75 percent of European people live in urban areas; more than a quarter of European territory is urbanized and, responding to many realistic valutations, in 2020 approximately 80 percent of European people will be living in urban areas. It’s a long, still open range of investigation where this tesis has been placed on, purely occurring in response to the consciousness that knowledge, in urbanism, is a planning and cognitive action at the same time. Therefore, the research deals with the “sprawl problems” within a metropolitan urban ambit, giving answer all the following questions: What is sprawl settlement and, above all, how does it deal with territorial ambit? Is it to consider as a new periphery, or, merely, as a sort of urbanization plan resulting from a limited urbanistic praxis turned to be a pure, building license regularization? Moreover, what kind of instruments and action strategies should have to be provided in order to really answer all the questions about settlement sprawl using within the metropolitan context

Formal property rights in the face of the substantial right to housing

This paper explores the dichotomy between formal property rights and use value of rights in the field of the right to housing for homeless people, focusing on the entitlement of the squatting practices to claim the collective rights in the public domain. This collective claim can be considered an alternative to the ‘traditional’ conception of the public property as 'exclusive' domain of State. In the cities of Southern Europe, urban space has become an ‘object’ of contention by groups of inhabitants, who are organized at various levels, and an object of claiming – through illegal (although not illegitimate) forms of occupation of public or social private properties – the right to housing as primary expression of the broader ‘right to the city’. Starting from the evidences emerging from the informal practices of reappropriation of spaces (occupied spaces) in the case study of Palermo, the aim of the paper is to demostrate that the use value is applicable in the housing field through the lens of the right to the city. The self-help housing practises suggest a “third way” in the theoretic interpretation on the right to housing, overtaking the division between natural rights and legal rights

Shopping malls as pseudo-public spaces. The shopping mall as an emergent public space in Palermo

Much has been written on the role of public space in contemporary societies, and many scholars agree that public space today is a controversial and arguably critical concept. It may actually seem that even the basic idea of what is or should be ‘public’ is experiencing a deep and troublesome reconsideration, as new forms of privatization slowly but firmly erode its fundaments. Within this conceptual framework, this paper aims at critically analyzing the idea of public space today, with particular attention to the idea of public space as a shopping mall. Characteristics of the Italian way of using shopping malls, and their social and spatial consequences, are investigated and analyzed through case studies in Palermo

The Green System and the Reticular Approach in the Italian Planning Instruments

During the last decades, the importance of Urban Planning’s role to safeguard green areas and to build green chains gradually increased. The latter played not only an ecological function to requalification the city’s environment quality, but it becomes also an occasion to find social space. In particular the approach changed, from a quantitative to a qualitative point of view. The first procedure reaches to achieve a minimum standard while the second one aims to satisfy ecological and environmental necessities. The overcoming of a wrong punctual approach and the use of a new reticular one has origins in territorial scope where the new model is used to maintain and improve the ecological network. The latter encourages the ecological exchanges within different natural areas, which in this way, are not converted to island, avoiding a massive loss of species, both plant and animal (Bennett, 1991; Forman, 1995; Jongman, Pungetti 2004). The transposition of the ecological network into an urban dimension led to the green chain beginning. This new model is not completely implemented by regulations even if often it has been part of the urban planning practices (Angrilli, 2002; Peraboni, 2010). In the present proposal paper a dissertation about the different approaches to the green chain is proposed. Indeed the instrumentation of Italian local planning has undergone transformations in the form and the substance: from the structure of Master Plan (PRG), planning instrument legislated by LUN 1550/42, to a new form plan carried out in Municipal Structural Plan (PSC), Urban Building Regulations (RUE) and Municipal Operative Plan (POC) and legislated by innovative laws of regional planning

Analisi interpretative per il riconoscimento delle connessioni ecologico-ambientali nei territori trans-frontalieri dell'agrigentino e delle isole maltesi

Il volume contiene gli esiti della ricerca Remasi indirizzata alla realizzazione di una rete transfrontaliera sui temi della conservazione e valorizzazione delle aree di interesse naturalistico sia come “rete immateriale” di scambio di informazioni e buone pratiche, sia come “rete materiale” di interconnessione ecologico-ambientale dei siti di interesse naturale

¿Metrópolis dispersas?

La cuestión de la dispersión urbana constituye hoy un tema de investigación alrededor del cual se ha ido concentrando el interés disciplinar y político-institucional. Tal interés encuentra su respuesta en datos estadísticos (EEA, 2006) que confirman que: el 75% de la población europea vive en áreas urbanas; más de un cuarto del territorio europeo resulta urbanizado, y según las estimaciones en 2020 aproximadamente cerca del 80% de los europeos vivirá en áreas urbanas. Es un campo de la investigación todavía abierto y sobre el cual este trabajo de tesis ha querido reflexionar, siendo consciente que en urbanismo el conocimiento es una acción cognitiva y, al mismo tiempo, proyectual. Por lo tanto la investigación afronta el tema de las urbanizaciones dispersas de ámbito metropolitano pretendiendo dar respuesta a las siguientes preguntas: ¿qué es la dispersión de asentamientos? Y, sobre todo, ¿qué produce en términos territoriales? ¿es una nueva periferia o simplemente se trata de urbanizaciones que resultan de una praxis urbanística que se ha limitado, en el mejor de los casos, a ser una regulación del derecho de edificación? Y además ¿A través de qué instrumentos y estrategias de acción se pueden dar respuestas concretas al tratamiento de la dispersión de asentamientos en el contexto metropolitano? Abstract: Urban sprawl has become, today, the topic theme of the speech for anyone who wants to debate the problem of urban growth; a problem on which disciplinary, political and institutional interest has been concerning for long. This interest mostly corresponds with the statistics (EEA, 2006) which confirm that: 75 percent of European people live in urban areas; more than a quarter of European territory is urbanized and, responding to many realistic valutations, in 2020 approximately 80 percent of European people will be living in urban areas. It’s a long, still open range of investigation where this tesis has been placed on, purely occurring in response to the consciousness that knowledge, in urbanism, is a planning and cognitive action at the same time. Therefore, the research deals with the “sprawl problems” within a metropolitan urban ambit, giving answer all the following questions: What is sprawl settlement and, above all, how does it deal with territorial ambit? Is it to consider as a new periphery, or, merely, as a sort of urbanization plan resulting from a limited urbanistic praxis turned to be a pure, building license regularization? Moreover, what kind of instruments and action strategies should have to be provided in order to really answer all the questions about settlement sprawl using within the metropolitan context

La dispersione insediativa nei sistemi territoriali costieri

I territori costieri, luoghi di frontiera sotto il profilo fisico e gestionale, sono stati oggetto negli ultimi anni di un rinnovato interesse disciplinare. In particolare il saggio affronta il tema delle ricadute che la dispersione insediativa ha comportato in termini di trasformazione dei caretteri del sistema insediativo costiero

Da “luoghi” di scarto a “spazi” di innovazione. Piani e politiche per i territori agricoli periurbani

Concerning the new post-metropolitan area, the peri-urban territories, also due to the vagueness of their structural components, have become po-lisemical and plural places. From border areas between urban and rural functions, they have turned into integration places dealing with those two functions, getting out indeed their own plural identities. They are unsteady places, not even urban and no longer rural; border areas not only in spatial and administrative terms but also as regard a conceptual profile, which – such as a mosaic where settlement, agricultural and environmental systems interact and coexist- ask for clarification and mutuality reformulation between populated areas environment and open territory. The progressive intensification of populated areas in peri-urban context has generated on the one hand heterogeneous forms of settlement characte-rized by a quite clear low density and spatial fragmentation; on the other hand, in the setting up interstices we are able to find such a resisting areas that have been built by portions of territories characterized by the presence of natural emergencies, wide free areas and agricultural soil traditionally worth in terms of production, social and not least ecological-environmental value. It is from these resisting areas where to start running again in order to set up a brand new project for the peri-urban territories as to overcome the traditional carelessness on open territories planning. The future of post-metropolitan territories will be a great challenge both for planning and for the protection of peri-urban environmental and landscaspe values, particularly on those marginal and intersticial agricultu-ral areas that represent a very large share of territory. This paper aims to suggest a general remark on some key issues that urban planning will be facing up to renew its own tools and paradigm of action so as to recognize the common but sometimes latent values of peri-urban agricultural areas able to get back the alliance between agriculture and city over the new postmetropolitan context

Le urbanizzazioni disperse nei contesti metropolitani europei: aspetti teorici e questioni metodologiche

Il saggio, a partire dal percorso metodologico di una ricerca sul fenomeno delle urbanizzazioni disperse, affronta questioni teoriche e metodologiche più ampie relative alla ricerca urbana e territoriale