City Design and sustainability. Could Italy lead the way?

As city design plays an increasingly fundamental role in making our living, working and urban environments more sustainable, this paper aims to discuss the role of cities in achieving more sustainable development. The first step is to clarify what we define with the word sustainability and how this concept evolved from the 1970s to our days, widening its meaning and extending its range to everything that is related with better quality of life. Furthermore, this paper argues that quality of life is tightly intertwined with quality of spaces. Building on top of this assumption, this paper analyze the role of cities in achieving sustainability. UN statistic forecasts reveals that future world’s population will be ever more urban, therefore sustainable development will becoming increasingly related to cities growth. Cities are actually key assets in order to achieve sustainability in terms of environmental preservation. But what about quality of life? The paper compares how sustainability is applied with different approach in the US and the Italian context and why. Finally this article argues that Italy has an incredible know-how and an extraordinary cultural heritage related to city-making. Know- how derived from the 1950s experience of building public funded neighborhoods around historic cities. Still today some of these neighborhoods stand out for quality of architectural and planning design. Ultimately, Italy, strong of its extraordinary heritage has the chance to lead the way, moving the concept of sustainability to a higher meaning that embraces quality spaces and quality of life

From highways to boulevards, from roads to streets

Urban traffic and transportation plans have the potentials to become more comprehensive planning tool for the urban environment. Starting from analyzing the UK context that created a framework of well-established tradition in urban street design, and the US recent tradition of tearing down highways and form based codes, this paper aims to underline the potentials of urban transportation plans when approached as innovative planning tools, able to create and build a more complex, integrated, thriving urban environment. These plans can actually support other planning tools, create a different urban landscape designing new grids and new systems, reducing space for vehicular traffic and connecting new green and pedestrian infrastructures to the existing public realm. They can also link land uses and transportation policies, selects a variety of transportation means to access the city that can actually help specific urban contexts to develop a mix of uses. Innovative transportation plans have the potential to create new urban geographies, different from traditional hierarchy of spaces and roads. Cities all over the world are facing traffic congestion problems and are investing in their transportation systems. This is due fundamentally to increasing rate of urbanization across the globe. Millions of people cluster in mega metro region, challenging the existing infrastructures and policies related to transportation. This document will focus on the impacts that transportation and traffic plans can have on the public realm. Different approaches to transportations issues If the vehicular traffic volume increases and the existing infrastructure network cannot keep up with it, the easiest solution is to build a new highway or to expand the existing one. Obviously, this kind of approach does not take into account environmental sustainability and apply a short-term strategy that can provide an immediate but temporary release to the problem. Nevertheless, many cities are still pursuing this strategy to solve their traffic and transportation issues. In other cases, the new infrastructures are built not to accommodate vehicular traffic but instead, to expand public transportation systems. Cities are increasingly investing in special buses routes, light rail and subways, but also car sharing and vanpooling. In both cases, the city’s officials have to roll out general master plans to coordinate their investments. If building infrastructures is a common strategy to solve mobility issues, in some cases it is true the opposite. Seoul, Portland and recently San Francisco, just to cite some of the most famous examples, have decided to tear down their highways; at least the ones that affected in negative ways the proximate surroundings. The torn down highway was outplaced by a park in Seoul and Portland and by a smaller urban boulevard in San Francisco. Still, we argue that despite the objective benefits of these kind of interventions, the rationale behind them is not so far from what brought the highways. The approach is always the same one: build an infrastructure, perhaps greener and more attractive, but still an infrastructure that is often disconnected and isolated from the existing, exactly like the one that was there before. These kind of interventions are the result of a way of planning that proceeds with extraordinary, isolated, episodes more than reconsidering the whole system of networks and open spaces that constitute the public realm. Traffic and transportation issues are just the tip of the iceberg of the urban environment that every citizen experience in their daily navigation of the city. Here we argue that traffic and transportation plans should not take into account the traffic fluidity and public transportation capacity only, but have the breath to redesign and improve the public realm as a whole. The UK and US context The country who invested the most, in terms of planning quality public spaces, is no doubt the United Kingdom. Its urban planning re-known past makes this country one of the most advanced in terms of street design. In England, every new development and project has to follow some basic principles in order to achieve quality public spaces and well-designed streets. There are manuals1 that will indicate the best practices and the right methodologies to curate every single detail of the streetscape, from the lamppost to the pavement size and materials, the storefronts design and the colors nuances options. Crossings, as well as the traffic signs have to respond to a certain standard of quality. Transportation and traffic plans have to compel to these rules and integrate them within their design. In America, cities are built around cars and the streetscape is too. Most of American cities presents highways juxtapose to smaller neighborhood-scale boulevards and streets to connect the different suburbs to the main thoroughfares. There is little attention to the street’s design because there is actually few people using those streets. Streets are considered just necessary strip of asphalt, useful to travel from one place to another

The Blossom Avenue. For better human living

I progetti che questo libro illustra raccontano la storia di dieci anni dell’attività di Marco Facchinetti e Marco Dellavalle; dieci anni in cui la progettazione architettonica e urbanistica sono profondamente cambiate. Attraverso il percorso illustrato dei tanti progetti elaborati, questa raccolta si interroga su come siano cambiate urbanistica e architettura, partendo dai presupposti iniziali e leggendo oggi quale evoluzione si sia compiuta. L’evoluzione della pratica urbanistica, attorno alla quale tutta l’attività dell’operato degli autori si muove, verso la scala regionale in Italia ha significato moltissimo, ed ha cambiato almeno in certe regioni l’attitudine allo sguardo verso le dinamiche di trasformazione delle città. In dieci anni di attività, il quadro comunale, seppur riformato e seppur trasformato come è stato in Lombardia, con il passaggio dal vecchio piano regolatore al piano di governo del territorio, non è stato capace di uscire da alcune logiche e alcune dinamiche non necessariamente positive della nostra storia. L’enfasi sul programma e sull’ansia da programma che il piano comunale comunque porta con sé, la consapevolezza che dopo il bilancio del comune è l’atto pubblico di maggior rilievo per un’amministrazione comunale, hanno permesso in tutti questi anni di non sentirsi spogliati di una pianificazione intermedia che in realtà in certi contesti (come la Lombardia) ha persino perso ulteriore potere, e di non sentirsi privi di certezze nel non aver riformato con la stessa attenzione tutta la strumentazione attuativa, chiave necessaria per la realizzazione delle previsioni. L’urbanistica che ne è conseguita è stata particolare Anche l’agenda dei temi è cambiata in questi dieci anni: l’enfasi ambientale e l’attenzione alla sostenibilità hanno informato di sé molta parte della pianificazione e della normativa edilizia, fino a diventare un tema strutturante la pratica della pianificazione; ma i risultati non sono quelli che ci si sarebbe attesi di vedere, almeno diffusamente e almeno non dappertutto. Senza dubbio, l’enfasi sulla sostenibilità non ha permesso di ridurre il consumo di suolo e di puntare a un modello di sviluppo differente, e non ha imposto regole edilizie come invece in altri paesi della Comunità Europea da anni sono realtà. L’attenzione al potenziamento infrastrutturale ha assorbito la riscoperta, tardiva per l’Italia, della necessaria presenza del ferro e dei servizi su ferro, ed ha in qualche modo reso condiviso il fatto che è meglio concentrare attorno alle stazioni piuttosto che costruire senza infrastrutture, ma contemporaneamente i contesti comunali sono ancora assorbiti dal risolvere esigenze più di base, come la presenza del traffico nei propri centri storici, la carenza di politiche che connettano l’uso dei parcheggi ai servizi e al commercio presente negli stessi paesi, o la scarsa efficienza dei servizi di trasporto pubblico su gomma per poter assorbire così profondamente canoni più evoluti da riformare il disegno del piano in generale. Le politiche insediative in dieci anni hanno aggiunto qualche tema nuovo, come la necessaria presenza di edilizia convenzionata o a prezzi calmierati, ma in molti contesti le stesse politiche insediative non sono state così efficaci dall’affrontare la problematica del recupero dei centri storici a vantaggio della salvaguardia del territorio o, più profondamente, la necessità di rivedere l’offerta insediativa a seconda del tipo di contesto, evitando il ripetersi brutto e monotono di villette e piccoli condomini; complice il passaggio tra regolamenti edilizi e strumenti di pianificazione dedicati allo spazio costruito incapaci di parlarsi. In questo contesto complesso, l’attività di Marco Facchinetti e Marco Dellavalle si è mossa, con grande dinamismo, nel proporre piani e progetti realmente incisivi e capaci di modificare, almeno localmente, la realtà, costruendosi attorno a due parole chiave: il disegno e l’attuabilità. I progetti illustrati, e le riflessioni che questo testo propone ragionano attorno alla capacità dell’azione della progettazione di incidere, attraverso l’uso del disegno e attraverso un percorso corretto ed efficace di attuazione, sulle realtà locali, puntando alla costruzione di scenari evolutivi nei quali il progresso dei contesti garantisca produzioni virtuose di territorio, nuovi episodi di urbanità in contesti spesso slabbrati e nuovi modi di valorizzare l’esistente. Perché l’azione di progettazione sia sempre evolutiva per i contesti ai quali si applica. Marco Facchinetti e Marco Dellavalle collaborano da dieci anni e insieme hanno fondato The Blossom Avenue, un marchio presente in Italia e negli Stati Uniti, capace di contraddistinguere l’attività di progettazione di Fda International in Italia e di F&D Projects negli Stati Uniti. Marco Facchinetti, architetto, insegna Urbanistica al Politecnico di Milano e come visiting professor in alcune università americane mentre Marco Dellavalle, urbanista, collabora con diverse amministrazioni locali in Italia

From urban fringe to regional hub: re inventing Milano Porto di Mare - Exercises from Urban Plans Studio - School of Architecture at Politecnico di Milano

This book is about the results of the Urban Plans Studio course, first semester of academic year 2015 / 2016 at Politecnico di Milano, School of Architecture, held by Marco Facchinetti. The aim of the course was to learn urban planning theories and techniques, studying recent and most contemporary urban transformations around Europe and US. Urban transformations became, since decades, a way of reinterpreting the existing cities, focusing on the unique value of living within the city and its boundaries. In recent years, after a first wave of changes that followed the end of extensive industrialization in western world cities, and not mentioning the early attempts to re invent cities through urban renewal programs (and simultaneously not considering how they failed in many cases), urban transformations became one of the tools that urban planning has to re invent cities. By themselves, they reinterpret the concept of scale, they create a different balance between interior and exterior of urbanized areas and they become new occasions of ‘urbanity’ even where relations and distances are not at an urban scale. Learn how students developed their analysis and their projects, opening interesting and unexpected views over the future of the area and the relations between city and region

From city to region. Transformations and the urbanization of the metropolis

This book aims at understanding if recent transformations in our cities are creating new typologies of urban regeneration or transformation processes. New emphasis on downtown areas, extending the daily life of many central places, new ideas for the retrofitting the suburbs, some new attempts in regional planning and consolidated experiences in transportation networks are bringing to our attention a new way of interpreting the relations between cities and regions and some new geographies in the organization of urban regions. The research published in this book investigates on the last 15 years of attention on cities, asking if it has produced new typologies of urban environments, linked to regeneration and transformation of some parts of the city. Can we say that downtown re birth or suburbs retrofitting are creating new typologies of urbanity so recognizable to become a specific chance for all consolidated cities? It tries to understand if this process of re thinking some parts of the cities brings to a new way of reading and planning large cities: are relations between downtowns and suburbs so different from the past to be able to restructure the cities into regions, made by episodes of urbanity not necessarily in or close downtowns? Are recent transformations so structurally urban to be able to consider urbanity as main value and to spread it around less dense regions? The book answers to these questions proposing a manifesto for better planning urban regeneration processes for those transformations able to reconnect differently urban characters to regional cities. The manifesto proudly starts from Italian culture and practice in place making and urban transformations planning, rediscovering some rules and ideas able to propose a different approach to space design. Reading some of the most well known principles and ideas, the manifesto proposes a way of understanding and planning regeneration processes finding a new way of considering “urbanity” as a value for all the transformations around a region

Resource-aware Cyber Deception in Cloud-Native Environments

Cyber deception can be a valuable addition to traditional cyber defense mechanisms, especially for modern cloud-native environments with a fading security perimeter. However, pre-built decoys used in classical computer networks are not effective in detecting and mitigating malicious actors due to their inability to blend with the variety of applications in such environments. On the other hand, decoys cloning the deployed microservices of an application can offer a high-fidelity deception mechanism to intercept ongoing attacks within production environments. However, to fully benefit from this approach, it is essential to use a limited amount of decoy resources and devise a suitable cloning strategy to minimize the impact on legitimate services performance. Following this observation, we formulate a non-linear integer optimization problem that maximizes the number of attack paths intercepted by the allocated decoys within a fixed resource budget. Attack paths represent the attacker's movements within the infrastructure as a sequence of violated microservices. We also design a heuristic decoy placement algorithm to approximate the optimal solution and overcome the computational complexity of the proposed formulation. We evaluate the performance of the optimal and heuristic solutions against other schemes that use local vulnerability metrics to select which microservices to clone as decoys. Our results show that the proposed allocation strategy achieves a higher number of intercepted attack paths compared to these schemes while requiring approximately the same number of decoys

Online Fall Detection using Recurrent Neural Networks

Unintentional falls can cause severe injuries and even death, especially if no immediate assistance is given. The aim of Fall Detection Systems (FDSs) is to detect an occurring fall. This information can be used to trigger the necessary assistance in case of injury. This can be done by using either ambient-based sensors, e.g. cameras, or wearable devices. The aim of this work is to study the technical aspects of FDSs based on wearable devices and artificial intelligence techniques, in particular Deep Learning (DL), to implement an effective algorithm for on-line fall detection. The proposed classifier is based on a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model with underlying Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) blocks. The method is tested on the publicly available SisFall dataset, with extended annotation, and compared with the results obtained by the SisFall authors.Comment: 6 pages, ICRA 201