Learning objectives
The course objective is to consider the experimental character of the modern urban planning project. The three courses that comprise the Laboratory (Urban design, Theory of urban planning, Urban redevelopment) are structured as different points of view around a common work objective: to examine the possibilities of innovation in town and land planning. The Laboratory is based on two research hypotheses: the first is the need to study in detail the cognitive role of design in transforming space and modern society, starting from three different dimensions: descriptive, representative and demonstrative. The second concerns the potentials offered by reworking those long considerations on the modern town that emerge, often implicitly, in urban planning matters, debating the traditional categories of interpretation of urban space. Countryside, suburbs, and city centre seem, in fact, to be inadequate or insufficient terms to determine shared, useful images for describing modern areas. In recent times, large portions of land and established city have been the subject of significant, radical changes that have affected, more than the physical space, the strategic role, symbolic value and the population for which they were originally designed. The basic ideas behind modern urban planning, such as continuity, regularity, concentration and balance, are today replaced by others such as fragmentation, dispersion, and process, which have greater levels of identification and more widespread acceptance. Concepts such as space, density and elements have lost some of their significance in the modern city. By considering the design project, we will therefore work towards a reinterpretation of technical tools, theoretical foundations and the very nature of urban planning
Course unit content
Creating scenarios for a territory often means taking on a depository of descriptions, interpretive images and “images of the future” produced by others in the past: planning, design, studies and research constitute an important background for scenario builders, a background against which to place his or her own project and a useful means of comparison; but also a strong pre-existing basis that is sometimes rooted in the imagination of the field (or even collective imagination) and against which it could prove difficult to offer alternative images. This is the case with the area around Parma, that portion of the Po Valley in the Emilia region that is bounded by the Po River and the foothills of the Apennine mountains, a 50 km square area whose centre is the city of Parma: an area that has historically been structured in strict relation to the course of the Via Emilia and which, in the last 20 years, has not only seen the urban spread of Parma along the primary historically-key routes (Via Emilia, Cisa state road 62, Massese state road, Val d’Enza state road), but also widespread urbanisation, particularly in the towns around Parma and those in the Po valley. Phenomena harbingers of typical sprawl problems: negative impact on the environment and natural resources, traffic congestion, problems in organising social services, public transport and road maintenance; in certain specific contexts, other indications include space conflicts between “urban” productive activity and agricultural and zootechnical production. In this key moment in which the Province of Parma, through the recent PTCP (regional coordination plan), has set the goal of preserving overall environmental quality in order to safeguard the agrifood sector by proposing to «rationalise and upgrade the sprawl of complexes with the goal of building a different, polycentric structure for the region”, it could prove useful and fruitful to observe the dynamics described above in relation to the two main types of structure and territorial structure which, over time, have contributed to the urban planning debate in the Emilia region. Two development models that are contradictory and, in certain ways, coexistent: the first, based on the interpretation of the Via Emilia as a linear city, recently reiterated by Richard Ingersoll in his Roadtown E-R proposal and tending to be reinforced by planned new infrastructure projects (the TAV high speed railway in the process of construction, the Cispadana highway between Parma and the Po River and the Pedemontana between Parma and the Apennines, both parallel to the Via Emilia); the second based on the urbanisation of settlement routes that cut across the Via Emilia. The re-interpretation of these “images of the future” left within our cognitive heritage and accepted images within this field, represents the starting point for carrying out a project that takes into consideration alternative settlement forms which, taking on environmental sustainability and safeguarding of the region as its primary goal, is able to answer the demand for quality of life implicitly expressed by those who have chosen and who, in the future, could continue to choose, to live in the expanded Parma urban area. As part of the learning experience of the Urban Planning Laboratory, students are invited to contribute to the creation of a scenario - The Emilian Green City - that represents an alternative to the one that tends towards a gradual urban densification and concentration along the Via Emilia. Planning activities will therefore be oriented on the basis of a precise research hypothesis: what would happen if, hypothetically, the Via Emilia were to be rotated 90 degrees? What if around the current north-south rail route that connects the Po with Parma and Parma with the Apennines, a new settlement area were developed that could provide a different answer to quality of life compatible with environmental and countryside priorities, as well as urban ones of efficient transportation, accessibility and availability of services that currently form the basis of the phenomena of sprawl and breakup of the countryside? Region-wide planning, from its very inception, has defined as its goals the decongestion of the Via Emilia and the bases for settlement expansion. In the last thirty years, many regional north-south lines have been affected by urbanisation phenomena that find a basis in the Roman “centuriazione” divisions. The transformation of agricultural land as a result of the implementation of extensive cultivation has removed many of the pieces that comprised the regional underpinnings of planting in the Po Valley. A vast heritage of farmhouses, hamlets, service infrastructure, and livestock raising has become obsolete from the standpoint of practical use-value, while maintaining significant geographic potential. These are the materials on which to plan a model of a green city, an alternative to the congested linear city along the Via Emilia. These are the points along which to trace the hypothetical rotation of the Via Emilia. The Emilian Green City is the hypothetical city which starts from the complex environmental system of the River Po, crosses the infrastructure belt of the Via Emilia (Via Emilia, Milan-Bologna train line, A1 motorway, TAV), enters into the centre of Parma and ends finally at the park of the Taro River and the foothills of the Apennines. The Emilian Green City is the city of ecological lifestyle and agrifood production which combines environmental protection and improvements with the basic values of mass lifestyles (privacy, individualism, self-production, ecology, environment). The Emilian Green City is built along the rail line comprised, on one side, by the Suzzara-Parma and Brescia-Parma lines (built along the ancient Via Francigena) which, starting from the main banks of the Po River, cross the territory of the Parma plain, characterised by the traces of what remains of Roman “centuriazione” and Po Valley cultivation, connecting the small town centres of Boretto, Brescello, Sorbolo and Colorno with the city of Parma; on the other side is the Parma-La Spezia line that from Parma crosses through the Apennine foothill area, skirting the Taro River park and connecting the urban centres of Collecchio and Fornovo with the poorer villages in the Apennine foothills and Apennines themselves. In the Emilian Green City , the rail lines become more closely anchored to the region, move more slowly, increase the number of stops and runs, thus enhancing their role as local transport and becoming a public, ecological metropolitan transport system that guarantees alternate utilization of the territory than that provided by road transport . An infrastructural axis that provides an alternative to the Via Emilia, not only in the means of transportation but also, and above all, for the areas it reaches and the perception of the countryside it offers. In the Emilian Green City the train stations, the stops in the new rail-based transport system, become points of contact and connection both with existing urban centres and the countryside: farmland characterized by a widespread local transportation route based on historical land divisions. It is in these points of contact that local and superlocal services will be located: the stations become actual, multi-functional complexes that host a variety of heterogeneous activities, thus creating multiple, new centres spread throughout the area. The rail system infrastructure is also a metaphorical infrastructure that supports a city made up of sections situated in relation to variable connections, links defined as-needed on the basis of resident habits. The Green City represents symbolic added value for the European Food Safety Authority (Efsa), which is to be located in Parma: within the territory of the Emilian Green City agrifood businesses and their employees will find conditions favourable for locating, working and living there. As it extends away from the Po River, the Emilian Green City will cross through changing landscapes and a range of urban situations that will change as needed through forms of settlement, construction types and different project strategies. In that area currently occupied by the banks of the Po River, there is the opportunity for a project to redevelop the landscape and once again take advantage of this body of water as a means of communication, and its banks as an element to enhance the landscape and leisure activity. The Po also represents a potential urban expansion area: using new construction technologies, landscape organisational models can be developed that aim towards a new type of engineering and territorial protection and organisation of the agricultural irrigation network. In the reclaimed areas of the Emilian plain, the Emilian Green City wends through the historical countryside of the Po Valley planting system, a potential source of self-production and bio-diversity to recover the heritage offered by the farms and rural structures which, over time, have lost their function as watchkeepers of the territory, but which today offer a new way of living in small communities in contact with nature and just minutes away from major urban centres. Through the reclaiming of this heritage, new synergies can be built, injecting and redefining the pervasive phenomena of urban sprawl which, over the last two decades, has characterized this zone. Moving south, the Emilian Green City will reach Parma, the capital city of the province, entering into it through the Parma River which, within city limits, flows for a distance of 3.5 km (from the railway overpass to the Dattaro bridge), varying in breadth from 60 to 170 metres to occupy a total surface area of approx. 40 hectares. The riverbed, flanked by two wide strips of vegetation during dry periods, could become one long, large park that extends from north to south through the middle of the centre of Parma. Further to the south, within the “pre-park” area along the Taro River and in the foothill belt of the Emilia Apennines, the Emilian Green City crosses through an area where agrifood production forms the nucleus of its activity and could offer opportunities for new residential expansion design for low environmental impact: the individual isolated dwellings could produce the thermal and electrical energy they require themselves, exploit passive and active capture of solar energy, collect rain water, recycle in biomass thermal centres part of their waste and dispose of that remaining using phyto-depuration systems. Thanks to new communications and informational systems, these ecological dwelling units would incarnate all the hopes and desires of citizens living in over-extended cities: here the major part of daily activity would be located. Here, newly-planned road systems (such as the new Pedemontana road as an alternative to the Via Emilia) can become the vectors for upgrading the countryside: Emilian parkways , to be used to cross through and lend form to the Green City. The various projects that will be produced are designed to feed debate on what the future could look like—perhaps less likely than other options given the context of a study project—but they aspire nonetheless to contributing to reflection on how living space issues in our territory today are approached.
Bibliography
Will be given during the course
Teaching methods
During the second term, students are asked to develop a project on a portion of territory and relating to a subject that is coherent with the scenario of the Green City including the landscape variations proposed. The urban planning project is intended here as a design project that takes into account the physical transformations of the territory, acquiring the physical dimension, the world of objects, as a deposit, the result of practices, lifestyles, economies and symbolic representations. At the core of the urban planning project lies the contemporary territory, a complex geographic support that requires new cognitive strategies, new ways of describing and designing; that requires being walked through, observed and designed at different levels. The urban planning project is no longer conceived of as being characterised by one single design form, but rather by a set of design forms. Often intended as residual and implicit expressions of the city design (the design forms governing quantity, density and distance) or as seldom used (the design of infrastructural networks or the soil thickness, the design of emptiness), these forms overall allow for a radical consideration of contemporary living space. Students approach the project by getting used to experimenting with new cognitive and representational techniques for the territory; combining reading of the technical maps and statistical data to other forms of physical surveys of the territory, mixing territory analysis phases with project phases, getting used to moving up and down different observation and design levels. Texts, sketches, photographs, photomontages, films, conceptual relief models and multimedia presentations are the instruments provided in the laboratory. Refer to the Laboratory syllabus
