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Review over the

integrated course in Urban Planning and Design

June 29/ 2009

Arch. María Clara Restrepo Tirado

Territorial Analysis Urban Planning

Prof. Gabriele Pasqui + Prof. Patrizia Gabellini

Politecnico di Milano

Architecture and society Faculty

MSc Urban Planning and Policy design

2009

The integrated courses of urban planning and territorial analysis, worked as complementary lessons

between their own contents and the urban design workshop. The variety and interesting themes treated

went from definitions to real practices over planning on the contemporary cities and context.

The Territorial analysis section was basically facing the fields of socio economic dynamics, urban

anthropology, urban ethnography. Lots of things can be said about which is the best way to organize space,

and architects have designed all through history cities with different positions over how should they be like.

Even now, in the post-modernity [sometimes even called post-contemporary] world we`re living in, there is

this group of “scientist + artist + politicians + citizens + studious” that have as mission pay attention to the

city as a whole, to think as a community and make decisions in the name of entire populations, that is

planning the future. For the course there were very important concepts, that not only were repeated but

stressed by the different “special guests”, some of this concepts serve now as key words to understand the

relationship between space and socio economical dynamics, and how the decisions of planners [named

projects, plans and policies] affect, in the everyday life, lifestyles and livability over the space.

Mobility-immigration-proximity-propinquity-participation-conflicts-knowledge-flows-implication-tendency

The urban planning section was a space in where, from a pragmatic point of view, and having always as

background the workshop of urban design, we could realize and listen to practitioners and experiences of

different approaches, not to the theory of the planning but to the daily execution of the urban planning.

This themes were supported by the case of Projecting Bologna, as a study case, where we could appreciate

the several times called “…most successful example in Italy” of the multiple approaches to what a city is

now. As the center of the discussions there was always the question of what does it mean to be a planner

in the contemporary [sometimes even called post-contemporary] and globalized world, with such intricate

and complex urban realities. It was important to have in mind always the “explosion” through which the

city went after the crisis of the industrialization, and that the main and most determining product of this

explosion was SPRAWL. This reality, form, new urbanity, process, is accepted and visualized in the last

decades as dangerous and negative practice over the concept or traditional urbanism. But the truth most

be said and the city is the expression of what the society is, and it is not a helpful thinking to deny the

changes. We as planners and even as academics, have to find the new answers, in the complexity we have

created, to improve the quality of life of the people, as much in urban, as in suburban, and even in

whatever rural is now.

The fact is that the city as physical space, the city as socio economical construction and node of flows –

networks, and the population itself, can’t survive isolated. One can’t exist without the other one, just as in

the URBANITY there is always man and its constructions as the center of the whole discussion.

"” “Man is the measure of all things:

of things which are, that they are,

and of things which are not, that they are not”

Protagoras (ca. 490– 420 BC)

- what is Contemporary City?

As every time of history has its own characteristics and features, the cities of this times expose different

sorts of shapes, ways, people. The spaces were more than 60% of the world population is living now

became in the last decades immense conglomerations of people, with endless kinds of lifestyles and every

time less links with physical spheres. The concepts of Urban and Rural, with their respective dynamics, that

during the last century the planners and urbanist tried to developed and clarify, become everyday more

and more blurry, at the same speed that the technology in communications and globalization processes

advance. The drastic changes on the economy [production modes, from local to global, from the products

to the services] and the appearance of so many types of knowledge and sciences are obviously affecting

the space, because whether we want to accept it or not, we are still physical matter and most of us still

behave like animals, individually and socially. The tendency towards individual more than social realization,

the strong segregation on the difference [economically, ethnographically, sexually, to name a few] and the

absurd pluralization and acceptance of the identities, could be the main dynamics pushing the changes not

only in the ways the people approach to the spaces and use them, but the way the spaces are design and

conceived on the paper by the architects and planners.

The first human communities felt the need of leaving the signs and traces of their lives, of their pass through

earth, and they printed their fingers on the caves, trees and stones: on the things that composed their

homes and environment. It was a way to remember themselves who they were, how to live and what was

important. Probably they never thought we would now read it as a document for history, as a way to

understand them as individuals and societies, as much as we read our contemporary landscape to try to

understand our reality. Drawn on several walls all over the world, there is the fingerprint

of a society that expresses how to pass time [live]. Just as them, WE, contemporary men and

women, with all the weight of history after world wars, revolutions, inventions, constructions and

destructions, became now such a large, wide and complex “global community” and are forced in this time

to make a stop on the way, and ask ourselves and the rest:

What are we doing?

What does it mean?

How is it that we got to it, and how are we going to sustain it?

IS IT WORTH IT AND RELIABLE TO KEEP IT THAT WAY?

Fingerprints on the landscape: Lascaux caves (France, 15.000 b.c. aprox.) – Suburban graffiti (France, 2005)

- How strong are the relations between dynamics and

landscape?

In the fields of the contemporary city, where there are no more recognizable boundaries, a city with no

beginning and no end, full of complexities and diversities, the landscapes are as complicated as the

dynamics. In any case, the age of a city can be read on its patterns and shapes, and specially after the

modernity, on its peripheries in where although the development happened not so long ago, the changes

have more dramatic and deep, because of the speed of the changes in the constitution of society and

economic processes. At the start of this spatial organization, periphery was the scenario for the “extra

communitarian” activities in the European city, in which the uses that were not acceptable to have inside,

were placed. In the meanwhile, the American cities were developing a model in which the urban life was

not so pleasant, and the people started following the green peripheries, outside but not far from the urban

core. It didn’t take so long for the European city to follow this pattern, and the soils that used to have

specific uses as rural territories and/or industrial settlements, were invaded by residential areas, looking for

low prices, green areas and new life styles. All this movements are still going on, and actually the cities are

starting to weak up and wonder where is that we can live better, because if the movement and

development of the cities occur is always looking for a better place.

The shapes and patterns of the post industrial city, the hyper- fragmented by the infrastructure land, the

monopoly of the private mobility, the multiethnic cities without strong identity, mixed with the over

regulated space and the power of “communications mass media”, the invasion of the global multinational

enterprises that belong everywhere but nowhere, the lack of power of the local administrations and the

incapacity of the planners to read the whole picture, could really make us define the model of sprawl city as

the end of the urbanity, but the truth is that the reality has always been complex and should not be a

reason to stop interpreting the changes and creating new solutions in the always evolving URBE in which

we have to keep co-living.

From our perspective as planners, from where we have the opportunity to think of the community as an

entity, we have to be the conscience of it. Always asking why the dynamics happen and which are going to

be the consequences, not only on the urban shape and image, but memory, ecology, and sustainability for

the future generations.

The definition of sprawl inscribes a

sense of disaster over the traditionally

urbanity concept. It has been defined

as anti-urbanity, and “the end of the

city”.

Against the continuous spread of the

urban stains over the territory, the

cities formulate different responses,

trying to recover the value [as

imaginary and monetary] of the urban

soil. In this processes of re-densify the

urban centers and recuperate the

traditional urban cores, one of the

responses of the cities all over the

world has been the use of architecture

of author, as a way of marketing and

selling the city as a good, and the new

developments as interventions over

the landscape, with most of artistic

value. The big design firms and famous

designers are always interested on

having “the white liens” of the city to

draw on it their dreams, and as they

are very well recognized, to have the

opportunity of proposing, running the

risk of making deep and expensive

mistakes over the experimentation

field…