UnNatural

UNNATURAL TERRITORIAL RELATIONS BETWEEN CITY AND NATURE

NICOLA CANESSA

UNNATURAL TERRITORIAL RELATIONS BETWEEN CITY AND NATURE NICOLA CANESSA

Published by Actar Publishers, New York, Barcelona www.actar.com

Author Nicola Valentino Canessa

Collection n-cities Director / Manuel Gausa

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ISBN: 978-1-948765985

Publication date: March 2021 Special thanks: Manuel Gausa Gic-Lab DAA-UNIGE UNIGE _ University of Genoa DAD _ Department of Architecture and Design

01. UNNATURAL _ introduction 7

Artificial landscapes 02. INNATURAL _ nature and artifice 11

Urban multifunctional natures |Perceptions

of a new landscape

03. RENATURAL _ new natures 21

Regeneration for new communities |

Re-discovering “Urban Nature”| Natural based solutions | Natural trajectories

04. UNNATURAL _ Liguria case studies 43

Albenga | Tigullio | 5Terre

Ge-coast | Ge-Forts | Ge-Valleys

05. POSTFACE

by Manuel Gausa 167 The Oak and the Reed.

Imposing Cities vs. Resili(g)ent Cities

Fig. Photomontage Challenges to plastic gardens, NCV (2021)

01.

UNNATURAL introduction

Artificial landscapes

When we think of nature, we think of something uncontaminated, sometimes even a little wild. A space of discovery and also of rediscovery of ourselves, where we go to recharge our energies. Even entering a forest of chestnut trees, we feel as if we are becoming explorers again, discovering new places never explored before. In reality, we are following in the footsteps of someone else, often that forest has been planted and made to grow by someone in order to recover the fruits in a controlled manner. We consider incredible and rightly worthy of protection environments such as the Cinque Terre, which are an emblem of human anthropization, the ability to shape the territory in order to make the most of its characteristics and survive within it, from the houses overlooking the sea and terraces in the mountains you have to feel the tunnels that cross everything is part of a wise game of give and take between nature and man.

The parks of our cities are spaces that have been shaped to enjoy the presence of nature within the built environment, but they are more or less all an artifice. Take Genoa, its two parks in the city center are one built on a quarry of stonemasons inside the city, then born from a process of renaturalization by Barabino, while the other Baltimore Gardens also called Plastic Gardens, are the result of a short-sighted reconstruction after the demolition of an entire

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district of the historic center to make room for a new business center that has never really taken off and where the park is located on a concrete slab that covers the junction between urban and interurban roads.

The natures of our cities are therefore very often unnatural.

This being unnatural, does not make them less interesting or less functional, on the contrary sometimes makes them more suitable for man, even in large urban renaturalization projects, we find today even more than yesterday the ability to create multifunctional landscapes able to make not only our cities more livable spaces, but also and above all places lived by people, creating convivial and sometimes even resilient spaces.

The new green infrastructures that are springing up in cities all over the world are new tools to bring man closer to nature, they are spaces that create new urban complexity and new quality.

If we think of projects such as the Higline in NewYork, Seoullo in Seoul or La Promenade plantée in Paris, these are large linear infrastructures that cross the city and that are reconverted or rather renaturalized into green infrastructures, into new opportunities for urban well-being.

But this is not only true for this type of intervention today, the collective sensibility towards environmental sustainability and therefore also towards a higher quality of life in the cities is present, and therefore it is easier on the one hand to make people understand why it is important to redevelop the cities with processes of renaturalization, reduction of dust and pollutants and create new cycle-pedestrian connections to take advantage of a slow mobility, more on a human scale.

These new landscapes are once again created by man, and therefore in any case they are artificial landscapes, we could say that they have a more or less high presence of “green” or vegetation, but they remain unnatural spaces. This is not a bad thing, unnatural spaces, we could say that they are “controlled” environments, managed and designed on a human scale. We should not hide behind a screen, we

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intervene on a landslide or on the course of a river, only when it threatens a built and inhabited environment or an infrastructure, we do not do it for nature but we do it for people and the urban or territorial unnatural.

We are resilient where we are able to see the damage that humans do to nature. This is not always good, think of the islands of plastic in the oceans, we do not see them and almost do not exist, but we should be able to take care of nature away from us that does not really mean manipulate it or make it unnatural, but have a different relationship more symbiotic.

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Fig. Photomontage unnatural terracements 5Lands, NCV (2021)

02.

INNATURAL nature and artifice

The English language gives us the opportunity to translate in two ways the title of this volume “UNNATURAL” which is certainly the most correct mental process, because it tells us of the deprivation of a previous state and the new configuration that this space takes on. But there is another term “INNATURAL” or better, as I prefer to express it “IN-NATURAL”, inside nature, or inside the natural, a way of telling and perceiving these places as part of the mathematical set of nature, but with something different, and personally I think with something more.

Urban multifunctional natures

Directly or indirectly, human beings depend on nature for the satisfaction of all their needs. Not only the vital physiological ones, such as breathing, drinking and eating, but also those less essential but equally vital to the quality of life such as recreation, outdoor activities, psychophysical balance. Although altered and threatened by the pressure factors of anthropogenic contexts, urban and peri-urban green spaces perform multiple functions of environmental, social, ecological, cultural and economic nature that make them one of the key components of urban sustainability.

They, for example, improve the microclimate of the city, mitigate air pollution, increase the biodiversity of the urban environment, are fundamental components of the landscape and its cultural

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value, make possible a healthy lifestyle, promote social relations and community cohesion, provide a fundamental contribution to urban regeneration (Sustainable Cities Observatory). There are many other functions that urban nature performs on a daily basis, with immense - and often underestimated - benefits for the quality of life in cities.

Through its function in mitigating air and noise pollution, urban vegetation indirectly contributes to reducing risks from two of the major environmental emergencies in contemporary cities. Urban vegetation can affect local air quality both directly and indirectly by influencing the surrounding atmosphere. The experience reported in the section on good practices in Italian cities is among the very first scientific applications carried out in an attempt to quantify the contribution of city trees to the mitigation of urban air pollution.

Moreover, vegetation, thanks to the photosynthetic activity and the accumulation of carbon in the biomass during growth, contributes to the fight against climate change taking place on a global scale.

Vegetation also produces benefits in terms of thermoregulation, functioning as a “natural air conditioner”. The effect of cooling the air during summer periods reduces the need for air conditioning in buildings and, consequently, also has a positive indirect impact on energy consumption, air quality and global warming. Moreover, vegetation has sound-absorbing capacity and also contributes to the reduction of noise levels. Finally, the city green spaces host a rich and varied flora and offer suitable habitats for many animal species, contributing to the conservation and protection of biodiversity.

It is direct experience and documented in the literature that green areas contribute to the quality of life in the city. Their social, cultural and aesthetic functions are recognized as crucial elements of the city’s open spaces for the possibilities they offer for recreation, socialization and leisure in the open air, as well as for the historical and cultural values they preserve and transmit. These areas are often the focus of citizens’ “desire for nature”, as well as the desire to escape from pollution, traffic and concrete.

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In addition to the best-known environmental and social functions, nature in the city is also an important resource from an economic point of view. Among the economic sectors that most directly benefit from the presence of green areas is certainly tourism, which sees in the natural/landscape component one of its critical factors for the quality and image of the services offered. Whether it is mountain or seaside tourism, summer or winter, naturalistic or in “art cities”, the quality of the environment and the availability of green areas certainly play a role in favor of the image and attractiveness of places.

The real estate market is also positively affected by the presence of green areas. In fact, they represent a considerable investment: the value of houses with gardens is higher than those without.

However, the economic benefits generated by nature are generally not easily quantifiable in monetary terms, and therefore their value remains largely underestimated. Estimating the value of environmental resources in the urban environment must address all those functions and services provided by natural ecosystems that contribute to the social and economic well-being of our cities, but which are not currently the subject of commercial transactions in the marketplace and which, consequently, have not yet been priced. This would contribute to a greater awareness of the role of green in the city and a better integration of its values in the general urban planning.

All these functions depend on a network of biochemical processes and interactions active within ecosystems, thanks to the relationships between animal and plant components and the physical environment in which they are found. In order to maintain them over time and ensure their benefits for future generations, therefore, it is necessary to ensure biological diversity in cities.

On a global level, the importance of conserving and enhancing biological diversity from the perspective of sustainable development was highlighted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. In this context, in March 2007, the conference “Cities and Biodiversity: Achieving the 2010 Target” was held in Brazil, during

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Fig. Photomontage Cheonggyecheon river Seoul, NCV (2021)

03.

RENATURAL new natures

Talking about the city today means talking about an organism capable of relating both on a local and global scale with people and/ or users, increasingly differentiated and specialized, who seek new references, seductions and experiences in the territory.

A new city is probably that which, after having elaborated its own history, is able to reconvert it into a new reading of its own spaces, in new ways, in which today’s users know how to reconfigure themselves and see the territory not only as a chain of events but as a set of clusters or specialized levels that overlap, making the urban fabric rich and moving within it fluid.

In this way, the reconfiguration of what were the urban facilities of the last century becomes a source of development of the city. Just as the reconversion of abandoned industrial areas has often been a reconquest of spaces for civil society, so too the transformation of private mobility networks in favor of public spaces and sustainable mobility can become a new urban proposition.

In this cultural context our research work as GIClab1 proposes the Mediterranean cities and in particular the Mediterranean port cities as natural laboratories of new paradigms with respect to the current dynamics, processes and needs induced and introduced by 1. Research cluster founded by Manuel Gausa of the Department of Architecture and Design, University of Genoa.

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the incessant and changing geographies of desire2.

What, in fact, most unites, in the dimension of the basin, and at the same time distinguishes, in the global dimension, the port-cities since their origin compared to other urbanity, is the definition not with respect to a positioning of buildings on the territory, but the combination and tension of and between spaces: the public square, the suk or bazaar, the baths ... public spaces strongly connoted, never exclusive product of a cultural singularity, but rather the result of the meeting and intersection of different instances and solicitations and so fundamental, in their declinations and evolutions, to define and characterize the port-cities as relational, inclusive, osmotic systems.

In today’s reality, in which these areas of relationship have long since exploded and multiplied, far beyond the definition of a single or a sum of devices, in a much more complex and focal dimension in the definition and configuration not only or so much of individual urbanity, but systems defined by their interconnection on, in, with and through the territory, conviviality has taken on value as a fundamental attribute of the logic of interaction and urban and territorial structuring.

The Mediterranean port-cities so intrinsically predisposed and implicitly devoted to this relational dialectic are configured in the context of our research as privileged theaters and amplified logical and systemic evolution of a complex space of new conception.

Landscape, environment, development in the articulation of these territories, in fact, are more than in any other reality to be compared and mediate in and between permanences, stratifications and intertwining, in a concert of pushes and resistances to change, with respect to which projects such as New Multistring City3, although developed in a specific context such as Barcelona, are proposed as strategic paradigms in the definition of new tactics in the face of the 2. Gausa M. (2009), da Multi-Barcelona. Hiper-Catalunya, List Laboratorio Internazionale Editoriale, Trento/Barcellona 3. Gausa M. (2012), da BCN-GOA New Multistring City, Canessa N.V. e Nan E. (edit), List Laboratorio Internazionale Editoriale, Trento/Barcellona

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need to combine and resolve tensions and questions of the great themes of today’s debate.

In today’s dimension where the old geographical borders, aimed at containing the new emerging city, have given way, almost suddenly, in front of the different scales of a new field of action, much more complex, elusive and vital, in which latent nuclei and consolidated nodes coexist, uncertain margins and spaces of friction, consolidated fabrics and unfinished plots, thus announcing the new hybrid and progressively ambivalent condition (between the natural and the artificial) of a new territorial urban scenario what characterizes and distinguishes the approach proposed with New Multistring City, is the will and the possibility to make concur, in the same project, simultaneously and synergistically reconversion, recovery, renaturalization, but also innovation, interconnection and hybridization, multiplication in the definition of strategies and renacturativate spaces and territories with respect to which spaces and territories become a platform for the autonomous choice of the user who can at any time not only choose and modify, but even draw and define, for his own use and consumption, according to his personal and intimate aspirations and concerns, through his own actions and feelings, new urban geographies without putting in crisis the overall system.

Today there are many projects of urban regeneration through a process of renaturalization and enhancement of nature within the city, including the rediscovery of agrarian territories as processes of urban extension and interpenetration, and among these we can consider exemplary those listed below.

Seoul, South Korea. The city’s mayor Lee Myung-bak, an enlightened and powerful man, developed a great idea in the early 2000s. The city center was flanked by a fast highway following the model prevalent in North America in the 1950s and 1960s, the famous highways that quickly bring citizens out of downtown to the huge suburbia. The decision was let’s take out this old infrastructure and put in a new one! Let’s make a big linear park for leisure, for

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Fig. Photomontage Genoa Hig-Line, NCV (2021)

04.

UNNATURAL Liguria case studies

Genoa and Liguria have always been a multi-city laboratory.

Genoa in the past has been able to experiment and transform itself, sometimes leaving indelible marks on its territory, cutting promontories or building residential geographies, often however without leaving any trace of the mutations within, other times even forgetting about them.

This was the case for the legacy of the great Hygiene Exhibition of 1914, where the Foce area was transformed into one of the most modern cities of the time, also equipped with a coastal monorail, later demolished. Today, this part of the city, rebuilt after the exhibition as a new urban junction, has its weak points of development precisely in mobility and interchange. This is an emblematic case because, like the terraces of Acquasola or those of Marmo, the many racks and public/private elevators, at the beginning of the 20th century gave an answer to a question that is now open again about the spaces and the use of the city.

Even today, the city is potentially a large laboratory where new projects, from Piano’s fresco to the transformation of the Fiera area, from the Erzelli Hub to the Ospedale del Ponente, from major urban infrastructural transformations (Strada a Mare, Subport Tunnel, new breakwater) to those with a territorial impact (Gronda, Terzo Valico, Alta Velocità, Porto d’Africa), are the reason for discussion and

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attempts at urban transformation, unfortunately with cyclopean timescales and continuous indecision.

In this sense, the theme of the relationship between port and city is enriched and, going beyond the concept of the banal reconversion of uses, invests the economic, social and territorial level of the city as a whole.

It is necessary to have a strategy of intervention that, overcoming the logic of removal, searches for a sustainable development logic for the overall growth of the city, in the exploitation of the potential that is generated by the integration of the productive reality with the urban one, identifying with a new look the relationship with the hilly and peri-urban areas.

Talking about a city today means talking about an organism that is able to relate both on a local and global scale with people and/or users who are increasingly differentiated and specialized and who seek new references, seductions and experiences in the territory.

A new city is probably that which, after having elaborated its own history, is able to reconvert it into a new reading of its own spaces, in new ways, in which today’s users know how to reconfigure themselves and see the territory not only as a chain of events but as a set of clusters or specialized levels that overlap, making the urban fabric rich and moving within it fluid.

In this way, the reconfiguration of what were the urban facilities of the last century becomes a source of development of the city. Just as the reconversion of abandoned industrial areas has often been a reconquest of spaces for civil society, so too the transformation of private mobility networks in favor of public spaces and sustainable mobility can become a new urban proposition.

The design scanner in this chapter traces a selection of projects carried out within the GIC.Lab by students in the third year urban planning laboratory courses of 2020 and by some thesis students, with the intention of reinterpreting and reinterpreting the urbansettlement structure of some localities in the Ligurian territory with an open, multi-layered and multi-scalar logic, capable of innovating

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design proposals, identifying intervention methods and sample solutions. Following a reconnaissance survey on the elements, the layout and the characteristics that constitute the founding matrix of the built environment, the road network and the public spaces, we tried to work, through the exercise of design vision, on the quality of the spaces - in architectural, functional and environmental terms - and the effects induced on living, lifestyles and the social fabric.

The traditional public spaces, which more and more often appear as labile elements of the urban form, fragmented and often subjugated to other interests, so as to make them more and more marginal and devoid of collective interest, are being replaced by the places given by infrastructures, networks, urban margins, capable of expressing new centrality in an increasingly functional logic of city management. It is necessary, therefore, to build a new linguistic repertoire that, from the scale of the landscape to that of the urban space, is able to interpret the relationships between mobility, time, collective uses and private interests.

Informational scenarios but also relational strategies of the city and of/on the territory.

Scenarios and strategies capable of selecting relevant multiple reality data, processing, recording, synthesizing and intentionally exploiting them to improve their levels of information, occurrence and their ability to express themselves and to express themselves in “operational projections”, real potentially qualitative.

Manuel Gausa would define these visions or scenarios as “multilevel” projections and forecasts of a multiple city - metaterritorial confronted more by the registration and overlapping of different relational territories than by simple contiguity and physical proximity: projections of a city constituted by an effective positioning and projections of a dynamic interregional and intermunicipal proper implementation, of a city of flows and connections and projections of a city of circuits and routes, of plots and projections of internal fabrics of a city of external margins and peripheries, of a structured city and projections of an infrastructural city. Projections

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ALBENGA

Albenga and its agricultural plain are a very particular territory, in general Liguria is all very compressed between the sea and mountains, this territorial space is the only one that is an exception.

The great Plain extends as far as the eye can see between cultivated fields and greenhouses, the great quantity of the latter makes this territory similar to what could be defined as a Glass City (Tucci).

This is a territory with new potential and even today it is a marginal place in the Ligurian logic of development. In fact it is not considered a tourist city of the coast, it is frowned upon by its inhabitants who consider agriculture as a heavy industry with little return on the territory despite the 4 DOP products that are cultivated there.

Yet the Piana is connected, unlike the neighboring municipalities the highest tourist capacity, directly to the highway and its historic center with many towers and Roman artifacts along the river would make it a very interesting hub for parking and land management. the surrounding area is even more interesting because the natural systems surround the plan creating views and trekking routes very suggestive. In the immediate vicinity also a small airport, beautiful beaches, the nature reserve of Gallinara island.

But in this context the nature, the agricultural one, is perceived as something negative and as such it is not exploited, it is not used to become a generating element not only of new landscapes but also of new urban structures of new spaces for the habitat and new economies.

In these years with Cig-lab, we have often worked on this agrarian territory, often comparing it with the Agricultural Plain of Llobregat in Barcelona. In the work of the following pages you will find the intuition to make this Plain a traversable place, to generate that connection between this artificial nature and the inhabited, to make agriculture something that is exploited both by farmers, but especially by inhabitants and tourists, to generate new economies.

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In-line to U Lab. Urb. 2019/2020 Students: Gualco, Carrossino, Ansaldi, Garzon

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Critical issues in the area

Map of the main territorial nodes

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Land use map

Map of SCIs and protected areas

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CONCEPT

MOUNTAIN SYSTEM TERRITORIAL TENSORS

FUNCTIONS

VIABILITY

STRATEGY

TIGULLIO

Tigullio is an incredible place, a constant interpenetration between city and nature, sometimes this interpenetration has had very negative effects, think of the term rapallization that for years was an indication of something extremely negative in urban building speculation and aggression of the nature surrounding the cities.

But in reality this interpenetration between city and nature between built and natural element is something much more rooted and much more qualitative. Let’s think of the beautiful villas by the sea, the roads that flank the coast, the places that are the envy of the world like Portofino.

Portofino is the emblem in the territory, but it is also the emblem that it is possible to build in contact with nature with such a high quality despite the poor materials used that it makes that building as monumental as the park in which it is inserted, the same goes for the abbey of San Fruttuoso with its arches directly in the sand.

These fascinating territories are also very fragile territories, they need care, they need innovation, they need sustainable tourism, but these territories are also a flywheel of opportunities.

Developed within the Course is to use this notoriety to make the internal territories live create natural corridors for new types of sustainable tourism.

The idea is to work as little as possible within the park of Portofino, but to expand its extension a little as was proposed in the 90s to generate a pre-park, with fewer restrictions from the urban point of view and therefore with the ability to accommodate new public and private functions, but with the ability to connect three linear systems: the mountain of Portofino, the valley that connects Rapallo to Recco, and the inland valley of Valfontanabuona, which is the valley of the slate quarries, three places with incredible potential from a naturalistic, enogastronomic and cultural point of view.

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2-Side Tigullio Lab. Urb. 2019/2020 Students: Betti, Bini, Minuto, Parisi Portofino Park Coast Paths

Park systems Trails

Costa Park systems Route Paths

Flood risk Landslide risk Fire risk

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Natural Suture Lab. Urb. 2019/2020 Students: Gualco, Carrossino, Ansaldi, Garzon

CONCEPT

MOUNTAIN SYSTEM TERRITORIAL TENSORS

FUNCTIONS

VIABILITY

FUNCTIONS

STRATEGY

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Tigullio Islands Lab. Urb. 2019/2020 Students: Chavez, Leone, Varrone

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5TERRE

Everybody in the world knows Cinque Terre, maybe more for the great amount of tourists that every year come to this territory.

This great amount of people obviously generates problems to a territory that in the last years has grown a lot from the tourist flywheel, many funds have gone for example to the recovery of the terraces along the coast of the old vineyards, giving work to many young people, and also to migrants, who have returned to these lands.

The territorial system is actually much more complex and also offers other opportunities already discovered by mass tourism, such as Levanto, Portovenere, Palmaria island, are all places that conform to the expectation of the Cinque Terre tourist giving beautiful villages perched on the sea unspoiled natural spaces, which as we have said many times are not very natural because they are completely anthropized of a nature transformed by man to be made usable, and this is one of its great charm.

The goal, a bit ‘as seen for the Tigullio, is to discover another territory, or rather give a neighboring territory the opportunity to be the door of a park, the ability to be able to find a reflex economy from that massive the coast, but above all find a way to relieve the tourist pressure on the territory through operations of recovery and reactivation of the territory.

The works of the chapter work precisely in this perspective to generate new links between the countries of the interior towards the coast, in particular, however, is interesting the thesis Nigata round trip, shown here only for a very small part, reuses these countries in the interior as real laboratories for cultural and artistic festivals taking inspiration from the Japanese festivals that transform the inhabitants of these semi-abandoned countries in real managers of territorial transformation.

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5 Lands Back Lab. Urb. 2019/2020 Students: Parisi, Parodi

MONTEMARCELLO-MAGRA-VARA NATURAL PARK PORTOVENERE NATURAL PARK 5 TERRE NATIONAL NATURAL PARK HIGHWAY PROVINCIAL ROADS

BIKE PATH

STATAL ROADS

PEDESTRIAN PATH

MOUNTAINBIKE TRAIL

PRINCIPAL PEDESTRIAN PATH

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IDENTIFY

DELIMIT

Area fitness Bike park

Gymnastic area

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LINK

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Equipped Area Bike Park Car Park Handling

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GE|COAST

The coastal system of Genoa is very particular, as it develops for about 30 km, and the city is very compressed between the mountains and the sea. Of this coast the most interesting side is certainly the Ponente side because over the years it has undergone a long process of de-naturalization. In fact since the beginning of the 1900’s with the successive constructions and enlargements of the Port, the relationship with the sea has almost disappeared, if not in small tracts, in any case between the mouths of rivers and the airport runway. This is the part of Genoa that, despite being the most industrially productive, is the one that feels less like Genoa. It is the one where the inhabitants still say let’s go to Genoa, as if they were still at the time before the unification of Greater Genoa at the beginning of the twentieth century.

These delegations need respect, they need new projects to be reborn and to manage their relationship with the coast, the water and the port.

Over the years with Gic-lab, we have worked several times on these territories and many of those projects have already been published, so in the following pages five projects for five different stretches of coast will be represented.

All the projects work in a similar way, although very different from each other, that is to say, new natural infrastructures that work in exchange with the urban context, becoming stitches or new limits.

In one case a bridge building, in the other the covering of the railway that passes through the heart of the neighborhood, in the other a new green infrastructure that covers a high-speed road and that, by positioning itself in an elevated position, gives the Sampierdarena municipality a view of the sea. A not dissimilar approach in the project of reconversion of the elevated road that passes in front of the sea in the historical center transformed in a big highline and instead in the Foce district the road is buried to give back an accessibility to the sea on the Eastern mouth of the Port.

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Green Wave Lab. Urb. 2019/2020 Students: Archetti, Molinari, Oneto, Sobrero

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playground

theater

resturant

elastic net

didactic garden

market

fitness

walks

bike sharing

benches

performance shadow place

playground

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boat depot

parking

GE|FORTS

Genoa is a strange city, if you look at a plan of the municipal boundary you will see that 40% of the territory is covered by vegetation, and that all the territory beyond the northern boundary is still a predominantly mountainous natural territory.

These mountains that crush the city of Genoa against the sea can be the greatest resource of the coming years. In fact these are a great green lung for the city, today practically unused by the citizens, if not in this period linked to covid-19 that has further facilitated the rediscovery of this urban portion.

On these mountains are located the fortresses that protected the city of Genoa from the sea and from the troops that arrived from the north and are part of the great outer walls.

It is several years that the city is looking for ways to reactivate the system of forts and today and even planned a cable car, as in Barcelona, to connect one of the closest. It is not true that these forts are so disconnected, there is a historical train that runs along them at a lower altitude and a funicular system that partially guarantees their accessibility.

The work of the laboratory focused on how to make these natural areas perceived as more urban and thus reconnect the forts to the city. In particular, systems of paths were designed a new perimeter accessibility through public and private means that would generate new access points in order to multiply the perception of belonging in the various delegations that are located the two valleys Polcevera and Bisagno. Another work was instead to connect the system of forts of Ponente with that of Levante in order to make them a unitary system from a tourist point of view.

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Fort Ring Lab. Urb. 2019/2020 Students: Baroncini, Fertonani, Fossati, Sacchi

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Missing links

Border “Parco delle Mura”

Park Gates Metropolitan sistem

Centers around the park Slow road

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Main roads Roads Existing hiking trail Funicular/Train Existing Station Intersection hiking network New public connection New cable cars New hiking trail New metro line New station

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GE|VALLEYS

Genoa has in its valleys its true urban structure of an enlarged city, of a true system of connection and distribution, and this is true on two scales, both when we speak of the Polcevera and Bisagno Valleys, and when we speak of the small valleys of minor waterways or those now completely covered by the city.

Of the latter, we will see only one example, that of a small project of urban reconnection in the city center with the connection of two very particular parks, two artificial parks, the one of Acquasola built by Barabino on an urban quarry, and on the other side the Baltimore Gardens, known as Plastic Gardens, built in the 70’s of the last century after the demolition of an entire district of the historical center.

The projects on the other hand on the larger valleys work very differently from each other. Those on the Val Bisagno work more on the dimension of a livable river, and on the ability to manage the nature of the stream as a variable dimension space and therefore able to exploit both dry and flood moments as systems of a collective imagination. In fact, the main project for this stream is a thesis working on the transformation of a gloomy station park into a large watersquare system capable of partly managing flood flows, but most importantly reminding people of the presence of water at every rain. The project for the Polcevera Valley presented is also a thesis made after a large master plan for the valley made by Gic-Lab after the collapse of the Morandi Bridge and goes to analyze the relationship between this master plan and the competition made by the City of Genoa for the area under the bridge. The project attempts to go further by reconnecting the banks of the valley and refunctionalizing an entire system of industrial wasteland in what was once the city’s main agricultural and resort valley.

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Urban Valley graduation thesis | Students: Ciravegna, Favilli Director: Canessa

Nodes

Main axis

Public transport

Main cars flows

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Nature

Main pedestrian flows

Enlargement pedestrian area

greenery

multifunctional elements

bike path

public transport

breaks and shade

public spaces

gathering spaces

wifi hotspot

recharge stations

infopint

points of enhancement

city arc existing

new

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Fig. Photomontage “New Resili(g)ence”, NCV (2021) between “La Fontaine, Le Chêne et le Roseau, Illustration by Gustave Doré, 1885” and Gausa+Raveau actarquitectura Avenier Cornejo Architectes , ZAC CLICHY BATIGNOLLES, LOT E8 Paris.

05.

POSTFACE The Oak and the Reed Imposing Cities vs. Resili(g)ent Cities Manuel Gausa

The Oak and the Reed and the contemporary environmental habitats complexities.

Le Chêne et le Roseau is a well-known fable by Jean de La Fontaine that translates the importance of adaptive and flexible intelligence - reactive - against the arrogance - imposing and imposed - of the apparently stronger and more rigid structures.

Dynamic synergy, resonance, fluctuation and versatility, or reactivity, in front of - and with - forces in action (conditions, solicitations, volitions, tensions, actions, that is, information, in short) are the basis of this responsive capacity (and re-impulsive) more malleable.

In the structure physics one learns these qualities quickly, by working with isostatic rather than hyperstatic systems. The static vocation of the former gives way to the dynamic response of the latter.

It is really surprising the importance that this fable (and these analogies) acquires today, in the transfer of centuries – coming, in fact, from the distant times of Aesop – in our contemporary urban, territorial, environmental (and logically sociocultural) processes.

The relatively recent and general growth of our anthropic “superhabitats” has produced, in fact, an exponential increase in CO2 emissions, resulting collateral effects particularly negative on the climate and the environment, in a reality strongly marked by the

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The Oak and the Reed Jean de La Fontaine, Fables, 1668

The oak one day address’d the reed: ‘To you ungenerous indeed Has nature been, my humble friend, With weakness aye obliged to bend.

The smallest bird that flits in air Is quite too much for you to bear; The slightest wind that wreathes the lake Your ever-trembling head doth shake.

The while, my towering form Dares with the mountain top The solar blaze to stop, And wrestle with the storm.

What seems to you the blast of death, To me is but a zephyr’s breath.

Beneath my branches had you grown, That spread far round their friendly bower,

1– La Fontaine, Le Chêne et le Roseau, Illustration by J.J Grandville, 1838-1840 2– La Fontaine, Le Chêne et le Roseau, Illustration by François Chaveau, 1668

Less suffering would your life have known,

But wait the end.’ Just at the word,

Defended from the tempest’s power.

The tempest’s hollow voice was heard.

Unhappily you oftenest show

The North sent forth her fiercest child,

In open air your slender form,

Dark, jagged, pitiless, and wild.

Along the marshes wet and low,

The oak, erect, endured the blow;

That fringe the kingdom of the storm.

The reed bow’d gracefully and low.

To you, declare I must,

But, gathering up its strength once more,

Dame Nature seems unjust.’

In greater fury than before,

Then modestly replied the reed:

The savage blast

‘Your pity, sir, is kind indeed,

O’erthrew, at last,

But wholly needless for my sake.

That proud, old, sky-encircled head,

The wildest wind that ever blew

Whose feet entwined the empire of the dead!

Is safe to me compared with you.

I bend, indeed, but never break.

Thus far, I own, the hurricane Has beat your sturdy back in vain;

3– Aesop Fables, The Oak and the Reed, Illustration by Bernard Salomon, 1547 4– La Fontaine, Le Chêne et le Roseau, Illustration by P. J. Billinghurst,1901

The book is composed of the graphic contents made mainly by the students of the “Laboratory of Urbanism” of the year 2019-2020 at the Department of Architecture and Design of the University of Genoa

The theme is increasingly important mini European cities where the urban transformations must be able to bring in nature, but it is also very interesting the relationship of new urban contexts those generated by new metropolitan areas that allow you to connect areas that were previously considered a “back” to the city.

The book is divided into two parts the first more theoretical with the story of these new territorial opportunities, the second part instead is more graphic that linked feeling of some projects developed within the courses of the thesis.

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