Towards a Pro-Active manifesto

Re-It 16

Towards a pro-active manifesto aims to share the connected approaches in research and practice to develop professional and ethical competences in relation to local urban development practices in strongly globalized contexts. This Manifesto is based on two workshops held in 2014 in Genoa and Hannover and supplemented by a thematical framework provided in research of the Università degli Studi di Genova (DSA Department) and the Leibniz Universität Hannover (Department of Urban Design and Planning). This international collaboration has been supported by the programme Hochschuldialog with Südeuropa of DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service.

isbn

16 TOWARDS A PRO-ACTIVE MANIFESTO

978-88-548-9006-0

Aracne

euro 34,00

Towards a pro-active manifesto

Towards a pro-active manifesto è il sedicesimo volume della collana Re-cycle Italy. La collana restituisce intenzioni, risultati ed eventi dell’omonimo programma triennale di ricerca – finanziato dal Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca – che vede coinvolti oltre un centinaio di studiosi dell’architettura, dell’urbanistica e del paesaggio, in undici università italiane.

Obiettivo del progetto Re-cycle Italy è l’esplorazione e la definizione di nuovi cicli di vita per quegli spazi, quegli elementi, quei brani della città e del territorio che hanno perso senso, uso o attenzione.

TOWARDS A PRO-ACTIVE MANIFESTO

EDITED BY MOSÉ RICCI JÖRG SCHRÖDER

8

Edited by Mosé Ricci and Jörg Schröder Contents curators: Sara Favargiotti, Chiara Olivastri Peer reviewers: Mauro Berta, Maurizio Carta, Michelangelo Russo Progetto grafico di Sara Marini e Vincenza Santangelo Copyright © MMXVI ARACNE editrice S.r.l. and the editors Texts by kind permission of the authors.

Pictures by kind permission of the photographers/holders of the picture rigths.

All rights reserved. www.aracneeditrice.it info@aracneeditrice.it via Raffaele Garofalo, 133/A–B 00173 Roma (06) 93781065 ISBN 978-88-548-9006-0 I diritti di traduzione, di memorizzazione elettronica, di riproduzione e di adattamento anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo, sono riservati per tutti i Paesi.

Non sono assolutamente consentite le fotocopie senza il permesso scritto dell’Editore.

I edizione: gennaio 2016

8

PRIN 2013/2016 PROGETTI DI RICERCA DI INTERESSE NAZIONALE

Research Units Università degli Studi di Genova Leibniz Universität Hannover

DAAD Hochschuldialog mit Südeuropa 2014-15

gefördert durch den Deutschen Akademischen Austauschdienst finanziert aus Mitteln des Auswärtigen Amtes (AA)

INDEX

FOREWORD

12

Towards a Pro-Active Manifesto Mosé Ricci, Jörg Schröder

14

Politic of Beauty Stefano Bernini

16

The Recyle GOA Pro-Active Manifesto Mosé Ricci

20

0.1 RE-CYCLE GENERATES NEW BEAUTY AND NEW VALUES

30

New Beauty Alberto Bertagna Core Values For Re-Cycle Social Innovators Raffaella Fagnoni 3 Decalogues For A New Informational Era Manuel Gausa

32 38 46

0.2 RE-CYCLE IS AN ONGOING CHALLENGE FOR THE INNOVATION

56

The RE-Époque Sara Favargiotti The Partici-Passion To The Event. An Ethnography of the “Superelevata” Event Federico Boni Genoa and Hannover: Urban Pioneers, Common Grounds Emanuele Sommariva Neglected Modernism. Beyond The Sassi Ettore Vadini, Gaia Vicentelli

58

66 72 80

0.3 RE-CYCLE IS A CREATIVE AND REVERSIBLE PROCESS

88

Ordinary Voids. Special Openings Jeannette Sordi Switch On The Urban Void Giulia Garbarini Re-use Modern. Re-form Matera Mariavaleria Mininni, Cristina Dicillo

90

0.4 RE-CYCLE IS A SHARED PROJECT AGAINST THE CRISIS To Inhabit Is To Design Silvia Pericu Re-Condensed Values Elisa Angella Pop-Up Events. From Vision To Action Giulia Giglio Research On Field. Survey And Imagination Maddalena Ferretti

98 104

112 114 122 130 136

0.5 RE-CYCLE IS A POLITICAL ACTION THAT ANTICIPATES THE FUTURE

144

Beyond the Sopraelevata. About Continuous Recycling Luca Mazzari Urban Injections Chiara Olivastri Placemaking Along São Paulo´S Highways Sarah Hartmann

146

TOWARDS

170

Urban Initials Jörg Schröder

172

154 162

HANNOVER

genova network

VENICE re-cycle research coordinator GENOA recycle italy international workshop

BARCELLONA

EMILIA ROMAGNA re-cycle italy law proposal for planning

ROME re-cycle italy final exhibition and symposium NAPOLI recycle italy international workshop

PALERMO recycle italy international workshop

Recycle Genoa Network

MATERA

SUPERLEVATA FOOT[PRINTS]

180

1. See you(rself) Matteo Pendenza, Giovanna Zampagni

190

2. City, reflections of stories G&S Green & Sustainable

194

3.Take a Brake!

UdR IUAV

198

4. Dark Room CLAB

202

5. Untaken Spaces UTC+1@EViDEnte

206

6. New Urban Spaces UTC+1@EViDEnte

210

7. Eco–Barter Lantlos

214

8. Recycle Mandala Officina5 Achitetti Associati

218

9. Recycle Machine Associazione Culturale Emsteludanza

222

10. Genova 2492. Beyond a Nonexistent Mobility Alternative Burrasca

226

11. BioReactor GR.IN_LAB

230

12. Keep Them For Me / Throw Them To Me Giardini "Poggi"

234

8

13. Imballo di Idee Giulia Cavallari, Andrea Aragone

238

14. Tracce UNOAUNO_spazioArchitettura

242

15. Zolla UNOAUNO_spazioArchitettura

246

16. Ricicloverino Il sentiero del Movimento Ragazzi

250

17. "Pink Ribbon": Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign LILT Genova

254

18. Painting Under The Sopraelevata_Drawing The Street Francesca Marina, Silvia Sangriso

258

19. Draughts' Time Under The Sopraelevata Francesca Marina, Silvia Sangriso

260

20. In&Out_The Recycled House Associazione Palazzo Verde, Francesca Marina, Silvia Sangriso

262

21. [IN]Urban Analysis Laura Arrighi, Giovanni Carli

264

22. Asfalto, Goghin gogò UdR Ascoli Piceno/Camerino

268

23. Grey to Green UdR Reggio Calabria

272

24. Asphalte Ă Dessiner UdR Trento

276

8

25. Superviewpoint UdR POLITO

280

26. Beautiful, useful, smart Manager on bicycle©

284

27. 0°57’39,2’’N-14°04’19,6’’E UdR Napoli

288

28. Un-licensed Territory UdR Pescara

292

29. Half of 8 UdR Roma

296

30. The Fab City UdR Palermo

300

31. Genoa Re-cycle Footprint UdR Genova

304

32. Recycle mobility Tomaso Martino, Linda Pierozzi, Fabio Torterolo

308

33. P.P-P. 4.2 / plastic play-pen 4.2 Olivia GIovannini

312

8

VARCO VARCO CALATA GRAZIE A 29

28

20 18 16

19

21

24

25

32

23

22

17

Cala

15

O

ARD

OCC

ta B

13

34

30

31

26 27

33

14

12 11

DA

10 9

Ca

la

ta G

AD

8

VARCO PORTO ANTICO D

7

6

3 1

5 4

2

SUPERELEVATA [FOOTPRINTS] RECYCLERS

1. Genova 2492 2. Città, riflessi di storie 3. Bella, Utile, Intelligente 4. RGB 5. Asphalte à dessiner (UNITN) 6. Zolla 7. Tracce 8. Bio_reactor 9. Superviewpoint (UNITO) 10. ri_vediamoci meglio 11. Asfalto, Goghin gogò (UNICAM) 12. [in]urban analysis 13. La quà 14. Nastro Rosa 15. Recycle Machine 16. Grey to Green (UNIRC) 17. Eco barter 18. Imballo di idee

19. 40°57'39,2''N,14°04'19,6''E (UNINA) 20. Tienimele| Tiramele 21. Recycle Mandala 22. Territori non omologati (UNICH) 23. Nuovi spazi urbani 24. Take a brake! (IUAV) 25. Ricicloverino 26. Camera oscura 27. Uga 28. Painting under the Sopraelevata 29. Draught's time under the Sopraeevata 30-32 Recycle Genova 33. Palazzo Verde 34.Lametà di 8 (UNIROMA) 35. Segway

35

8

FOREWORD

8

SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] MANIFESTO Ph: Chiara Olivastri, 2014

8

TOWARDS A PRO-ACTIVE MANIFESTO Mosé Ricci, Jörg Schröder

The book "Towards a Pro-Active Manifesto" aims to share the connected approaches in research and practice to develop professional and ethical competences in relation to local urban development practices in strongly globalized contexts. Innovative tools and procudural inventions of the Manifesto are referring to shared investigations in the “Re-cycle Italy” research project; it is funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research, developed by eleven Italian Universities and their international partners, with the objective to systematically work on urban re-cycle issues. This Manifesto is based on two workshops held in 2014 in Genoa and Hannover and supplemented by a thematical framework provided in research of the Università degli Studi di Genova (DSA Department) and the Leibniz Universität Hannover (Department of Urban Design and Planning).

This international collaboration has been supported by the programme Hochschuldialog with Südeuropa of DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service.

We would like to thank all contributors for the common research and performative élan in designing the Manifesto, and especially the architects, artists and activists of the Superelevata Genoa manifestation. The City of Genoa, the Port Authority and the Architect's Association of Genoa have been of great support.

15

SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] Opening. Genoa, September 21, 2014 Ph: Silvia Pericu, 2014

8

POLITIC OF BEAUTY

Stefano Bernini > Municipality of Genoa

It often happens, when I speak with Italians and foreigners, to associate the image of Genoa with the Aquarium. It was not always so. It actually stems from a big urban recycle operation.

In the past, Genoa was two things: the biggest port in the Mediterranean and the Italian capital of State owned engineering (metal-mechanic) industry.

Economic changes brought about changes in urban landscapes. In the first place, the port landscape changed. The arrival of containers moved activities westwards, to big spaces where they can be stacked before transport. Piers and warehouses, which used to host bulk goods, remained empty.

Celebrations for the five hundred years of the Discovery of America brought enough state funds to Columbus’ birthplace to change those piers and warehouses into recreational and cultural spaces, bringing along a flow of visitors from which also the Ancient Town benefits.

Genoa thus discovered a new element in its economic system: tourism and, furthermore, became aware of an element in its identity it had until then undervalued its being an “Art City”.

17

State funding supported the closing down of steel industry, allowing reclaiming and reusing of unused areas as well as requalification of adjacent urban areas.

The strong crisis in State-owned industry involved also other sectors and a big number of companies working in the value chain. Many private companies did not survive globalization. Today, there are entire unused urban hectares in the city. A pity, for a city where space is a rare good, sandwiched as it is between sea and mountains.

In the meanwhile State funds for reusing deindustrialized spaces were drastically reduced or cancelled.

Genoese administrators and economic players now face an unavoidable challenge: finding an innovative approach for reusing territory, which will attract proposals and extended funding.

It is within this complex scenario that the meeting with MosĂŠ Ricci, his competent team, his passionate students, was born.

The Sustainable Mobility World Day, reflections on the obsolescence of an important urban connecting way such as the “Sopraelevata� (Elevated Urban highway), the need to draw new ways connecting reused places with others that need to be reused, were the starting point to build together a fascinating and stimulating event/project.

The RE-CYCLE manifesto and the SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] were for me a big boost in confidence. They convinced me that there actually are human resources, made of physical presence, intelligence, passion and fantasy, which can allow us to face the challenge of reusing our urban spaces.

The Convention between the Municipality and the Department of Architectural Sciences of the Genoese Polytechnic School is not a mere formal tool, an administrative act to regulate relationship between the city and its university. It also represents convinced sharing of a goal, common knowledge that only networking skills and resources will allow us to attain it. The playing field is made by big state owned properties not in use any longer, such as the Gavoglio barracks, the Hennebique silos or the Quasimodo school, but it can be extended to other areas, including private ones, with projects of reuse, even temporary.

18

Genoa is beautiful, in a complex way, made of age long history of art and architecture, but also of industry, which could be developed thanks to skills and hard work of its inhabitants. It deserves nice politics or better still a “Politic of Beauty” which can highlight and enhance its qualities.

I use the term “Politics” in its etymologic meaning of government of the “polis”, because I am convinced that it is not only up to professional administrators, but on the contrary other stakeholders should be involved through a transparent participative process.

SUPERLELEVATA was a key moment in this Politic of Beauty. We all hope we will continue to make more.

Genoa, October 21st 2015

19

[IN]URBAN ANALYSIS, Laura Arrighi and Giovanni Carli Ph: Sara Favargiotti, 2014

8

THE RECYCLE GOA PRO-ACTIVE MANIFESTO 1 MosĂŠ Ricci

> University of Genoa

CONTEXT Italian cities have grown enormously in recent years. Between 1999 and 2009 approximately 300 million cubic meters per year were built up. It means 46 cubic meters per inhabitant. A building stock equal to about 70 apartments per square kilometer if we calculate the national territory minus the protected rural areas and woodland. Between 1999 and 2007 house values rise steeply: in over 8 years, from +25% in the islands (i.e.

Sicily and Sardinia), +30% in the North, and +60% in Central Italy2. The same has happen with the number of buying and selling transactions, and the number of real estate agencies, architectural firms and construction companies3. And the landscape has felt the impact of development just as much as the cities have. Between 1990 and 20054 a total of about 3.5 million hectares (a surface area as large as the Lazio and Abruzzi regions together) have been transformed. In Italy each Italian citizen makes use of 230 square meters of urbanized territory. There are more than 200,000 kilometers of roads, 7,500 kilometers of disused railways, and 27 million homes of which 20% vacant. Each year, starting from the late 1990s, about 244,000 hectares of ground are consumed5. With a game in which everyone believed to win - owners who put their savings safe, building companies

21

working, the administrations that survived with urbanization taxes, policy that was continually prized by the rhythm of the building cycle – it was perpetrated a bloody and unprecedented invasion of Italian landscapes.

Since the collapse of the housing market in 2007 all the Country hit by the economic and environmental crisis suffer abandonment and disposal often also for more recent works. The results of the Survey into the Property Market drafted by the Parliamentary Commission for Environment, Territory and Public Works, carried out in 2010, clearly outline the actual urban condition in Italy. In the years from 2007 to 2010 there were 120,000 unsold flats, around 40% of those built. In 2010 the investments in the property sector dropped by 7%, and new buildings by 32%. The buying and selling transaction fell (-15% in 2008 and -19% in 2009) and in the three-year period 2006-2009 the business volume of the property market collapsed by 33%. The same report highlighted that fact that in 2008 to purchase a house in the semi-central part of a large urban area an average of nine years of household income were required, as opposed to 3.4 years in 1965.

The evictions for payment arrears went up by 25% between 2008 and 2009.

Moreover, there are 5.2 million empty houses out of 10 million unrented properties in Italy. “If we exclude the first homes and the relative accessories and the other properties whose use could not be reconstructed or that have not been detected in the income tax declaration form, around 17.5 million property units are owned by private families. Of these not even one third (that is, 29%) is declared as being rented. It is very likely that out of this very limited share there is the impact of evasion.” Or the vacant houses6. In spite of the growing number of empty houses, in 2010 at least 230,000 families were living in a condition of cohabitation and 70,000 in precarious living conditions.

Even the numbers on the infrastructure reserve are significant. In Italy there are 20 million square metres of railway yards that are either disused or in the process of being closed down, of which around half (9.5 million) in metropolitan areas. In the meantime around 5,000 km of railway line have been divested, of which 2,600 km are still unused today7. There are 20,000 km of abandoned roads of which 2,600 unused. The Gioia Tauro Harbour, the Tiburtina High Speed Railway Station, the Bre-Be-Mi Speedway (and soon -we bet- the Expo) are only the most obvious examples of a policy that wastes always twice First insisting in building new fetishes of a passed modernity, and then wasting away the greatest historical and

22

natural heritage all over the world. No enhancement devices or strategic investments are forecasted for that. The situation is the same in other European countries. In Spain between Madrid and Toledo is a kind of new city for 300 thousand inhabitants completely empty and unsold but built even with the rubbish bins and the lampposts. And even in the wealthier countries of northern Europe, the problem is very much present. The Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2010 was an empty room with the threat of plastic hanging from the ceiling of all the empty buildings of Ramstadt incumbent on the head of visitors. Biennale of 2012 always the Dutch Pavilion was called Reset and the German Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

In the 2014 Biennale Portugal is the Country that dramatically raises the same issue.

In just a few years the economic and environmental crisis has shown us that there is an important form of abandonment in Europe that is influencing the life and economy of the cities. It's a sort of abandonment that's not so much determined by an urban population decline, as by internal mobility, migration from manufacturing centers, excessive building, the marginal state of agriculture and the stagnation of the building market.

All of these factors deeply affect the behavior and the wishes of the inhabitants themselves. In short, what's new is being abandoned. It is the abandonment of an idea of growth and the city, even before being an idea about its physical spaces. It responds to a strategy of survival, to the economic crisis and to the awareness of the environmental emergency. Its effects are evident, and across the territory they disseminate the image of a crisis-stricken city.

SCENARIO That's the point. The simultaneous action of three key factors -the economic crisis, the environment and the revolution for sharing information technologies- is so deeply changing our lifestyles and the way we imagine and shape our future that all our design knowledge suddenly appears to be inadequate both to interpret current inhabiting spaces situation or as a device capable of generating new environmental, social, economic qualities and new beauty. Turning to the positive the effects of the technological revolution it could be said that we have a huge amount of built volume that is no longer needed or that people do not know exactly how to use. And it is the same for infrastructure and open spaces.

23

Nothing surprising. In the history of architecture and cities the huge technological changes have always produced major transformations in living modes and shapes and consequently in the modes and forms of urban architectural and landscape projects. One of the main theoretical paradigm of modernity was the best possible spatial synthesis between form and function. Today we have the opposite problem to give sense, narrative and uses -even temporary- to places that already have a given form. And turn them into attractive and environmentally efficient living spaces. In the perspective of a decrease in the urban growth the point of view of people dealing in architecture and the city changes radically. In the meantime, reduction, reuse and recycle seem to be the only sustainable social strategies capable of expressing innovation, or generating consensus and producing beauty in the post-crisis city.

Reuse and recycling of existing urban materials are coming back to be again the main field of design and construction fields interest, after a long modernist phase in which the construction of new buildings and the conservative restoration seemed to be the most convenient intervention practices. Furthermore, the recent European Directive on the subject of energy efficiency in building clearly sets a highly ambitious innovation horizon. From 2021 all the new public and private interventions will have to have “close-to-zero consumption and emissions [...] but equally important is the fact of creating the conditions for a significant action of requalification and improving the energy and safety performances of the existing real estate assets�8. The shrinking of the market will thus have to be matched by a reduction in the building output and, above all, in the energy consumption levels. The recycling rhetoric very often speculates on the ethics of the process. Recycling means putting back into circulation, re-using waste materials which have lost value and/or meaning. Recycling protects the environment. It is a practice that allows to reduce waste, to limit the presence of garbage, to reduce disposal costs and to contain the production of new goods. Recycle means creating new value and new sense, to start a new cycle, another life. The propulsive content of recycling lies in this concept. It is an ecological action that operates on sense and pushes forward the existing into the future by transforming waste into prominent figures. In other words, as architects we do not do research on recycling because it is a good and right action. We study that because today for an architect to recycle is to design.

24

25

MANIFESTO Recycle is not a fashion. Recycle is a paradigm for the future of the architecture, the city, the landscape. Recycle is a program that needs a shared proactive Manifesto. It is not a statement of principles. It is also different from the idea of the Koolhaas Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. The Recycle Manifesto is oriented to the future and its pragmatism is represented by the huge built patrimony that shapes our architectures, cities and landscapes.

RE-CYCLE creates new beauty and new value The same idea of recycling provides a vision. What interests us here is to look at just those experiences that thanks to recycling produce the culture of the city, beauty and urban quality. Architecture and the city have always recycled themselves. Examples like Split (Croatia), the Teatro di Marcello in Rome or the Duomo in Syracuse are just a few of the most obvious manifestos of recycling. It is not a question of restoration: the idea of conservation tends to embalm the image of architectural or urban space by attributing value to the unchangeable. But the change itself is the value when recycling is carried out. When it generates spatial figures that can produce new meanings and new ecologies.

RE-CYCLE is an ongoing challenge for innovation Recycling is not limited to the reuse of materials, spaces, buildings or urban scrap, but it’s a device for life cycles renewal of cities, infrastructure and landscapes. The recyling paradigm offsets the one of demolition and construction that dominated the period of modernity, but not in an ordinary way. The practice of recycling space and urban fabric is necessarily contextual and adaptive. It can't be carried out by using stereotyped methods or traditional tools. Each place and each case provides for a different project. We might speak of different tactics that respond to the same logic of intervention. A strategy that, on the one hand, is aimed at an increase in environmental and landscape quality in the city and, on the other, at the erosion of the density of over overestimated metropolitan functions. The innovative aspect of this contemporary condition lies in considering this policy a strategic one for architecture, city and landscapes improvement.

26

RE-CYCLE is a creative and reversible process Recycling requires a program of specific actions that can produce immediate solutions for the reuse of abandoned urban-architecturallandscape spaces. And at the same time this strategy is able to enable the conditions to reduce the production of new or residues, to avoid interruption of life-cycles, to plan and to design the reversibility of uses.

RE-CYCLE is a shared project against the crisis In a shared and circular economy the resources of waste, residual and abandoned urban materials can contribute in a more creative -and less erosive- way to redefine how we move to close the energy cycles, to feed creativity, to produce new ecologies and a different Urban intelligence.

Recycling is economically convenient, it preserves the environment. In this frame Recycle becomes the main conceptual, social and material space of both building and designing sectors in the world of crisis. The crisis is nothing but the detonator of a deeper change that is modifying the geography of our desires, our lifestyles, our expectations about the future.

RE-CYCLE is a political action that anticipates the future Recycling is a militant action. It is not limited to a cultural approach, or to an ecological sensitivity. It is social action that requires a strong ethic of responsibility oriented to change. In the actual economic and environmental contingencies we are experiencing the sharing information technologies revolution. It is a huge radical change that we almost do not even realize. Change happens in our lives and in our behavior in a subsidiary and molecular form. Day by day we see the world from new point of view and every day we do the same things we did before in a different way.

We learn to use always powerful tools of instant artificial adjacency. We occupy virtual spaces every time bigger. To manage our lives and spend our time we have less and less need of dedicated physical locations.

RE- CYCLING city is a smart city, There is a thin thread that binds inextricably recycling and smart systems.

Perhaps the real cause of the abandonment that involves so increasingly the living spaces and the landscape of the West of the world are the computers, smart phones, tablets, interactive television, the new app ... and all the sophisticated devices and technologies to erase distances and times and to share information, decisions and actions. Each of us can find

27

thousands of similar examples that demonstrate how you always need less functional spaces to live and work because many of the uses that occupied spaces solids in the city have been transferred or will be transferred in the virtual spaces of the Net. But if all this is about to happen or is already happening is clear that some essential paradigms of modern, such as the close relationship between function and form of architecture or of the City, has lost its significance.

Ultimately the information technology revolution displaces our modern certainties. It makes seem all the modern theories and practices are suddenly out of time. Let’s think about the zoning - the functional organization of urban spaces- or even to those architectural theories of the models, or of the "best practices"‌ They seem epiphanies of a logic that belongs to another era, theoretical models and behavior designed to manage a solid three-dimensional space that is no longer the only possible place for our projects.

RE-CYCLE is a planning action that requires a shared commitment Recycling should not remain within the individual decisions or institutional will, but must have the strength of a new regulatory environment that addresses public action, facilitating the private behavior, consolidating informal practices and to characterize new operational instruments.

This phase of disposal of modernity requires new paradigms -such as new points of view about the future- and a new idea of the physical spaces. It is a major challenge for the architectural culture. It is a challenge that emphasizes the existing with conceptual devices that work on sense shifts and new life cycles of living spaces. A challenge that considers the context as a project, the landscape as infrastructure that produces ecological value and the future of the city as a collective and not authorial project.

28

1. The main Manifesto concepts and sentences were conceived during the SUPERELEVATA workshop speaking with Maurizio Carta, Enzo Gioffrè, Raffaella Fagnoni, Manuel Gausa, Lina Malfona, Chiara Rizzi and other participants representative.

2. Source: processing and estimates CRESME/SI, 2010-2014.

3. Cf. Il Mercato delle Costruzioni 2011, XVIII Rapporto Congiunturale e Previsionale CRESME. 2010- 2015 l’avvio del VII ciclo edilizio, planning and direction by Lorenzo Bellicini and Francesco Toso, Rome, November 2010.

4. Source: WWF Italia, 2009 l’anno del cemento.

5. Cf. CRESME reports for 2007-2014.

6. Source: Agenzia delle Entrate, Study entitled “Gli immobili in Italia 2010”.

7. Source: FS Sistemi Urbani srl, 2011.

8. Source: Indagine Conoscitiva del Mercato Immobiliare, Camera dei Deputati, Commissione VIII, Ambiente, Territorio e Lavori Pubblici, 29 July 2010.

29

The city of the economic income must be replaced by the city of social and creative profitability, able to operate more effectively on the resources and on the cyclical energies, aiming the quality and the beauty as values. It must be led by a forward-thinking vision able to recover wisdoms and practices.

8

0.1

RE-CYCLE GENERATES NEW BEAUTY AND NEW VALUES

8

William H. Jackson, Mountain of the Holy Cross in the Great National Range, Colorado, 1873

JoAnn Verburg, Gordon Bushaw, Mountain of the Holy Cross, Colorado, 1977

8

NEW BEAUTY

Alberto Bertagna > University of Genoa

O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 54

You can also read the Sonnet 54 in this way: “Beauty seems so much more beautiful when it comes with integrity. Roses are beautiful, but we think they’re even more so because of their sweet scent. Wildflowers have as deep a color as fragrant roses; their thorns are the same, and their beauty broadcasts just as loudly when summer opens their buds. But because their only virtue is their looks, no one wants or respects them and they die unnoticed and alone. Sweet roses don’t suffer that fate. When they die, the most fragrant perfumes are made from their corpses. The same is true of you, beautiful youth. When you fade away, my poems will preserve your essence.” The beauty, just thanks to the poem, is preserved: it remains.

There’s a picture of JoAnn Verburg and Gordon Bushaw. It portrays a landscape, more precisely framing a mountain, the same mountain shoot from the same point a century earlier by William H. Jackson. In the first step, in 1873, the snow draws, on a natural relief formed in the side of the mountain, a cross. The photo is titled, from Jackson, Mountain of the Holy Cross in the Great National Range, Colorado. A century later, in the picture of JoAnn Verburg and Gordon Bushaw, the snow is not there: the title does not work, loses sense, the mountain has changed its name and perhaps its aesthetic value. The cross is no longer a cross, the reason for

33

that first shot (that of Jackson), the relevance of that landscape has failed under varying climatic conditions. Enlarging the field, and emphasizing the nature of the cross as a symbol, we can say that the meaning of the picture in 1873, failed in our eyes, may prove irrelevant in other contexts, that can load both the images of different values. If the background is a physical variant, the cultural landscape is subjected to the effects of the interpretation. The similarity between the two images is canceled in the difference of sense, which reveals an entropy that relates not to the nature of being, but to the evolution of the translations that it can be given, or that being in its change offers. How much integrity exists in the images, subject to cultural interpretations? And in the mountains of Colorado?

Integrity (noun) c. 1400, “innocence, blamelessness; chastity, purity,” from Old French integrité or directly from Latin integritatem (nominative integritas) “soundness, wholeness, blamelessness,” from integer “whole.” Sense of “wholeness, perfect condition” is middle XV century.

Biological integrity, sexual integrity, database integrity, ecological integrity, ecosystem integrity, ego integrity versus despair. The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles: a gentleman of complete integrity. The state of being whole and undivided: upholding territorial integrity and national sovereignty. Examples of integrity: he’s a man of the highest integrity; I admire her artistic integrity; she had the integrity to refuse to compromise on matters of principle; without music, the film loses its integrity; they are trying to preserve the cultural integrity of the community; the earthquake may have damaged the building’s structural integrity; “many were tempted by a piece of the equity action and compromised their integrity” (Bruce Nussbaum, Business Week, 28 Jan. 2002); “by September, Gorbachev had told his aides that with Eastern Europe and Germany lost, the task was to defend the integrity of the Soviet Union itself” (Condoleezza Rice, Newsweek, 22 Nov. 1999); “but it is stunning to hear self-appointed watchdogs of public integrity shrug their shoulders at standard prosecutorial practice” (Wendy Kaminer, New York Times Book Review, 22 Mar. 1998); “a hundred-and-one-yearold Jewish philanthropist […] donated two and a quarter million dollars to the Archdiocese to purchase the property and preserve the integrity of the landmark” (Brendan Gill, New Yorker, 10 June 1991). Full Definition of integrity: firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values (incorruptibility); an unimpaired condition (soundness); the quality or

34

state of being complete or undivided (completeness). Related to integrity: character, decency, goodness, honesty, morality, probity, rectitude, righteousness, rightness, uprightness, virtue, virtuousness (synonyms); badness, evil, evildoing, immorality, iniquity, sin, villainy, wickedness (antonyms). Related Words: high-mindedness, honor, incorruptibility, irreproachability, irreproachableness, right-mindedness, scrupulosity, scrupulousness; appropriateness, correctness, decorousness, decorum, etiquette, fitness, propriety, seemliness; ethics, morals. Near Antonyms: impropriety, indecency, indecorum, indiscretion; debauchery, degeneracy, degradation, depravity, perversion, perverseness, sinfulness; crookedness, dishonesty, underhandedness, unscrupulousness; lowness, meanness, viciousness, vileness; corruption. Integrity in art, customs, laws, codes of behavior and moral. Integrity and integralism, or fundamentalism. Integrity as completeness: what can be said to be whole, unchanged, forever?

Integrity means that all component parts are safe: the sense of an object can be considered a component? Similarly of its physical components, the value and the aesthetic sense of an object are its components?

Certainly the intangible components of an object are part of the definition of the object itself. And then we can define “intact” an object –without prejudice to the maintenance of its materiality– if this item have changed the aesthetic acknowledgments? What has kept the beauty of Sonnet 54?

Sure is intact the appreciation of Shakespeare, and certainly also that of his sonnets, and therefore also of Sonnet 54. But it is not healthy the way of its recognition. Its spread has widened over time. Its language is not, however, immediately understandable: it is universalized the fame, it is particularized reading –that you can not “fully understand” the form in which it was written. How undamaged the way to hire it? That we still think that integrity is an ornament of beauty? That we still think that beauty is more beautiful in a undamaged thing? This does not imply that we do not recognize beauty in Sonnet 54. How undamaged its message? That is what is whole in the translation language that we have to do to read it in the way we understand it, that in its translation, and in the updating of culture who plays it? How much the aesthetic culture of Shakespeare’s “integrated” in our time?

The sonnets of Archilochus –for example– are not complete, there are only “fragments.” Where lives, if any, their beauty? Certainly there can be their “beauty.” There can be an appreciation, recognition of their aesthetic value.

35

Obviously –and so banal– all this applies to the Coliseum, the Parthenon, and so on. How much we are interested in the integrity of a work, to define its beauty?

How much it intact the Fountain of Duchamp? There are only 16 copies of it, the original does not exist, nor indeed has never been exposed if not in the picture of Alfred Stieglitz accompanied by the caption The exhibit refused by the Independents on the second and last issue of The Blind Man. So Louise Norton in article accompanying the photo, The Richard Mutt Case: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view-created a new thought for that object.” But how much is still intact the power of its message? How much it was, that work or the sense of that work, pure subversion? How subversion still producing to our eyes?

Why today –if this is our idea of beauty, if we understand integrity as sentient entities and therefore in motion, or in connection with, or as a principle that relates gradually with different senses or cultures as a continuous fragment; if we do not mean by integrity nor integrity of form, nor integrity of sense, nor permanence of signs nor permanence of signifiers or significant– why today we do not accept that every body, every idea, every architecture may have a mobile beauty, can have a changeable beauty? Every object, every start has an internal integrity, or external.

Internal as constituent; external as defining, or that defines it as such.

The internal integrity may be questioned from the outside? That is, we can accept that New Beauty is a beauty that is independent of the setting of “truth”, or of integrity?

You may change the Sonnet 54. Give it a new meaning as we are doing here. You can use the incipit of Sonnet 54 to talk about the possibility and also the necessity of the transformation of sense and appearance of architecture and city? Sure you can, because here we are doing, whether accepted or not this our use of Shakespeare. Of course you can do this because each quote implies manipulation, because any simple reading involves interpretation. It can be used otherwise Sonnet 54 in its “truth,” in its entirety, in its originality? There is still the woman portrayed by Shakespeare in Sonnet 54?

Which may be the “truth” of Casa Malaparte, reduced today to the museum of itself? The truth is in its form? Perhaps the truth is in its form. Or maybe

36

the truth was in its use? The truth is in its exposition? In the statement of its original meaning? As it was read in its own time Casa Malaparte? As we read today Casa Malaparte? How intact its “appearance,” as it is intact its sense? How much is healthy the meaning of the urinal subtracted

by Richard Mutt to his integrity or truth and forward its New Beauty, or projected to a new aesthetic dimension? How much we could desecrate the work of Mutt, or rather one of its copies, placing it in Casa Malaparte and returning it to its original user mode? On several occasions, many artists have already urinated in Duchamp’s Fountain. How much we would produce New Beauty using the work of Richard Mutt to urinate? To urinate in it, in a museum or in a Casa Malaparte who returned to being a house?

Where is the beauty of Shakespeare? Which is today its integrity? In stage V, Act V of the second part of the tragedy, Prince Hal, became Henry V, says addressed to Falstaff: “I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! I have long dream'd of such a kind of man, So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane; But, being awaked, I do despise my dream. Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace; Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men. Reply not to me with a fool-born jest: Presume not that I am the thing I was; For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn’d away my former self; So will I those that kept me company.

When thou dost hear I am as I have been, Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast, The tutor and the feeder of my riots: Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death, As I have done the rest of my misleaders, Not to come near our person by ten mile. For competence of life I will allow you, That lack of means enforce you not to evil: And, as we hear you do reform yourselves, We will, according to your strengths and qualities, Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord, To see perform’d the tenor of our word. Set on.” How true, or undamaged, Prince Hal became Henry V? How much Parthenon has turned his back on its being, how much Athens has turned its back to Parthenon? How much are left, meaning and form of Parthenon, to Athens or for us? What is beauty? What is New Beauty?

37

FORGO(A)T, Changing Urban Vision, Laboratorio Re-cycle Genova, 2013 Beatrice Amoretti, Alessia Ronco Milanaccio

8

CORE VALUES FOR RE-CYCLE SOCIAL INNOVATORS Raffaella Fagnoni

> University of Genoa

Value is a very basic and broad concept. It relates to the worth that we humans ascribe to anything and for almost any reason. Value is most commonly understood to represent the amount of money, or other in-kind currency, that it is required to complete an exchange—to buy, to rent, to employ, and so on. The precedence usually given to quantitative valuation has led to attempts to quantify the less tangible qualitative aspects related to design1. In ordinary language the word “values” (plural) indicates the ideals to which humans aspire.

The concept of value refers to what is desirable, explicitly or implicitly, and it influences actions through selecting of modes, resources, and goals available2. It is distinguished, in this way, what is desired from what is desirable. A value is a preference justified by logical thinking or by aesthetic judgment. The generation of value is achieved through innovation, aimed to improving the quality of life.

In turn, innovation is based on knowledge and it is developed through the ability of experiencing the positive aspects induced on people's lives.

To produce innovation, then, disseminate and use the knowledge already acquired is not less important than to develop new knowledge.

39

Produce thinking / produce things / produce values Producing theory and producing things (actions, practices) are two completely distinct activities in the academic field. Producing value is something different again. The concept of production is linked to the concept of transformation. Producing thinking means the transformation of thinking that generates new knowledge by combining ideas, processes and experimental trials. Producing things means to transform matter, shapes, spaces and environments.

The innovation lies in the convergence between the transformation of ideas and things. This integration between the production of thought and the production of things can be reached if the things produced as a result of new knowledge meet practical needs. When the production of new things is not sustainable from an economic point of view, the economic value of knowledge will not grow up. The value is generated by the relationship between resources and needs.

Conversely, if this convergence cannot be achieved there is no innovation.

That is, for instance, when the production of things is a real-world practice and the production of thought is something that is done in universities.

This doesn’t mean to reduce the importance of basic research, with no economic reasons. But it is equally important, mainly for those working on city and on our habitat issues, to respond to stimuli and questions forced by the market and everyday life. They highlight the pressing problems and favour the cross-fertilization of knowledge, because they need solutions with inputs from different disciplines.

Re-cycle practices contribute to the construction and implementation of policies for common goods. These act as a means to reinforce and enhance active citizenship processes, to co-design temporary reuse projects. Practices to re-cycle (involving people) also contribute to the widespread economic revitalization, to feed social innovation. Working for common goods increases the common welfare, leads to a new way of living and inhabit the city. This goes far beyond the solutions of technical and legislative provisions, which are required, but it is also necessary to overcome the dichotomy between technical culture and humanities, between doing and thinking. The new perspective, offered by Re-cycle practices, indicates not only the revaluation or recycling of places but also a serious rethink about the life cycles. It is possible through the connection

40

of languages, techniques, artistic practices, cultural expressions, new behaviours towards our material and cultural heritage, recovering its meaning and working for people's wellbeing.

Experiment with – reproduce - connect The production of value through re-cycle practices, in and for a local system, considers the specificity of the local environment and possible synergies between those involved. Each local re-cycle experience can improve more collaborative ways of living and producing. In the local situation people are promoting a wave of social innovation. Through a responsible and ethic use of ICT it is possible to replicate the best solution and to connect them (a global network connecting similar models). This is the way of cosmopolitan localism introduced by Ezio Manzini3 capable of generating a new sense of place, and new design knowledge that is transferable from one project to another. A place is a space endowed with sense; it is a space that is meaningful for someone4. The re-cycle social innovators (urban makers) work to offer a new role to abandoned space; they work to respond to practical needs through temporary re-cycle activities and often they are able to shift these action from temporary to permanent change.

This relational interaction includes tangible and intangible values which, connected to one another, can increase the overall value of each element in the system5. According to Rullani6 the territory is a relational space, and a vital, dynamic result of meta-organizations related to each other in the production of a specific socio-economic context7. Between the economists, also Cafferata8 proposes a vision of territory as an open system characterized by creative individuals, realm of knowledge and social context. Public institutions must implement activities involving stakeholders with different backgrounds (e.g. from academia or practice) to promote the development of an area with different perspectives in the decision-making process.

Social way Everyone wants to play within the social contexts. Designers, architects and project-maker talk about design for social good. The business community people talk about social innovation. Artists are exploring social practice.

41

There is an emerging social space, in which it is possible to design for people and to design with people; to design for change and to design with change, to produce not only solutions but also meanings, to investigate how design comes out from the interaction between a practice, which aims to change the state of things, and a culture, which sets up sense of this change.

Care and transgression The goal of these activities is to reach a greater social sensitivity and responsiveness among people, showing respect for the spaces where they live. The capability of taking care relates to the quality of the actions perceived by users. This means to set up a relationship and communicate a sense of belonging and integration. The care of what is visible conveys trust in what is not visible9 (taking care of details, people, transparency of own actions). Resources, human and financial, invested in the care of the existing and respecting civil coexistence and commons, lead to better results rather than the use of repressive measures. On the contrary, the neglect of urban environments transmits signals of deterioration and insecurity10.

But it is not only comfort and security what we need. This order makes the city more obvious, flattened, foreseeable. The way by which the smart city has presented itself - marked by urban happy life icons, dependent on high-tech devices – it is not necessarily an improvement. Talking about smart city, Rem Koolhaas11 uses these words: “Apocalyptic scenarios are managed and mitigated by sensor-based solutions. Smart cities rhetoric relies on slogans – ‘fix leaky pipes, save millions’. Why do smart cities offer only improvement? Where is the possibility of transgression? And rather than discarding urban intelligence accumulated over centuries, we must explore how to what is today considered smart with previous eras of knowledge”. And he goes on: "(...) traditional European values of liberty, equality, and fraternity have been replaced in the 21st century by comfort, security, and sustainability. They are now the dominant values of our culture, a revolution that has barely been registered.” It is rather critical to recover and to share some of the attitudes and perspectives that inform various forms of activism (as re-cycle practices) restarting some radical attitude of the sixties.

42

ECONOMICAL VALUE COLLABORATION VALUE

SOCIAL VALUE

WORK VALUE

TIME VALUE

GLOBAL VALUE NARRATIVE VALUE

LOCAL VALUE

CULTURAL VALUE

CULTURAL VALUE

ECONOMICAL VALUE

SOCIAL VALUE

raising up autonomous personalities able to find and process information necessary for any design problem; favouring the knowledge cross- fertilization.

reducing consumption of products, energy and spaces; increasing sustainable qualities (physical and social environments and sustainable behaviors).

moving from a hierarchical structure to a distributed one (vertical/horizontal); taking care, setting up a relationship; communicate a sense of belonging and integration).

TIME VALUE

WORK VALUE

NARRATIVE VALUE

experiencing the time needed to link a multiplicity of actors, places, and products togethers (unlike) in contemporary accelerated time.

attributing far greater value to manual work and extending the idea of work to a broader range of activities. (meaningful work).

shaping our outlook and measurably impact how well we do: narrative is an important ingredient in human development.

COLLABORATION VALUE

LOCAL VALUE

GLOBAL VALUE

enabling people to play an active role in the construction of their chosen future.

remaining in the hands, minds, and pockets of the local community.

replicating small initiatives (local actions rooted in a specific context) in different places; integrating and synergizing several small projects into larger programs to attain great transformations.

Re-cycle practices core values, R. Fagnoni, 2015

Conclusions The figure above identifies the re-cycle practices core values, in the currently emergent nature of design in the public sector.

The way in which these are emerging is undergoing to different transformations, and in particular: 1. design and architecture are shifting to the concept of "co" (collaboration, cocreation, etc.) emphasizing the explicit involvement of users, partners, and other stakeholders in the design process; 2. design and architecture are increasingly embracing the social. This shift

43

is in part captured by the movement of social innovation and in part by the growing interest in public sector innovation12.

Re-cycle social innovators, urban makers, recycle ideas and materials.

They reuse devices and tools combining them with new meaning. They look for answers, they do not ask for questions. They work with waste and remains, aiming to produce new values for cities through their social intelligence, rather than technological devices. They produce public goods but in most cases they don’t even have relations with the public sector.

We don't know if they denote the future, but they're doing it, a near future.

More people will be involved in these processes and more and more opportunities will be developed to transform what is preferable in what is possible.

For the world of education this means to contribute in raise up autonomous personalities able to find and process information necessary for any design problem (i.e. personalities with strong values and able to handle the constant and complex changes of life styles)13. Academia should then rejoin the evolution of these scenarios proposing and accepting planning activities (practices) as a method of operational research, and define toolkits. Take action on issues of policy making is necessary not only with the construction of theoretical models but through real planning-actions with the aim of achieving a result and at the same time spreading new knowledge.

44

1. Value, in Erlhoff, M., Marshall, T. (2008) Design Dictionary. Perspectives on Design Terminology, Birkhäuser-Verlag, Basel/Boston/Berlin.

2. Kluckhohn, C., (1951) Values and value-orientations in the theory of action: an exploration in definition and classification, in Toward a general theory of action (a cura di T. Parsons e E. Shils), Cambridge, Mass., 1951, pp. 388-433., pag. 395.

3. Manzini, E., Jegou, F. (2003), Sustainable everyday, Edizioni Ambiente, Milano, Manzini,E. (2004) Un localismo cosmopolita, A cosmopolitan localism, in Medesign, forme del Mediterraneo, (Fagnoni, R. Gambaro, P. Vannicola, C. a cura di), Alinea Ed. Firenze.

4. Manzini, E. (2015) Design, When everybody Design, An introduction to Design for Social Innovation, Mit Press, Cambridge, Massachussets, London, England 5. Kotler, P., Haider, D.H., Rein I., 1993, Marketing Places, The Free Press, New York.

6. Rullani, 1999, L’impresa e il suo territorio: strategie di globalizzazione e radicamento territoriale, Sinergie, n. 49, pp. 25-31.

7. Golinelli C.M. (2002), Il territorio sistema vitale. Verso un modello d’analisi, Giappichelli,Torino.

8. Cafferata, R. (2011), Prefazione. In L. Pilotti (a cura di), Creatività, innovazione e territorio: ecosistemi del valore per la competizione globale (pp. 9-12). Bologna: Il Mulino.

9. Fagnoni, R., (2009) Design and new behaviours - Project responsibility, social and cultural connectibility. Strategic Design Research Journal, vol. 2, 2/2009, 45 – 55.

10. Kelling, G. L.; Wilson, J. Q. (1982) Broken windows: the police and neighborhood safety.

Atlantic Monthly. Mar; 249 (3):29–38. Avail. from: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ 11. Rem Koolhaas, (2014) Edited transcript of a talk given at the High Level Group meeting on Smart Cities, Brussels, 24 September 2014 (http://ec.europa.eu/archives/ commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/content/my-thoughts-smart-city-rem-koolhaas.html) archive/1982/03/broken-windows/4465/?single_page=true 12. Bason, C. (2010) Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a Better Society. Bristol Policy Press; Bason , C. (2014) Design for Policy, Gower, UK. 13. Castells, M. (2007) Società dell'autonomia, in «Internazionale», n. 5, 11 ottobre.

45

Sguarrdo complesso, sguardo trasversale.

Convegno Rebel Matters, 21-22 March 2013 (archivio)

8

3 DECALOGUES FOR A NEW INFORMATIONAL ERA Manuel Gausa

> University of Genoa, IAAC Barcelona

DECALOGUE 1: CHANGES OF PARADIGMS 1– The last few decades have confirmed the evidence of a spectacular change of scale –and thinking– in the definition of our spaces of exchange and sociability –of our own habitats– to do with the exponential increase in mobility, (hiper)connectivity and long-distance communication, the delocalization of exchanges, and the capacity for technological and material transformation of our environment.

But also with the capacity to process and interact complex and digital parameters of information.

2– According to these progressive infrastructural and informational (and not just formal or functional) multilayering dimension of an evolving territory “in process” –defined by layers of information (and definition) and networks of interchange (and flow)– our challenge as architects is that of proposing new formulations of space and of architectural design in synergy “in” and “with” a real, virtual and vocationally more complex environment(s) associated to the capacity for combining and synchronizing—activating and interactivating—multifarious and not always harmonious data and programmes in a single infrastructural framework of (inter)relation.

47

Not yet, working “from” complexity in order to simplify its effects, but working “with” complexity in order to celebrate its potentials.

3– Today, we are present at a change of paradigms in architectural thinking: from an architecture based on a static logic we have moved –or are moving– towards an architecture based on a dynamic and “irregular” logic—one that is more impure, irregular and definitively interactive—in interaction with an environment, a context, a society and a creative and scientific culture permanently attentive to the diversity and complexity of a definitively informational space-time. Transversal and multi-scalar.

4– A new type of “alternative” –or advanced– thinking stemming from the actual conditions of our contexts and associated with factors of: – Dynamism (Evolutivity) – Complexity (Simultaneity) – Diversity (Plurality) – Transversality (Connectivity) – Interaction (Interchange) Factors that are precisely the ones we now have to explore.

Those of a new logic that is more open because it is less fixed, because it is more relational and interactive.

5– A new cultural challenge that calls, therefore, a new open logic, which is no longer that of classic metaphysical continuity—or that of postmodern calligraphy (associated with a yearned-for composition of space)—nor that of functional modern objectuality (associated with a given position in space), but that of contemporary operative interactivity (associated with a potential interactive disposition between spaces).

On the basis of a new type of architectural thinking—and standpoint— intended to celebrate, articulate and promote the diversity of our time and to do this, indeed, through interaction.

6– In this sense, we have to rethink such traditional issues as the notion of order, form, organization or of architectural structure and expression on the basis of this new logic.

Order, form, organisation, structure, geometry... historical notions to define our spaces that are experimenting today a high level of “rebellion” in front of their traditional interpretations and definitions.

48

– Rebellion in the notion of form... more informal because more inform(ation)al (Form not yet as a figuration but as a spatial (con)figuration, a spatial formulation) – Rebellion in the notion of order... more irregular because less regulate (order not yet as a control but as a capacity of relation) – Rebellion in the notion of organisation... more flexible because less “right”* (organisation as a differential and non-lineary order” more than a lineary an hierarchical order) – Rebellion in the notion of geometry... more de-formed because less pre-formed (Geometry not yet as a rigid volumetry but as an elastic topology) – Rebellion in the architectural “definition” and “expression”... more intense because less tensed. More direct and extroverted (Definition and expression as strategic propositions more than calligraphic compositions) – Rebellion in the idea of “nature”... more hybrid and less genuine* (Nature not yet as a pure and essential condition but as an impure and hybrid definition) – Rebellion in our own attitude, more open to global and not pre-juiced interactions with our contexts, with our society, with our culture, our environment and our time

49

7– Indeed, we have to rethink our traditional issues and we have to rethink, as well, our wish as architects without renouncing to our first and basic mission, to help create a better habitat. A type of habitable environment in consonance with the ambitious anxieties—more than with the contingent demands—of actual society. Not with its tastes but rather with its ambitions (namely with the ability to foster intellectual curiosity, social projection and cultural expectation in the presence of more imaginative and stimulating types of built settings).

8– From an architecture traditionally understood as an “inert object” we ought to move on, today, to an architecture purposefully conceived as a “dynamic, relational environment.”

And this is the ultimate condition of architecture: to generate—and materialize—relations in the space, and not just forms in it.

An architecture conceived as an interactive interface in resonance with a new sensibility open to the complex, evolutive processes that mark the beginning of this century.

Therein lies the innovatory potential of a new concern in terms of design.

That of an architecture able to express its own movement but also the different solicitations that convoke, and configure, it.

Able to resonate and to resound: to work beyond boundaries and (traditional) dichotomies: architecture and landscape, city and territory, etc.

9– The contemporary interest in tackling transverse fields involving urbanism, architecture and landscape responds to the interest in moving between boundaries, logics and scales (to recognize and to transgress them) but also to understanding architecture as a relational environment rather than a mere formal or functional object, with all that this implies in terms of constructional and interpretative, planning and (why not?) narrative interaction in and with the environment.

Intersecting settings in which authenticity does not reside, then, in some kind of essentialist basis but in that open-ended process of interchange and interaction intended to work, at the same time: With synthetic registers more than with analytical layouts.

With formulations more than with figurations.

With trajectories more than with objects.

With processes more than with events.

50

DATAS

VECTORS

>

COMPLEX ANALYSIS > INTENTIONAL SYNTHESIS With strategic concepts more than with evocative ideas.

With open fabrications more than with closed constructions.

With arrangements—and devices—more than with “designs.”

An architecture in local and global vocation of synergy: With the context and beyond the context.

With the site and with the city. With the city and with the geography.

With nature and with technology.

10– At this time of shared exploration, Architecture must go back to being, in point of fact, a collective cultural adventure (and no longer a mere register of brand names or individual personalities). This adventure involves innovatory lines of research, shared horizons, and narratives that are more stimulating and exciting in their individual and adventurous decodification.

Above and beyond the habitual gloss on “singular trajectories,” “iconic personalities,” “unique experiments” or on “revered teachers,” we’re interested in an architecture that is able to generate shared processes of investigation: trajectories capable of revealing the evolution of a (new) architecture—diverse and enabling, because connected—promulgated in relation to the conditions of its own time.

51

DECALOGUE 2: URBAN CHA(LLE)NGES All these changes of paradigms have direct translations in our lecture and interpretation of our contemporary urban structures and in the conception of the city as a new kind of complex field of human, cultural, economic and spatial, relations and interactions.

1– The city is today a multi-city 2– Is not read as a set of forms (static), but as a system of levels (dynamic); 3– Is not defined as a place but as a hyper-place, a place of places and in places; 4– Is not imposed in the territory, but is moving in (between) the territory; 5– Its territory are its landscapes. The landscape is the other "building" of the city.

6– The challenge of the city is also, not to expand or to grow, but to reinforce itself. More than building it comes to recycle; 7– The identity of the city is not rooted in preserving its "essence", but in renewing values, make up the deficit, boosting potential and strengthen the assets. Bet on a strategic vision, open to a creative and sensitive innovation and to the inherited assets too (heritage, landscape, atmosphere of life and sensory spaces, etc.).

8– Its identity is not essential or fundamental but conditional. It depends on the ability of the same urban system to preserve and reinvent itself, at the same time; to give a new qualitative and strategic impetus.

9– This strategic orientation can´t find support in old closed formations (absolute planning), but in open formulations (differential process) with a new kind of launched and sustainable dynamics: 10– The new equation “CITY + DEVELOPMENT + SOCIETY” declines today as: “INTERACTION + INNOVATION + INTEGRATION” or, better, as: “(Inter)urban quality (interactive) + Economic development (innovative) + Environmental sensitivity (integral) + Socio-cultural affirmation (integrative)” The sustainability of any system implies, in fact, empathy, synergy and innovation (development, sensitivity and progress).

His future rooted in its ability to innovate and to improve its present.

Engaging a new proactive and propositional research of its own conditions, information(s) and volitions.

52

1. Complex gaze, transversal gaze. Rebel Matters,March 2013 (archive) 2. Ramon Prat. Nature and information. Diagram for Quaderns n. 217, Land-Arch, 1998.

3. Mathilde Marego & Actar Arquitectura: Multi Layer City, Diagram City, 4. Manuel Gausa-Gic Lab UNIGE 2012, GOA DIAGRAM City (patterns and differences, from Scott MacLow: Cartoon Faces. From literal information to synthetic information)

53

DECALOGUE 3: MULTI-CITIES: PROSPECTIVE PROGRAM From the city as a formal model to the city as an informational system We can define a new action prospective program that has not only promoted, but continues driving, investigations, searches and strategies associated with this new dynamic, complex and informational condition of the new multi-city.

1– CITY & MAPS Exploring a new expression (& representation): the mapification and cartography of this kind of new scenario as a first step of research(es): – N-CITY: the city as a complex and dynamic multi-dimension DATA-MAPS: DATALAYERS, DATASCAPES & DIAGRAMACITIES 2– CITY & NETWORKS Exploring a new kind of exo-organisation: the lecture and articulation of a new geo-urban condition as a second step of research(es), – MULTI-CITY (poli-polis): the city as a geo-urban land-net (eco, intra, infra and info structures).

LAND-LINKS: INTEGRATED SYSTEMS, MESH TERRITORIES 3– Going from an extra-urban territory to an inter-urban territory, from a back-territory to a mesh-territory.

– Strengthening and reactivating the actual and existent urban structures (the multi-city, as a polycentric system) – Coordinating the different matrix of landscape(s) (the landscape, as an operative system) – Articulating the different infrastructural networks of the mobility (the networks, as inter-connective systems) Concerting systems –global and local– destined to facilitate confederate formats, differential and “asymmetrically” cooperational able to propose new formulations for the supra-municipal governances.

4– CITY & URBAN PATTERNS Exploring a new kind of endo-(re)generation: the urban reactivation (and redefinition) and the “inside development” as a third step of research(es).

– RE-CYTING: the city as an existing urban multi-fabric RE-SETS & UR.UK. City (Urban Recycling, Urban Knowledge)

54

5– Going from a movement to the outside to a movement to the inside, from a material growth to a relational (and sustainable) development.

– Consolidating, reinforcing and reactivating qualitatively the centres – Profiling and/or modelling the edges (perimeters, margins, surroundings, limits…) launching operations of concentration or condensation city/city or operations of transition city/landscape) – Linking (connecting, resetting and re-urbanizing) the disperse and periurban sprawls 6– Trough a RE-ACTIVE URBANISM: 7 RE+ FACTORS 1– Recycling: Re-structuration / Re-use 2– Reconnexion: Link-Systems and Mesh-Plots 3– Reprogramation: Mixicity 4– Renaturalisation: Green factor 5– Relationality: Conviviality/ social Interaction 6– Relaunching: Creative economy – Talent prom.

7– Research: Prospection and innovation 7– CITY & ENVIRONMENT Exploring new renewal agendas: the eco-systemic conditions of the city and its environmental optimisation as a fourth step of research(es).

– ECO-CITY: The city as a sustainable and sensitive environment ENER-GRIDS: Self-Sufficient models and green vectors 8– CITY, SOCIETY AND SENS-TECHNOLOGIES Exploring new creative interactions: the new sensorized and sensitive capacities of the urban contexts as a fifth step of research(es).

– CO-CITY: The city as a plural intelligence CITIZENS and CITY-SENS: social communities and interactive networks Inform(ation)al inter(actions): 9– Not only smart technologies but also slow-culture.

Strategic vectors, intelligent environments but, also, soft and sensitive actions, and new public relational devices….

10– Towards an new Empathy-City or EMPATHIC URBANISM Able to work with a new paradigms associated to: IN & OUT, ENDO & EXO Urban Recycling + Territorial Res(e/i)tting + Social Recalling

55

Recycling is not concerning only to the reuse of materials, spaces, buildings or urban wastes. It tackles the continuing challenge of "renewal of life cycles" of urban complexes, settlements, infrastructure networks and landscapes.

8

0.2

RE-CYCLE IS AN ONGOING CHALLENGE FOR THE INNOVATION

8

A view from the Pegli Bench, Pegli Park, Genoa Ph: Sara Favargiotti, 2013

8

THE RE-ÉPOQUE Sara Favargiotti

> University of Genoa

Rehabilitate, rebuild, recalibrate, reclaim, recover, recycle, regenerate, reinvent, remake, remediate, repair, restore and reuse are some of the most significant RE-key words1 used in projects, researches and even exhibitions during the last decade. In 2006 during the Venice Architecture Biennale, directed by Richard Burdett, the German pavilion exhibited the “Convertible City. Modes of Densification and Dissolving Boundaries”, which presented architectural interventions on existing buildings and the idea of a city that grows on itself. The German research claims that the city must be re-stabilized and regenerated to mirror its lively and complex society. The economic context changes the social and cultural framework but it also brings into the foreground specific conditions in the construction of cities and territories, put aside for a long time, but that may return to importance. The exhibition “Vacant NL” for the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale (directed by Kazuyo Sejima) showed thousands of buildings that remained unoccupied in The Netherlands. The installation aimed to highlight the potential of temporarily vacant government space for use by creative enterprises. The existing buildings were considered to be matter which could be transformed and through which the idea of the city could be renewed. This was also one of the main aims of the exhibition “RE-CYCLE.

59

Strategies for Architecture, City and Planet”, held at the MAXXI Museum in Rome and curated by Pippo Ciorra with Mosè Ricci, Paola Viganò, Sara Marini, Reinier De Graaf, Jean Philippe Vassal. The topic of recycling was addressed through a transversal and interdisciplinary approach: it was not viewed simply in its better-known role of re-using discarded materials, but as a strategy in a wider sense. Again in 2012, at the Venice Architecture Biennale (directed by David Chipperfield), the German Pavilion highlighted the changing urban transformation processes and recovery of existing buildings. The German contribution “Reduce/Reuse/Recycle” claimed a successful shift in value from waste to reusable material. The three terms - reuse, reduce, recycle - describe a waste hierarchy that gives the highest priority to the most efficient strategies of minimization: avoidance comes first, followed by direct reuse and, finally, recycling which changes the properties of the material. This same logic may be applied in setting up a new value system to address existing buildings: the fewer changes that are made and the less energy used, the better the process.2 However, one thing is to speak about "re-use", while another is to speak about "re-cycle". Re-use refers to operations at the medium scale and is based on reprogramming the uses rather than on refurbishing the building or infrastructure. Recycle is a process that transforms the original material by adding proprieties not related to the original use. Recycle works on existing structures and territories from open perspectives and covers issues with wide contents such as hybridization and integration, always aiming to confront the old and new through the merging of mixed uses, epochs, attitudes and technical solutions.

Infrastructure Recycle The recycle process is linked to the need for recovery of the obsolete heritage, the land preservation through the reduction of land use, the redevelopment of abandoned areas and, particularly, obsolete infrastructures. Infrastructure gives life to cities. Infrastructures sustain cites. But what happens when an infrastructure ends its life, becoming obsolete? They become an incredible burden for cities. Also, the European directives3 indicate that it is an absolutely necessary to interrupt the connection between increased mobility and economic growth, even to prevent the excess of construction of useless structures. That’s why several projects and researches start to highlight the challenges to recycle

60

The High Line, New York. Photo by Sara Favargiotti, 2013

abandoned and obsolete infrastructures in search of a new identity: the recycling of obsolete infrastructure to optimize their potential becomes the most sustainable and desirable solution. Two manifesto projects of the recycle process are the High Line in New York and the Trento Tunnels in Trento. These projects, more that others, became icons for the reinvention of infrastructure’s significance and identity in the urban fabric. In fact, these recycled infrastructures reinterpret surfaces, buildings, and fragments of former transport infrastructures, converting them into public places with pedestrian and cultural uses.

The High Line4 is a new 1.5-mile long public park built on an abandoned elevated railway stretching from the Meatpacking District to the Hudson Rail Yards in Manhattan. In 1980 the last trains ran on the High Line. For almost twenty years a group of property owners lobbied for demolition of

61

the entire structure until 1999 when Friends of the High Line was founded

by Joshua David and Robert Hammond, residents of the High Line neighborhood, to advocate for the High Line’s preservation, transformation and reuse as public open space. In 2002, the City of New York advocated for a recycle project with the Federal Surface Transportation Board for rail-banking, making it City policy to preserve and reuse the High Line.

The project began in 2006, with the three sequential phases (2009-20122014). The High Line Park is meant to offer an urban promenade, a bucolic space floating nine meters in the air with Hudson River views. Inspired by this post-industrial ruin, the new park interprets its inheritance, translating the biodiversity in a string of site-specific urban microclimates along the stretch of railway that includes sunny, shady, wet, dry, windy and sheltered spaces.5 Yet it retained many elements of its past, such as the rails that have been restored in the park to cultivate wild grasses or allocate sliding benches. Much of the designers’ work has been devoted to seeking a balance between preserving “the romance of the ruin” and creating a fresh green corridor for pedestrians, through a strategy of agritecture: part agriculture and part architecture. The project wants to teach that gardens can be born in an asphalt crib generating a peaceful place to escape from the frenetic energy of the city streets. The park generates alternating moments of varied character to be discovered: wild nature next to cultivated areas, intimate areas and social spaces. The High Line process has spurred real estate development in the neighborhoods that lie along the line.6 Condominiums, hotels and office buildings designed by international architectural firms like Jean Nouvel, Annabelle Selldorf, Renzo Piano, and Della Valle Bernheimer are growing along the park’s span. This project «reveals the extent that recycling projects can be attractive and glamorous as well as contagious. In other words, they are capable of generating effects of emulation and reproduction inducing requalification and new economies on the side».7 In 2010, the Trento Tunnels8 are an experiment in the recovery of an abandoned industrial site, in the reinvention of the history museum, and in the animation of historical archives.9 The tunnels were built in 1974 splitting the ancient neighborhood of Piedicastello in two and during their first life they had an average estimated daily traffic of 30,000 vehicles. Abandoned in 2007, in less than one year the two former highway tunnels were

62

TheTrento Tunnels, Trento. Photo by Sara Favargiotti, 2013

converted into a history exhibition gallery: their second life has become.10 Like Diller and Scofidio’s NYC High Line, the Trento Tunnels reinvent a fragment of transportation infrastructure, converting it from vehicular traffic to pedestrian use. Also, like the High Line, they accompany this shift from passengers to perambulators with a program of city gardens.

Unlike their High Line counterpart, however, the Trento Tunnel gardens serve as geo-spatial boundary markers.11 In fact, the Tunnels frame this shift with city gardens that transfigure the tunnels into symbols of a region that serves as a conduit between the Mediterranean South and the Germanic North. More than a museum, it is a space for memory in which is possible to reinterpret the sense of place. «To enter them is to travel in time through the twentieth century. To see the light at their end is to espy the seam where a territory’s past meets its future».12 The project aims at urban reclamation: it merges recycling, restoration and renewal. «When

63

the twin tunnels in Trento were replaced by a new passage further west, so as to avoid bisecting an old nucleus of the town, the sudden appearance of empty passages through the mountain took on a calamitous presence.

Remedying a planning mistake that dates back to a period of public infatuation with automotive travel left a gash in the landscape. What to do with a monumental piece of obsolete infrastructure? Instead of pretending that the tunnels were now useless, consigning them to some ignoble purpose such as municipal storage for cumbersome equipment, the provincial government and the historical museum of Trentino sought to return them to the community as a site of its own history and as theatre for its sense of self. At the time of this curatorial decision, the eye of an architect proved to be decisive, for the new destination of the tunnels changed their nature even before a single shovelful of earth was moved».13 We are living a time of reflection and reuse of what has already been produced. The RE-Époque has begun: it is not only a “vogue” of the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is a real change of mind and attitudes. Several superimposed crisis - financial, political and environmental - brought a higher sensibility to climate and social changes and even a change of paradigms in the dynamics of urban transformation. Design projects and theory turned towards environmental, efficiency, cost or energy saving factors, aiming to recycle existing buildings and infrastructures with an attitude of understanding and reclaiming what we have hyper-produced.

64

1. Javier Mozaz defines these operations as Re-processes whose aim is to intervene on the world that is already built. Javier Mozas, “Remediate, Reuse, Recycle. Re-processes as atonement”. In: Reclaim. Remediate, Reuse, Recycle, a+t architecture publishers, issue 39-40, 2012, p.25.

2. Rosenfield, Karissa. “Venice Biennale 2012: Reduce/Reuse/Recycle / German Pavilion”.

In: ArchDaily, August 27, 2012.

3. The European Transport Policy for 2010, COM(2001) 370. Reviewed in 2006 by the Council Commission Communication and the European Parliament.

4. The High Line green promenade was designed by James Corner Field Operations as landscape architects with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Piet Oudolf and Buro Happold, together with Friends of the High Line. It was approved in 2002 and work was begun in 2006. It is owned by the City of New York, and maintained and operated by Friends of the High Line.

5. Ciorra P., Marini S. (eds.), Recycle. Strategies for Architecture, City and Planet, Electa, Milano, 2011, p. 74.

6. Gregor, Alison, “As a Park Runs Above, Deals Stir Below”.

In: The New York Times, August 10, 2010.

7. Ricci M., “New Paradigms: Reducing Reusing Recycling in the City (and the Landscapes)”.

In: Ciorra P., Marini S. (eds.), Recycle. Strategies for Architecture, City and Planet, Electa, Milano, 2011, p.76.

8. The Trento Tunnels project started in 2008 carried out by a multidisciplinary team made up of Studio Terragni Architetti (CUNY), Stanford Humanities Lab (Stanford), FilmWork (Trento), and Gruppe Gut (Bolzano), under the aegis of Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino and the regional authorities.

9. As presented in the symposium entitled “Next Stop on the High Line: The Trento Tunnel Project”, Trento, 2010.

10. The Trento Tunnels were reopened on August 19th, 2008 with a celebration for the public.

More than 3,000 people attended the inauguration.

11. Studio Terragni Architetti, “The Trento Tunnels Cultural Space”. In: Phaidon Atlas.

12. Ciorra P., Marini S. (eds.), Recycle. Strategies for Architecture, City and Planet, Electa, Milano, 2011, p. 28.

13. Kurt W. Forster. “The light at the end…” In: Tunnel REvision, Book of 12th International Architecture Exhibition Venezia, 2010, p. 57.

65

Recycle Mandala, Officina 5 Achitetti Associati Ph: Sara Favargiotti, 2014

8

THE PARTICI-PASSION TO THE EVENT. AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE “SUPERELEVATA” EVENT Federico Boni

> Università degli Studi di Milano

The aim of this ethnographic study is to understand how participants got involved in the “Superelevata” event and how (and if) the event succeeded in make them aware of the issues at stake in the event itself. The research involved a digital ethnography of the Facebook group related to the event and the attendance of the live event. Through participant observation I attended the event for all its length. Semi-structured interviews were conducted during the event. As this event was extremely social, most participants were happy, if not eager to take part in interviews and random questions. Not all participants interviewed were asked the same questions, and not all interviewees answered each question asked. Interviews were given during the event either singularly or in groups.

When I asked participants how they learned of the “Superelevata” event they were attending, 60% of participants reported that they had heard of the event through Facebook, while 30% had heard about the “Superelavata” event through word of mouth. The remaining 10% had learned about the event from other sites or other social networking site. With 70% of participants learning about the event from social networking sites and the Internet it is clear that such an event is dependant on these sources for its success and continuation. It also makes clear the social nature of an

67

event like “Superelevata”. Nevertheless, the social networking sites are all dependant on individuals posting and sharing information, and in the case of “Superelevata” event the posts were very limited. Not very much of the event has been recorded in the Facebook group.

From the answers of the participants it seems likely that the Internet social networking and the face-to-face word of mouth functioned as a means of communication among people who were already involved in the event, or at least already interested. The idea is that of a “communitarian” participation of cognoscenti, friends or siblings of the organizers or anyway related to the active participants to the event (such as the performers).

The findings are consistent with the traditional functioning of face-to-face or digital word of mouth1, which is a “pass-along” process of interpersonal communication, a “social diffusion” which has particularly powerful effects especially in its ability to inform people as messages are “passed” and transmitted from person to person. Based on the traditional model of the “two-step flow of communication”2, according to which media messages are mediated through interpersonal relationships, word of mouth includes face-to-face discussions as well as so called “word of mouse”, online interactions based on social media. It seems likely that, compared to the traditional mass media, interpersonal communication has a greater degree of flexibility in the face of the resistances of the receiver. If in a communication process the credibility and the reliability of the source affect the influence of the message, then it is likely that the impersonal source of the media is at a disadvantage compared to the reliable sources of the interpersonal relationships.

In the case of the “Superelevata” event, interviews confirmed that close social ties have played a fundamental part in the flow of communication from the organizers to the participants: most of the people who participated to the event were somehow connected with the organizers and the primary participants (the performers and those who “occupied” the “ footprints”).

They already knew (at least approximately) what was at stake with the proposal of the organizers and the creation of the event.

Since the majority of the interviewees were somehow connected with the organizers, the former tended to trust the information diffused by the different installations displayed along the path of the “footprints”, and

68

the latter played the role of “opinion leaders”, that is, people with a good level of information, in direct contact with the scholarship related to the issues of “re-cycle”3. What could seem a weakness of the event (people informed about the event were already close to the organizers) turned into an advantage: the information came from known people, in most cases friends, whose influence is informal and often unwitting. The event presented a unique opportunity for many participants to turn to others at their same social level whom they knew and trusted. Some participants declared that they needed advice or interpretations to try to make sense out of the complex situations related to the issues of the event. They needed to understand the dimensions of this reality before them. The others they selected as “leaders” in this process were people like themselves but whom they felt command some special expertise. An interesting aspect of the process is that the personal influence of the organizers involved in the performances and the installations of the “footprints” was both given and received without either party consciously recognizing it as such – thanks to the interactive and entertaining quality of the event.

Nonetheless, many installations and performances displayed in the “footprints” have established an amount of information which surprised and kept alive the interest and the wonder of many participants. The public involvement in many “footprints” and the interactive quality of almost all the proposals activated a “will to know” and a “will to participate” that was superior to what most of the participants expected from the event.

A great number of the interviewees declared that, in respect to what they would expect from “Superelevata” (“a different way to spend the day”, “an occasion to walk along a part of the city which is normally closed to pedestrians”), the event had allowed them to learn something new about the city in terms of data and information.

Thus, what can be inferred from the interviews and the participant observation is that the “Superelevata” event played a key role in leading participants to form an awareness of the questions at stake regarding the “re-cycling” issues proposed by the organizers. The research identified three clear patterns of “influence” of the event, in terms of dissemination of information and participants’ involvement. Following the “two-step flow of communication”, which assumes that people receive a great deal of information and influence directly from other people, and not from

69

“impersonal media” such as radio, television or digital version of the main media outlets, three concepts can identify the patterns of influence of the “Superelevata” event on the participants: activation, reinforcement, and conversion.

Activation: information spread by the different “footprints” (in their wide variety of ways) activated latent predispositions to the issues at stake.

They did so by presenting effective arguments to people who selectively attended to them because they were consistent with their predisposing orientations. The performances and displays of the “footprints” aroused interest in the issues presented, thus activating an increased interest and exposure to the data and the information displayed in some “footprints” – and, in some cases, activating improvised “forums of discussions” between participants and organizers.

Reinforcement: organizers and performers supplied such alreadyinterested and informed participants with a continuing flow of arguments and justifications for remaining right where they were. This flow of arguments and justifications (for an already established opinion) was effectively represented by the path of the “footprints”, which came to represent both a pleasurable walk where people from almost every age range could have fun in a family friendly event, and a “journey” through knowledge and information.

Conversion: this is by far – expectedly – the less important effect of the event.

If (unlikely) the aim of the “Superelevata” event was to spread information about the issues of “re-cycling” among people with no knowledge at all, or with different opinion and behaviors in respect to those advocated by the participants – then the event was a failure. Normally we could think of the influence of such an event in terms of “conversion”, that is, to persuade individuals to desert their former opinions and switch sides by changing their minds. Actually, this happens only in a few cases and in particular circumstances. During the interviews nobody declared to have changed his or her mind about the issues related to the event; to be sure, all the interviewees shared the same concerns and the same perspectives of the organizers, so it can be said that the event had no “conversion effect” at all. No one was persuaded to change his or her mind about “re-cycle”, because all participants (apparently) shared the main ideas the event departed from.

70

1. On face-to-face and digital word of mouth see Allsop D.T., Bassett B.R. and Hoskins J.A., “Word-of-Mouth Research: Principles and Applications,” Journal of Advertising Research, 47 (2007): 398-411. See also Carl W.J. and Duck S., “How to do things with relationships and how relationships do things with us,” Communication Yearbook, 28 (2004): 1–36. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.

2. On the “two-step flow of communication” see the classic Katz E. and Lazarsfeld P.F., Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communication (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1995). See also (another classic) Granovetter M.S., “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology, 78 (1973): 1360-1380.

3. On the concept of “opinion leader” see Lazarsfeld P.F., Berelson B., and Gaudet H., The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).

71

Map of the main European Capital of Culture since 1985 till today

8

GENOA AND HANNOVER URBAN PIONEERS, COMMON GROUNDS Emanuele Sommariva > Leibniz Universität Hannover

The city is not just a reality, it is also a project. The term "City" today means, at the same time, environmental awareness, social cohesion, democratic governance and cultural expression.

A journey into innovations might be an odyssey to tomorrow-land, in search of new visions and paradigm shifts. Common frames for the implementation of shared principles are needed, in parallel to the development of performative indicators and life-quality targets, as new measures of progress.

The concept of “Recycle” applied to urban landscapes should mean a research for new equilibrium: the overlap of functions in space and time and the capability of different regenerative level as defined by the citizens, in a condition of mutual exchange, learning and experimenting. It introduces an operative idea of sustainability, such as that described by resilience: not as stability, but as persistence borne out of adaptive renewal cycles.

The end of the XX Century was characterized by the idea of the metropolis as the target for social progress and qualitative development. In addition, the territory was interpreted in relation to models and conditions of urban efficiency. But the recent crisis traced a turning point, in which people’s perspective dealing with architecture and the city is changing radically.

73

In this way the project, instead of representing a precise interest, form and function, acquires a narrative value that depict contexts for their democratic spatial qualities (decided by many, shared by many, made by many) augmenting the possible different uses and the sense of the place.

Historical city was able to absorb successive transformations without losing its distinctive structure.

Has the same capacity to retain identity despite changes, vanished with the spread of metropolitan model?

It‘s necessary to understand how «diverse cities overlap one another under the same name, in order not to lose sight of the continuity throughout their history and what implicates a sliding of sense through design» (Calvino, 1975). For centuries, Genoa and Hanover have changed themselves by renewing their role. In particular, the transformation undertaken in these two cases, apparently so different, express characters that are clearly visible in the design themes, which can be discovered within the stratification of urban elements. A commercial-port city from one side, an agro-industrial center to the other, but throughout their evolution both have faced the major events that from the modernity lead the society into a complete review of the contemporary urban policies.

GENOA (Liguria, IT) There is an implicit structure within Genoa’s development, which despite the urbanization process that had defined the contemporary city, is still recognizable at different scales, between the morphology and urban tissues, or between the buildings typologies, public spaces and fringe zones.

The image described by Stendhal in "Mémoires d'un touriste" (1837) is that of a complex vertical stratification, parallel to the coastline that, over the centuries, has been transformed and re-adapted according to the main important vocation of the city. Within the Italian cultural framework, Genoa as always occupied an interesting and particular position that could be synthesized in the idea of “City as a Laboratory” forerunner of ideas and projects. It is not a coincidence, that in 1892 here was founded the Italian Social Party and in 1926 was conceived the very first idea of Italian metropolitan costal area, with the strong connection between city, industries and harbor.

If the forms of late eclecticism gave concrete answer to most of the private

74

Hennebique Silos, former Quarto Psychiatric Hospital , Calata Gadda harbour Selection of the Recycle Genoa focus areas (2015)

initiatives and urbanization process during 30’s, public projects gradually mark the transition to modern architectural language and, especially after WWII, to autonomous master plans for social housing districts.

Local representatives of Modern movement, such as Fuselli, Daneri and Morozzo della Rocca, find the occasion to express their design capabilities with a clever control of landscape dimension, as occurred in the intensive housing complex called Biscione, which follows the topography of the Ligurian hills. Throughout the 80’s and 90’s the modernity of this city, continues to be expressed with the model of directional centers, such as Via Madre di Dio, Piccapietra, Corte Lambruschini, and later with the regeneration of dismissed areas: the project for the Old Port waterfront designed by Renzo Piano is an outstanding example.

From this moment ahead, Genoa transformed its identity in relationship to “Big Events”: 500th anniversary of the Discovery of America (1992), G8 Summit (2001), European Capital of Culture (2004), Slow Fish (2009-2015).

However, the relationship between contemporary urban policies and the growing diffusion in attracting these events, especially in a consolidated context such as Genoa’s one, is raising the problem of follow-up capitalization.

The indubitable “start effect” value (stimulating ideas, projects, resources, subjects and social debates) after 2004 nomination for European Capital of Culture produced an important Regeneration plan for the historical city centre, resulted in the reduction of gentrification outcome in parallel to large heritage restoration.

75

Many people, especially young families and students, decided to move back to old city harbour district, attracted by lower housing cost level and easy accessibility to the Universities, services and cultural places. However, this influence faded in ten years due to the absence of an appropriate local policy support and solid cultural basis in terms of consensus, actors’ cooperation, participation, support to a shared development, maturation of tools and means for the management of the new urban plan cycle.

Consequently, it’s important to stimulate shared initiatives, such as SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS], in order to cast a vision, to encourage practical knowledge, to communicate its forms and to implement them within a virtuous urban debate, which put together territorial agencies, citizens and local stakeholders.

The innovative aspect of this contemporary condition lies in considering strategic this policy for architecture and landscapes. The practice of recycling is necessarily contextual and adaptive. It cannot be carried out by using traditional tools. Each place and each case provides issues for a different project. But in the same way, it’s possible to speak about a new horizon for design discipline, that in Europe and especially in Germany, are focusing on the creative dimension and the pioneer activities in order to combine informal uses with formal planning. City such as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich are working with the participatory dimension in order to increase the transformative potential of temporary uses for future city development.

HANNOVER (Lower Saxony, DE) Hannover occupy a significant role in this scenario. Despite the late industrial development since Mid-19th century and the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, the city preserved its strong relationship with the countryside. As it was described by Thomas Hodgskin in his journey through Europe, Hannover city has always occupied a pioneering position within the Lower Saxony territory, due to is strategical position between Rhine, Ruhr region and Northern Germany plains, as important market of raw materials, food and transformed goods.

Moreover, the different occupation (French, Prussian, English) imposed to the city the necessity to reinvent its architectural language over time, according to the Royal House’s taste. For instance, the French Baroque influence can be seen in many Schloß or manor house in Herrenhäuser,

76

Ausbesserungswerk Leinhausen, Continental AG , Lindener Hafen Selection of the Recycle Hannover focus areas (2015)

Celle or Hilbesheim while the late eclecticism of Prussian matrix characterized the 1832 city center’s renovation and new administrative district around Waterloo Square. During WWII Hannover was targeted by heavy airstrikes because of its industrial relevance, especially in refinery, vehicles and tires sector. Already in 1943, almost 90% of the buildings included in the old city center, in Calenberger and large parts of northern and eastern districts have been destroyed, so that a first consolidation and reconstruction phase was needed.

The new plan conceived by Rudolf Hillebrecht, produced a profound change in the urban structure, saving only the few historical remains of the old cityscape. Particular attention was given to the infrastructural network, by completely redesigning the City Ring and the main urban access with new multifunctional complexes, such as the Continental headquarters, the theater hall, or the new railway Central Station.

In the 60’s, a second wave of modernization and the development of Volkswagen’s industrial area in Nordhafen, resulted in the encouragement of private transportation system and low density suburbs sprawl, celebrating Hannover as an “Automotive city”. It’s from this period that Hannover metropolitan region was created, gathering the 20 surrounding small urban and rural communities into a complex territorial entity; It extends for about 60 km from east to west and except for the southeast direction, most of the region lies within a 25-km radius from city centre.

The new metropolitan dimension of the city, connected to social housing demand, made gradually disappear the post-war traditional architectural

77

scale towards the model of new large-scale building such as the IhmeZentrum in Linden Nord.

However, it is only during the 90’s that Hannover re-acquired its international role, becoming one of the leading “Exhibition city” in the world for telecommunication (CeBIT), building materials (Domotex, Ligna), and agricultural production (Agritechnica). Yet after a short hype, international investment was stagnant and the city changed its focus by joining the agenda of the “Creative city” which combined the potentials reuse of vacant buildings, underused lots, empty sites, fallow lands, abandoned warehouses and infrastructural sites to be the theatre of spontaneous occupation and reinvention. The city nowadays considerably promotes and supports its “urban pioneers” - the actors of temporary uses - in the production of the creative city, by incorporating their initiatives in the official planning interventions (Overmeyer, 2007).

The Municipality considers many examples such as Faust civic center, Continental AG Wasserstadt Limmer, Lindener Hafen or Misburg Sud as new socio-cultural gathering nodes and open spaces. The main idea is that to develop new mixed-use districts and public institutions around the fringe of the sites, while maintaining the majority of the areas as public parks.

Although the effort to define a decision-making procedure in order to select the urban activists or the organization that will propose to set their activities in the target areas, the incorporation of informal practices in the Hannover urban planning procedures is not yet developed in a structured urban policy. The city acts as incubator for experimental uses, while on the other hand it is obviously unable to withdraw from the role of the authority that needs to set up rules in order to control the territorial governance, and reducing the effect of the social practices towards a more market-oriented practice. The occasion to define a new scheme of Urban Regeneration is evident: in this game the residual spaces, can play a significant role in a new scenario balanced between collective interests, rewarding procedures and forms of environmental compensation and reclamation.

78

Comparison between Genoa and Hanover's landscapes PRIN Recycle Italy Research Programme (2015)

1. AA.VV. (2004) Urban Catalysts: Strategies for temporary uses – potential for development of urban residual areas in European metropolises, Project Report 2. Balletti F., Giontoni B. (1984) Genova 1850-1920: cultura urbanistica, Fabbiani: Genova 3. Calvino I. (1975) "Gli dei della città", in Nuova società, n.67, 15 novembre 1975 4. Carta M. (2009) "Rigenerare per reinventare", in Monograph.it, List - Actar, Trento, 2009, n.1 5. Fiedler H., Wolf R. (2010) Hannover: die entwicklung der Stadt, BwH Editor: Hannover 6. Kloten M. (2010) Nachhaltiges Flächenmanagement Hannover, BwH Editor: Hannover 7. Moriconi M. (2004) Genova 900: architettura del Movimento Moderno, Testo immagine: Torino 8. Overmeyer K. (2007) Urban Pioneers: Temporary Use and Urban Development, Jovis: Berlin 9. Ricci M. (2012) New Paradigms, Actar-List: Barcellona, Trento 10. Schröder J., Weigert K. (2010) Landraum beyond rural design, Jovis: Berlin

79

"La Martella" rural village Ph: Sergio Camplone Š 2015

80 8

NEGLECTED MODERNISM. BEYOND THE SASSI, VALUES AND NEW LIFE FOR THE VILLAGES AND NEIGHBOURHOODS OF THE RELOCATION

Ettore Vadini, Gaia Vicentelli > University of Basilicata

I do not wish to become embroiled in local interests, as I am interested only in the preparation of the Plan (for La Martella, editor’s note).

It is of a formidable importance for the proper use of public funds, and the coordinating element of a healthy intervention-sample, with a decisively beneficial impact; so long as it is studied and realised according to modern and progressive concepts.

All of this is very important due to the scepticism about the results of large projects in the South, which is beginning to wane; if the project in Matera is not one hundred percent positive, it will mark the end of a healthy policy for the rehabilitation of Southern Italy.

(October 1951, Letter from Giovan Battista Martoglio to Frederich Friedmann)

Matera, the first Southern Italian city to be proclaimed European Capital of Culture 2019, is gearing up for the tourists who will visit it and putting its best face forward with a host of proposals and cultural developments founded on the strong history and traditions of a rural society.

81

The primary support and motivation behind current and future programming decisions is tourism.

This phenomenon has experienced a staggering period of growth, above all over the past twenty years: statistical data reveal a reduction, certainly not for everyone, in working hours and travel times, demonstrating how society now dedicates more time to holidays, culture and free time.

Precisely during these two recent decades, which began with UNESCO’s recognition of the Sassi of Matera as a world heritage site, this city in Basilicata has been stimulated, and consequently transformed, passing from a symbol of “national shame”1 to a destination for international tourism.

The most common tourist itineraries focus exclusively on a visit to the Sassi, an area that played a key role in national events during the 1950s with the forced relocation of the area’s inhabitants from their homesgrottoes under a special law2 and the successive development of a “new city” of villages and residential neighbourhoods to host this once rural population.

The Sassi are now the object of on-going international discussions of the management of the city-heritage; attempts to preserve and promote these areas, recovering them for example for residential use that permits a process of “custodianship” clashes with the attempt to freeze the development of the area and convert it into a museum for tourism. As if Matera were a large display case, exposed to the tourists who visit it occasionally, with the exclusive and sole function of selling its most typical and sought after product, precisely the Sassi themselves.

While the core of the ancient city is concentrated between cordonate [graded ramps – TN], vicinati [small outdoor common areas – TN] and cave churches, “beyond the Sassi” lies the other, intimately related story of the post-war villages and neighbourhoods3. These parts of the city, born as experimental models of a new way of dwelling and desi gned by prestigious Italian architectural practices, are now concealed from the eyes of mass tourism because they have nothing to sell: these inhabited areas do not offer the spit and polish and postcard views of the picturesque Sassi. Nonetheless, they are lively portions of the city with much to present to new tourists, interested in more than a partial experience and seeking to understand and comprehend the true history of the Sassi and an extraordinary period in late Italian modernism. The

82

story of the depopulation of the Sassi was a national issue that drew the immediate foreign attention 60 years ago. It is a question of public interest that still merits the interest of citizens and tourists. On the one hand the villages and their intrinsic sense of community, the model of an attempt to reinterpret rural culture; on the other the neighbourhoods, characterised by a strong search for modernity.

This marks a challenge for a Matera more attractive to tourism, to learn about and understand all of its parts, to rediscover them and restore their dignity. This may be one of the roles, or better yet objectives, for Matera 2019: focusing on the integration between the Sassi, the villages and neighbourhoods, an integration to be pursued and designed, a connection that is not only physical but also made of history, of places, of symbols and memory. A public project that now considers the transformation and growth of the city as it did in the past, garnering international attention.

This means triggering new processes, indicating directions and following paths whose models of intervention lead toward the regeneration and recirculation of sites and spaces, not only in Matera, of a now neglected modernism. It is possible in fact to encounter the theme of “neglected modernism�4 in many areas today and easy to observe that numerous works from the lengthy period of Italian modernism are scarcely considered by historiography or institutions, when not wholly omitted or

83

relegated to oblivion.

“Neglected modernism” wishes to demonstrate the existence of a minor modern architecture, parallel and in some cases antagonistic to its more famous counterpart. A neglected and often abandoned modernism that can – and perhaps must – be pulled out of the shadows of this period of crisis, so complex and contradictory, for a series of reasons not yet fully expressed. Public buildings and spaces to be exposed to the light as important evidence of our cultural and social history, but also unexpected (sustainable) models that may help to guide approaches to contemporary dwelling.

In a local and global condition that requires we leave the bargaining table with shared and sustainable decisions – to avoid the risk of a default – debate on the transformation of our cities is once again discussing the themes of all things public and the means of participating in the design of public spaces, or redesign when we speak of the Old Continent.

The history of Italian architecture from the second half of the 1900s, yet to be fully described, reminds us that the Bel Paese made important advances in public housing and participatory design, suffocated by indifference until recently, and now of significant interest to the search for sustainable responses to the problems faced by the city. In the wake of the global real estate bubble and scarce public resources, university research and education are gradually favouring a more responsible approach, presenting a number of interesting and possible projects for the regeneration of cities-heritage.

A number of graduate theses5 focused on Matera have worked in this direction. They represent the first results of the “Neglected Modernism” Graduate Laboratory, which examines the latent meaning and opportunities of the city’s villages and neighbourhoods, in parallel with the analysis and study of analogous realties and experiences outside Italy. The fact that the Laboratory chose to work with these settlements is a response to a condition that its all too obvious to professionals and personally experienced by their residents: the current state of abandonment and neglect in which many palimpsests of the extraordinary history of the late twentieth century, in need of study and projects for their rehabilitation.

Matera is once again a splendid position for observing a way of life and for implementing a process of experimentation with architectural and urban design.

84

The various theses focused on the key issues of housing and spaces of relation. The home and public space, consistently the first “recordings” of a changing society. Housing today is plagued by the difficulties faced by those in search of a home. Those who cannot – or do not wish to – accept the staggering offer of homes that remain unsold for reasons of cost or quality, coupled with the problems faced by those responsible for its promotion-creation. It is also necessary to observe that, given the increasingly scarcer offering of public programs, what is more difficult to develop based on a shared approach, there is a strong return to participatory processes that, however, is the result of a desire more than a condition. Thus only the sensitivity of the principal actors, in this case of graduate students, is still able to create a synergetic condition similar to that experienced in post-war Matera. As Giancarlo De Carlo stated, participation “is a process that requires a great commitment and great deal of work”.

Beyond the economic-financial objectives of public housing as a tool of pricing control, the most interesting aspect today lies in something that cannot be measured: the educational role assumed, or that can be reassumed, by spaces of dwelling that contribute to the “construction” of a civil-ecological society.

The Laboratory included the observation of various events from the period of late modernism, outside of Italy. These experiences helped understand its cultural-social importance and value, in comparison with events in Italian architecture entirely worthy of being re-examined, what is more as

85

an interesting cross section of national politics, economics and society.

This was the season of the ‘50s and ‘60s, which offered extraordinary examples of “spaces at the human scale”, built by public entities in small and large cities across Italy. The leading designers6 of residential districts from this period should be paired with those who believed in Quaroni’s vision of widespread quality and De Carlo’s notion of participatory planning, found in the Olivetti projects in Ivrea, Terni’s Villaggio Matteotti and Matera’s villages and neighbourhoods.

The result of a favourable economic-social circumstance? Perhaps, but not only. Undoubtedly it was a season when a more prudent world of politics and business listened to and involved citizens-workers to jointly develop an idea of “community”, more or less aligned with a very interesting cultural, social and political project theorized by the farsighted Adriano Olivetti. An idea that integrated the spaces of production and living within a unified design based precisely on the notion of community.

Though the historiography and promotion of modern architecture tend to favour larger projects and ignore minor works, it is still important to recognise and rehabilitate those areas that have affected the physiognomy o the city. Investigations and projects, such as these graduate theses, may lead to some form of rediscovery, providing the measure of how, for example in Matera, widespread quality is still able to find its own “space” and resist against the spread of the culture of the non-place.

86

1. During a visit to Matera in 1948, the leader of the Italian Communist Party Palmiro Togliatti declared the Sassi to be a ”national shame”.

2. Special Law n. 619 issued on 17 May 1952 for the “Rehabilitation of the Sassi in the city of Matera”.

3. By 1965 the following villages and neighbourhoods foreseen by Law n. 619 had been completed: the “La Martella”, “Venusio” and “Picciano” rural villages; the “Agna” semi-rural village; the “Serra Venerdì”, “Lanera” and “Spine Bianche” neighborhoods.

4. Neglected Modernism is borrowed from the title of an International Research Convention promoted by the Dipartimento di Architettura Infrastruttura Paesaggio at the Pescara Faculty of Architecture, under the patronage of the Ascoli Piceno Faculty of Architecture and the Press Office of the Greek Embassy in Rome. Conceived by Carmen Andriani and Yorgos Simeoforidis, Neglected Modernism: Themes, Figures and Works 1950/60 was held in Pescara on 25 and 26 May 2001.

5. The Graduate Theses in Civil Engineering-Architecture at the Università degli Studi della Basilicata are: “CONVERTIBLE VILLAGE: 1951-2014. Permanenze, trasformazioni e sviluppo sostenibile del borgo La Martella” by Maristella Quinto, tutor Prof. arch. Ettore Vadini, 2013/14; “ECO-BORGO LA MARTELLA. Abitare un‘infrastruttura ambientale a Matera” by Massimo Loia, tutor Prof. arch. Ettore Vadini, 2011/12; “RIABITARE IL MODERNO. Un’indagine e un progetto di riqualificazione per il Rione Spine Bianche a Matera” by Simone Cavallo, tutor Prof. arch. Ettore Vadini, 2011/12.

6. For example, Libera, De Renzi, Ridolfi, Moretti in Rome, Daneri in Genoa, Gabetti and Isola in Turin, Asnago and Vender, BBPR and Albini in Milan.

87

Recycling requires a program of actions over time to produce immediate solutions for the reuse of abandoned spaces, and simultaneously to activate the conditions for reducing the production of new wastes or to prevent the interruption of the cycles, planning and designing the reversibility of uses.

8

0.3

RE-CYCLE IS A CREATIVE AND REVERSIBLE PROCESS

8

SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS], Genoa Ph: Jeannette Sordi, 2014

8

ORDINARY VOIDS. SPECIAL OPENINGS Jeannette Sordi

> Adolfo Ibáñez University, University of Genoa

[We should] consider the city as a ‘high-tech favela’; avoid rigid and definitive solutions and favour reversible, incomplete, imperfect systems that allow the urban space to be constantly adapted to new unexpected and unplanned activities.1 The production of waste and empty spaces inside the city has gone hand in hand with the rapidity of urban and economic development. These ‘voids’ produced an ‘alternative’ or ‘generic’ urban landscapes that have been well described as drosscape - the natural externalities that are the result of the processes of transformation of production means,2 including the urban; junkspace – literally trash space;3 terrain vague – spaces that are forgotten within rapidly changing cities;4 ruins in revers -the voids, the ruins, of a city that has never existed5 … Voids have become a lens to look at the contemporary city, to which we can add all these spaces that in fact aren’t any void, but that have lost their architectural, urban, social, cultural function; and therefore their meaning. Relicts of the industrial past, great monuments that cannot be conserved, ordinary and extraordinary architectures, become obsolete and are left over.

Starting from the 1980s, the urgency to find a solution to the process

91

of industrial dismissing, have been seen as an historical opportunity to concretely transform the city and the territory, especially in Europe. Today, the economic crisis has blocked any major investments in a better future, leaving these space in a state of ‘steady development’ – suspended between the natural instinct to these places back to life, and the lack of means to actually do it. Plots and buildings remain on hold for years, waiting for a restoration intervention to be approved, started, and then stopped by other plans, complex bureaucracy, underestimated costs, funding cuts, environmental reclamation, political contrasts, citizens opposition…

An ‘extraordinary opening’ becomes the ultimate – and somehow the only – option. Increasingly, research projects like that of the Urban Catalyst in Berlin demonstrate how the temporary reuse of urban spaces – the gap between two consequent operations, one obsolete and one unknown - constitutes a resource for unimagined activities and synergies to rise and grow.6 Urban Catalyst, a European research project based in Berlin during 2001-2003, indeed explored strategies for the temporary use of leftover sites in urban areas. Founded by Phillipp Misselwitz, Phillipp Oswalt and Klaus Overmeyer the project was organized as an interdisciplinary platform for research and public interventions in order to stimulate discussion amongst architects and planners about the use of void spaces in the city. The project took as its topic the various unplanned and informal uses of these spaces, which operate within informal economies and fall outside the remit of traditional urban planning. Using the city of Berlin as their site, Urban Catalyst organized a series of events, exhibitions, publications and workshops, in order to develop strategies for integrating such processes into the urban design of contemporary cities. Their research explored new forms of urban development where citizens would be the initiators rather than professional developers. Abandoned areas would be used temporarily, occupying the space between a precedent and a future use. Temporary reuse was therefore seen as an action for anticipating permanent uses of space.

These operations require a radical change in the way we think of architecture and cities. The project becomes ephemeral, open, light, occasional, transformable, uncertain, and unstable. Every occasion corresponds to an opportunity to be taken, offered by a specific time and place condition.

Temporary and informal actions in fact allow unusual practice to emerge and consolidate. Unconventional mechanism of appropriation of space

92

1. State of use of the Genoa Recycle footprint (areas that are dismissed, in transformation and partially used). Map by Laura Nazzari and Benedetta Pignatti, Recycle Genoa Lab, 2014.

that are not aligned with general urban plans can enrich the quality of public space and the collective experience it in an unexpected way. Exactly because extraordinary, it is difficult to integrate these operations within ordinary planning instruments. However these actions that happen in the hidden spaces of the city – guerrilla gardens, urban farming, street art, skate parks, public art installations‌ are often the most interesting spaces of innovation.

The image of the Recycle Genoa Footprint,7 the survey conducted by the Recycle Genoa Lab to define the recycle imprint, shows a collection of obsoleted industrial buildings, infrastructures and facilities that have been caused by the abandonment of space, functions or economic activity. Out of 27 areas that are defined in a 'process of dismission' by the current legislation - which means that they are abandoned, partially used, misused, or about to be subject to a consistent transformation 1.265.857m2 of land is in a state of abandonment while only 232.140 m2 is used, with the plan to be dismissed, as it is the case for the Strada Sopraelevata. However, even more impressive is the surface of those areas that can be considered 'in transformation': 14 plots, for a total of 2.087.429 m2, are suspended between a previous land use and a future destination, in many cases still to be determined (fig.1).8 These areas,

93

usually previously characterized by an infrastructural and industrial use, are gaps in the planning instruments and in the city, gaps that often remain open for decades, in particular in the western part of Genoa. The area of the Bruzzo steel industry has been dismissed in 1957, 58 years ago!, and many others in the western part of the city have the same history: former industrial areas that in the best cases are now serving as deposits for containers (fig. 2-3). Finally, from the research conducted by Benedetta Pignatti and Laura Nazzari, it also emerged that 9 plots out of 27, equal to 54% of the total surface, had actually been designed but the project was never realized. These projects that have often been on the public debate for years, even collected investments, and promoted the development of new infrastructure but with no concrete results. 9 In Genoa, as it has happened in other cities, it is increasingly necessary to start acting now, operating in the gaps left by legislation and taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the special conditions of each place. Considering these areas as an urban catalyst, a new taxonomy of scenarios, tactics, and conversion policies can be developed for the renovation of themselves and the surrounding areas. In particular, as it emerges from the Recycle Genoa Footprint and the maps here, the underused infrastructure of mobility and (ex)industrial areas constitute a 'belt' potentially linking the city centre to the coast and the two river valleys: a relational place that could possibly engender new relationship between city, environment, landscape and ecology. A new landscape to be activated as soon as possible, even for one day.

On the 21st of September 2014, during the European Mobility Week "Our streets, our choice", the SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] event showed how through temporal, self made, low-cost, and collective actions multiple meanings and uses can be attributed to crucial locations in the city. For one day, the industrial shipyards next to the Ancient Harbour, the only part of the central waterfront of the city that hasn’t been transformed by the conversion of the city of Genoa into a public space, has been opened to the public. For one day, this area stretched between the city and the sea, has become the theatre for 40 installations that connected the industrial past of the city to its contemporary touristic connotation. Each installation was easy to transport, and it was mountable and demountable in few hours: these manifestos became temporary installations expressing a conceptual interpretation for urban recycle.

94

2-3. Year of dismission (above) and state of transformation - in costruction, planned, unplanned - (below) of the Genoa recycle footprint areas.

Maps by Laura Nazzari and Benedetta Pignatti, Recycle Genoa Lab, 2014.

The project of recycle indeed suggests to build visions or scenarios that become a strategy to test devices that may be replicated and implemented, suggesting new methodologies and opportunities offered by the existing conditions. The site suggests a program, which is very site specific and time related: long-term frameworks can be modified through short-term projects; multi-scalar devices that are highly time related.

The interstitial and neglected spaces of the city become the place in which new activities may take place, emerging urban landscapes that, if connected, can make a new ecological infrastructure for the city. This infrastructure may have “times� of activation, functioning, and transformation that are different from traditional ones, determined by citizens’ wishes, by the will

95

of the actors that can promote these interventions, by the city itself, and by the natural transformation of ecological and temporal processes over time. The strategy of 'temporary' recycle, a change of use and purpose limited in time, has been deployed there as a device to forecast possible futures for the dismissed infrastructure of the city.

In terms of urban planning and design, recycle can in fact be intended as a procedural strategy capable of triggering a continuous reactivation of the urban system, a medium for rethinking architecture and the city.

Architects are not in charge of designing specific buildings but rather to set the conditions for transformations to happen, resembling what Stan Allen has defined the "thick 2d" a matrix with enough surplus information that is open to being continually reworked and reengineered.10 And to act, proposing and realizing light and reversible installations that can become present scenarios for future transformations.

96

Visions of temporary recycle, Laura Nazzari, Benedetta Pignatti, Recycle Genoa Lab, 2014

1. Andrea Branzi, first suggestion for a New Athens Chart in Andrea Branzi. Ten Modest Recommendations for a New Athens Chart, ed. by J. Sordi and F. Vera (Santiago: Arq, 2015), 27.

2. Berger A., Drosscape. Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

3. Koolhaas R., Junkspace (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2006).

4. Solà-Morales I., 'Presente y futuros. La arquitectura en las ciudades.' In AA. VV., Presente y futuros. Arquitectura en las grandes ciudades (Barcelona, Collegi Oficial d’Arquitectes de Catalunya / Centre de Cultura Contemporània: 1996), 10-23.

5. Smithson R., “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson (New York: New York University Press, 1978).

6. Oswalt P., Overmeyer K., Misselwitz P., Urban Catalyst: The Power of Temporary Use (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2013).

7. On the methodology and outcomes developed by the Recycle Genoa Unit see: Mosè Ricci, Joerg Schroeder, Productive Grounds. Transalpine Trajectories, Roma, Aracne, 2014 [collana Recycle Italy, n.11].

8. 'Mind the gap' Master Thesis in Architecture (UNIGE) by Laura Nazzari and Benedetta Pignatti, advisor: Mosè Ricci, co-advisor: Jeannette Sordi; Recycle Genoa Lab. 9. Ibid.

10. Stan Allen, Introduction to Combinatory Urbanism, Thom Mayne, 2011)

97

Olivier Varrossieau, Project "Favelas Painting", 2014 Praรงa Cantรฃo, Favela Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro

8

SWITCH ON THE URBAN VOID Giulia Garbarini

> University of Trento

In recent decades political, economic and social changes have had a major impact on the cities. Architects, city planners and authorities were obliged to deal with these new contexts using evolving theories and actions that were often different from each other, from the modernist of Tabula Rasa to the theory of Modification of precursor Vincenzo Gregotti, based on the concept that "we must build on something that has already been built and that the already existing is a heritage."1 Closer to our times one can find a research project "Shrinking Cities"2, which highlights the deep crisis of the contemporary urban development, noting that it has become more and more prominent to abandon the new, paying more attention and will to the actions of targeted recycling through reactivation of the components of the contemporary city that are no longer in use. This strategy is referred in the "8 Rs", which Serge Latouche suggests as the basis for "sustainable degrowth"3. This range of theories that reflect on issues of an entire city raise some thoughts on an environment that is smaller, but not less important, the public space.

Over these centuries, with the overcoming of the absolutist powers and the affirmation of modern democracies, the notion of public space has been extended to include every collective space, physical or virtual, where

99

the rights / duties of citizenship, information, and political action are exercised. The public space is a physical (or virtual) place characterized by social collective use, where anyone has the right to move and to dialog.4 It is the space of the community or the collectivity. Within human societies, especially urban ones, it represents all the spaces of passage and meeting, which are designated for common use. A contemporary city is a subject to continuous changes and stimulus, which are often balanced between practices dictated from above (government or private sector) and practices from below, from the will and the needs of a society living the urban zone, by artists, who seek to redeem marginal spaces of the city with their works, and by groups in which professionals develop strategies to retrain the areas that are forgotten or abandoned way too often.

Observing these practices, it right to focus the attention on a pair of performers/artists Haas & Hahn, two Dutch, whose work is known and distributed all over the planet and includes some interesting projects, which might concern our sector. The project in question is Favelas Painting, an experiment that combines street art and social rehabilitation.

The first work of the duet was completed in 2007. It is a mural of 150 square meters built in one of the most problematic favelas of Rio De Janeiro, Villa Cruzeiro, an area where outsiders are not welcome and where the drug dealers lay down the law. This didn’t intimidate the two artists, who with the help of local children painted a picture of a child playing with a kite, the work for which they became famous and got an opportunity to be involved in an even more significant project. The scene in question was the favelas of the neighborhood of Botafogo, where Koolhaas and Urhahn persuaded the inhabitants to repaint the walls of houses in a default pattern of colors, thus transforming the face of an entire square, Praça Cantão.

Today the square is a giant rainbow, which, according to the artists, can make a difference in the daily life of local residents and which is a catalyst for initiatives and processes of renewal and social change in the whole city.

This is exactly what happened. An action of street art has not become only a mere artistic intervention in itself but has given rise to the creation of countless social centers for young Brazilias, who in this way were removed from the streets and from organized gangs, and thus in a simple way the administration of the city of Pan di Zucchero rediscovered the potential of the most deprived areas. Subsequently, with a "practice from above"

100

Olivier Born, Project "Unpacked garden" 2014

the municipality decided to invest in an ambitious architectural and social renewal.

Moving up in latitude, I would like you to focus on a project of street art in our country, in Rome.5 This project, being different from the previous one, was not created spontaneously by artists or citizens but was promoted by the Mayor of the city praising this action as an urban renewal in the neighborhoods of San Basilio, Tormarancia and Tor Pignattara. Analyzing the definition of the "urban renewal" we understand quickly the way in which this term is abusively used in the sense of "an activity of planning, programming or design in order to recover a valuable qualitative and functional dimension in urban structures and / or buildings in their wholeness or in individual parts compromised by functional obsolescence or deterioration."6 To present an art project as an effective solution to the degradation of these neighborhoods and persistent serious malfunctions in the suburbs is not enough. The street art should be used not only for landscape aesthetics of unappetizing neighborhoods, but also as a glue that focuses on critical issues of urban realities, which are repeated in many contemporary cities, thus helping the citizens who live in these neighborhoods to have a real relationship with their space.

Let us now think of practices working largely in this direction, we can find the use of them in the genius loci, meaning the inventive force, which is not born in a place but recreates it, re-elaborating its conditions.

101

The work in question is aimed at the transformation of the current city, being subject to continuous readjustments but without neglecting the reality of the everyday landscape that engages in complex cultural and political processes, in which we find ourselves; within these processes we try to address a wide variety of interpretations of this open space that can be defined as a negative of constructed. In recent years we have witnessed an increasing number of collective "insurrection" in these public spaces, rediscovered, opened in the cities, which have multiplied internationally starting almost always with those that are defined to be practices from below aiming to defend the right to an urban heterogeneous space.

Gradually, the expansion of these practices led to the spontaneous recognition by many actors in the city's public of plural and multifaceted dimension of these places that became a true symbol of contemporary public space. The expansion of this contagious "insurgency" led initially to an aesthetic, democratic, and accessible-to-everybody dimension and as followed to the formation of critical collective conscience, thus triggering multiple mechanisms of social cohesion.

In this context we can observe how in the voids of a smaller contemporary city, for example car parks, parking areas and empty spaces connected with the system of infrastructure, the recreation and reworking of new conditions could lead to a significant change and therefore to the creation of a new figure of urban landscape, the way it happened in King's Lynn (GB) with the project of Unpacked garden7, which, by actively involving the residents, turned a parking into a garden with weave botanical themes to live in. It was a small intervention (150 square meters) that conquered a piece of abandoned and underutilized urban space to make it useful and habitable and therefore accessible to the whole community.

Always in a minor vacuum of a city was held and developed, the project "GENOA 2492"8 with which Burrasca Association has participated. Similarly to the intervention made in King's Lynn the intention of this project was to actively involve the inhabitants, though only on an intellectual level, hoping to awaken the creative impetus and sense of belonging of the Genoese to every space in their city. The installation was designed to create in them the desire to support projects of urban reactivation awakening their curiosity in the first place. It would encourage the citizens to have a broader and more utopian vision on the city of Genoa and its landscape aiming to recover intellectual and historical vanguard that Genoa had in

102

Burrasca Association, “GENOVA 2492”, 2014

the field of infrastructure. The obtained result reflects a city that doesn’t exist, created day by day and hour by hour by the desires of its citizens. The project was conceived in the hope that one day in Genoa collective revolts would be created in order to take back those public spaces that now are denied but at the same time are left to their fate.

Street art, like other forms of artistic performances, is able to produce appropriate changes of perception of reality, leading to rediscovery of forgotten places putting in these "urban voids" a stimulus to later reach the targeted redevelopment. These actions with their often provocative works raise attention to various problems, but cannot bridge the gap that often separates the social city from the material city; this distance may be reduced only by focusing not on new buildings but on so often forgotten spaces, which are public spaces.

1. Gregotti V., “Modificazione”, in Casabella, n. 498/9, pag. da 2 a 7, gennaio\febbraio 1984.

2. CIORRA P., MARINI S. (eds), Recycle. Strategie per l’architettura, la città e il pianeta, Editore: Electa, Milano, 2011 3. Latouche S., La scommessa della decrescita, Editore: Feltrinelli, Milano 2007.

4. Leveghi E., Spazio pubblico come interfaccia comunicativa tra società e città, (source: www.theurbanobservatory.com accessed 20 May 2015) 5. Carrano E., "Roma: il sindaco Marino spaccia la street art per riqualificazione delle periferie", Il Fatto Quotidiano, 27 April 2015.

6. Borri D., Lessico urbanistico annotato e figurato, Editore: Dedalo, Bari 1993.

7. Lambertini A., Urban Beauty! Luoghi prossimi a pratiche di resistenza estetica, Editrice: Compositori, Bologna, 2013.

8. Burrasca Association, for more information consult the website: www.burrasca.eu.

103

Paesaggi senza giunture [NUA] Mariavaleria Mininni, Cristina Dicillo, 2015

8

RE-USE MODERN RE-FORM MATERA Mariavaleria Mininni, Cristina Dicillo

> University of Basilicata

Jointless Landscape and breadscapes1 Matera, following its illustrious past, is reverting to the centre stage with the proclamation of European Culture Capital 2019, while crucial factor for its success over the other candidates cities was the ability to transit from ‘national disgrace’ and emblematic place of underdevelopment, produced by a flaw in the modernization process, to an open future city, able to reach the heart of the urban policies debate as a middle city oriented to innovation and creativity.

Matera, exemplary case of a Modern City that launched a reformist message from the South, as a contribution to defining the future of the Italian cities during a reconstruction phase started in the mid-50s.

In Matera it was easier to focus on a comprehensive proposal for the city and its territory, conceived for a peasant society which was living in a pre-modern state, to bring it quickly, skipping the intermediate levels, anticipating history, to a modern condition in which economies, work, aspirations of society were immediately detectable in spatial forms, in the architectural quality of the houses, testing new materials such as urban districts. The modern Matera, able to compete with other Italian cities, but original enough to propose a new agricultural infrastructure draft,

105

leading the city to the countryside, developing new decentralized dwelling practices.

A strategy to solve the Sassi displacement problem and supply new homes to a population which was, for the most part, composed by ‘peasant citizens’. A strategy created, not without difficulty, from a joint vision of Urban Reconstruction and Land Reform, based on a development vision structured primarily on the expansion and modernization of agriculture, making the countryside a more alluring place where to work and live. «It's the city that really intends to move towards the country, to heal a secular fracture» (Musatti, 1996, p. 36) Musatti wrote in his report on the results of the Matera Commission studies. «It is the city, as a symbol and expression of cultural qualifications and political and civil commitment. [...] Is the awareness that the city-countryside combination actually hasn’t that strictly antithetical meaning as intended by its more abstract first enunciators, even Gramsci. A meaning of progress opposed to conservation, motion opposed to inertia, organization opposed to disintegration».

Our proposal for a MRT manifesto, starting from the performative concept of recycling launched from our research, consists of the exploration of agro-urban spaces lifecycles, but also involves processes which have lost their meaning, use and care, and are available for a renewed relationship with history, more ironic, after years of tyranny of the present and loyalty to the past. In Matera imaginary of the territories of the post-industrial city divestment couldn’t help us with the comparison. Matera, always subjected to a loyalty assumption to its history, sometimes cumbersome, never abandoned a condition of pre-modernity and modernity, an inertia which now offers interesting suggestion to rethink.

1. Matera put us thorough a complex, always unstable, placement exercise of the ‘nature’, ‘agriculture’ and ‘city’ categories. The Sassi town is indeed urban nature but also nature city where houses do not prevent lesser kestrels to nest between the roofs, where mallow grows among the urban rocks, where the spectacular scenery of the ravine can be appreciated from the kitchen of a cave-house. Many of the ‘displacement’ districts designed by Piccinato at the edge of the modern city still establish the urban limits from where to gaze a deep countryside, designed to accommodate the peasants

106

in modern houses thanks to the pedagogical virtue of good architecture (Musatti, 1956). Rural villages as La Martella, Borgo Venusio, designed as urban cores in the countryside, able to reinterpret a community model without sacrificing the agricultural practices of own-consumption and work in the fields, still update new models of decentralised dwelling, more challenging proposal of sociability that those suggested by the urban sprawl. Our landscape project aims to restart those materials hybridized between natural, urban and rural, through new cycles of flows and materials, to try to further complicate them building new hybrids; landscape project proposes ‘ecotones’, ecosystems in tension between town and countryside. Matera as a jointless landscape that doesn’t struggle either with nature or city, open and permeable thanks to the ironic assumption of being both a ‘stones’ and a rural town.

2. If urban-countryside, economic solidarity and new peasant are the most advanced positions to develop creative forms of production, exchange and consumption, citizenship and conviviality built around unreleased spaces of sharing and intimacy, rethinking the relationship between city and rurality, from Matera the proposal is submitted in terms of retro-innovation, as a challenging term which combines and reinvents ancient practices, offers contextual knowledge to new challenges, raises a habit to sobriety that does not give in to the lure of intelligent consumption, invents new forms of open space by updating the neighbourhood dimension, relying also on the construction of micro-economies, local markets, to find an effecting

107

motivation to live among neighbours, where acting, living and consuming bend efficiency and economic interest to subordinate functions.

These operations reinforce a sensibility to the food issue deeply rooted in Matera’s culture, where its preparation is linked to positive emotions that, in addition to health protection, encourage micro-community practices in the farmyards, gardens, in the more isolated districts, presenting folklore in contemporary terms, as a no more reactionary phenomenon, and instead as a concept able to cope with the cultural and relational impoverishment.

Not just foodscapes. Food planning in Matera, accounted almost exclusively by bread production, in accordance with its past and present agricultural landscape, to overbid a wider agrourban laboratory, able to build important economies but also to deliver a message to the entire South, repository of creativity, culture, innovation and ancient knowledge (Favia, 2013).

Energy flows and material cycles. A three-phase model for Matera2 Assuming territorial deformations as irreversible transformations and considering, also, cities and countryside as ecosystems, dissipative systems that is, which evolve dynamically through phases of instability, we value the energy flow theory as a more convenient notion, able to represent a trade of intentions, of power which inevitably degrade in metabolic processes, or during changes from one phase to another. Our hypothesis is to consider ideal values of potential energy and productivity of those agro-urban processes which have affected Matera, to understand whether there is still a subsidiary energy value that city and countryside, as ecosystems interacting at their border, are still able to exchange. Flows of material, for recycling and conversion of material objects, and energy flows, as transitions able to move ideas and modify spaces.

These constructs, these positions are reflected operationally in a transcalar strategy which tare its 'moves' not on the dimensional magnitude of materials, but on their ‘state of acceleration’ or ‘inertia’, to detect and interpret forces that express a demand, explicit or latent, or an interest to a new lifecycle and an ‘agro-urban conversion’ of their activities (Mininni, 2013).

Three categories that we distinguish by degrees of acceleration, corresponding to as many design scales: (i) stocks and waste, items, products which have exhausted their lifecycle and are still, motionless,

108

to set back in motion; (ii) urban materials in low definition, in which we highlight a dysfunction, a slow pace due to a deflagrated process, to restart through an operation that moves from local history and design materials to replace those devices that didn’t succeeded in the past, try them again today «beyond the liabilities of reuse» (V. Gregotti, 1984) in a advanced post-agricultural dimension; (iii) bemusements, imaginaries in need of new meanings and to be place on more promising trajectories, through operations which belong both to the strategic and policies dimension, as the spatial project one. Those three ‘moves’ establish new ways of producing jointless landscapes, not in opposition with their nature but able to force it activating new flows, building ecotones, spaces in tension.

In the first category we have STOCKS, urban objects and agrourban containers coming from a now complete cycle, incapable to offer new conveniences. Quarries, mills, redundant architectures, infrastructure never finished and never used, whose story can not be exhausted in the highlighting of a 'failure' by reusing only their packaging, as formal evidence of a residual condition. A tale of scars, for as they’re procedurally layered and healed (Favia, 2015), but insufficient if incapable of becoming design.

Those materials belong to a small scale project, built by acupunctures operating at architectural scale in the light of two approaches: on one hand the relationship between social changes and public action and, on the other hand, the mise en paysage as the ability to start a landscaping action by

109

creating, not just by describing the sense of a place (Mininni, Dicillo, 2013).

The quarries system with its symbolic and poetic value, expressed by rents impossible to heal, now lends itself to new functions and horizons.

The mills, grain banks, today inactive by-products of the modern Matera, often fought in real estate transactions, seems to take advantage of the slow recovery of bread and pasta production chain, and, more generally, by the renewed interest in ‘urban crafts which have preserved traditional production techniques from market globalization’. And yet the 29 km of the Matera-Ferrandina rail route, never finished and still unusable, manifesto of a broken promise, of a rail connection to the national network, which today can take advantage of the attention of the academic community to become an extraordinary landscape infrastructure, where, paradoxically, slowness becomes an expedient to get it back in motion.

We recognize as materials in LOW DEFINITION all those homogeneous modern and contemporary projects of urban parts that seem to have disregarded expectations and, because of insufficient performances and inadequate living standards, are subject to deformation, processes of individualization and marginalization. Neighbourhoods, villages, suburban tissues of the suburbs in need of regeneration and reinvention by acting simultaneously at the intermediate spatial scale and on an updated sociability draft.

Starting from the recognition of a general tendency to introversion and public open spaces fragmentation in the districts, as a sign of the inability of the contemporary urban planning to support Piccinato’s plan, encouraging a nuclear growth model, we try today to re-accelerate these materials metabolism by enhancing the porosity of their settlement principles, their positional value and proximity to urban edge.

Operate on the public open space in the districts to solve a lack of planning and take into account spaces treated as empty fields, areas which do not correspond to the intentions of their designers neither to their inhabitants expectations, but able to intercept more humane forms of residence by answering to accessibility, permeability, environmental sustainability requests.

Similarly in the villages, conceived not as residential rural areas but as parts of the city in the countryside, we recognize today conditions to reverse the negative value associated with the distance from the city centre and

110

the peasantry as a dwelling condition, by transforming marginalization and exclusion factors into opportunities to encourage domestic practices and off-handed productions, and support the recovery of a dynamic agriculture, the reconstruction of short production chains, combining them to a new design culture focused on the environmental and estate value of peri-urban agricultural areas.

BEMUSEMENTS are imaginaries, great visions that belong to a successful season in the urban history of Matera and that failed to fully settle into space. Plans, strategies, ways of understanding the territorial project to replace in the post-modernity, in a circumstance which shows, albeit in a latent form, more suited conditions to receive them. The original vision of Piccinato recognizing in the green open spaces system a suitable capacity to structure the entire shape of the plan, the attempts to build an agrourban policy shared among Land Reform and UNRRA Casas, the advanced matrix of the VEP for suburban and peri-urban space, beyond the urban park and green belt models, both disregarded by the last two decades revisions which have replaced a structural-strategic interpretation with a quantitative policy, with urban standards, with urban reports which deny any design intention.

Peri-urban seems a particularly appropriate device where to recall the design efforts contained in these instruments, and rethink the open space in a wider urban dimension, beginning with the involvement of agricultural areas and new operators who practice them: operate on the peri-urban edge to adapt it as a equipped ‘hem’ able to host functions, to turn its potential into specific performances capable to serve both the city and the countryside.

1. M. Mininni is the author of the first paragraph Jointless lanscapes and breadscapes.

2. C. Dicillo is the author of the second § and of the graphics|pictures.

3. Mininni M., Dicillo C., Favia F., Matera. Cultura del cibo, green soft power e politiche agrourbane, in Atti XVIII Conferenza Nazionale SIU: ITALIA '45-'45, Venezia 11-13 Giugno 2015 4. Musatti R., Saggi introduttivi. Motivi e vicende dello studio. in ‘Commissione per lo studio della città e dell’agro di Matera, UNRRA Casas, Roma, 1956

111

In the circular and shared economy, the resources of waste contribute in a more creative and less erosive approaches in order to redefine the way in which we move, to close the energy cycles, to produce new ecologies and to feed creativity and urban intelligence.

8

0.4

RE-CYCLE IS A SHARED PROJECT AGAINST THE CRISIS

8

ECO – BARTER, LANTLOS Ph: Joshua Pagano, 2014

8

TO INHABIT IS TO DESIGN Silvia Pericu

> University of Genoa

From resource to refuse “Wasting is a pervasive (if valiantly ignored) process in human society, just as it is elsewhere in the living system. It is a feature of the underlying flux that carries us along, the everlasting impermanence of things. There is a short-term wasting of objects, and a long-term wasting of place. Each has its own characteristics. The rate fluctuates, and the flow is cyclical or directed, depending on circumstances. It threatens our health, our comfort and our feelings. It interferes with the efficiency of our enterprises. Still, it has its own values. If we seek to preserve things, it is a ceaseless threat.

If we look for continuity and not permanence, on the other hand, then wasting might be turned to account. […] Hidden behind the polite facade of living, its presence preoccupies us: it is an affair of the mind. Might there be pleasures in it, and practical opportunities? Could we be at ease with it?”1.

Throughout its evolution global economy has hardly moved beyond one fundamental characteristic established in the early days of the industrial era: a linear model of resource consumption that follows a make, use, dispose pattern. The environmental crisis we are experiencing requires a double challenge: on one hand we must counteract the progressive

115

impoverishment of resources, on the other the disproportionate accumulation of waste must be reduced. In the late 2000s it was estimated that the volume of world resources extracted were tantamount to 60 billion tons, while the volume of waste was equal to 12 billion tons, or about 20% of extraction2. If related to the individual inhabitants of the planet, despite the differences existing between the various parts of the world, this means that every year a person extracts almost 10 tons of raw materials to produce almost two tons of waste.

If we direct our glaze to our main environment, the city, it represents “a massive logistical endeavour. It as an overwhelming input/output machine, a voracious beast guzzling in, defecating out. It stands at the apex of the global nexus of goods distribution. Like any living organism, the city consumes food and water, expends energy and produces waste.

Cities require bricks, mortar, cement, lime, steel, glass and plastics to generate and renew their physical presence�3.

In this balance the consumption of land for construction and the demand for new buildings play an important role, because the construction sector absorbs a significant amount of resources and generates an equally significant percentage of waste, including inert, perishable materials and hazardous waste.

In this respect new tools have to be found to give a new meaning to what already exists in our territory, in our landscape, in our cities, to give new life to what is disposed of or abandoned, either by eliminating the processes generating waste as much as possible, or by finding a new use for those spaces, buildings and structures that have lost it, working on their new semantics.

From refuse to resource Circular economy proposes an alternative to traditional linear economy, a way to keep resources in use as long as possible, and to recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each life cycle by reusing them.

This circularity of the life cycle is the pattern of a new economic opportunity that can allow us to exit the current crisis.

The practice of recycling is not a new phenomenon; it has always been part of the normal life cycle of things, often in a pragmatic way, without special care, simply following functional and economic grounds. In a

116

project’ praxis recycling is not a common word yet: other expressions are more commonly used, such as transformation, recovery, re-use, or even reactivation.

Using the term “recycle” means an innovative approach, challenging the original purpose of the building and its shape for reasons dictated by todays needs and not as progressive adaptation. In recycling the object, whether artefact, building or site, is not the central point of the project, but one of the elements that are concerned, along with expectations and perceptions of those involved in the recycling process.

This complexity makes it difficult to establish a program for developing a new semantic of places without putting shared decisions in a central position with the plurality of the actors and the variety of visions involved.

Intervention strategies often conflict with the citizens’ needs, with the memory of places and with an image of them that has settled in the collective imagination.

It makes sense In some way we could assume that reality is shaped also by the meaning that people give to things, to the situations in which they find themselves or that they have created. The attribution of meaning helps building what is perceived, it represents the ways in which people create what they construe4. The individual perceives a specific aspect of reality, by interacting with it. This aspect is therefore activated, it exists, and can be

117

modified by the individual’s actions, gaining various meanings continuously.

In turn, the activated environment retroacts on other individuals who take on behaviours resulting from the newly modified reality. The subject, therefore, does not shape the environment; it is the environment that influences the actions of the subject, as it happens with neglected urban environments able to transmit signals of deterioration, of selflessness and insecurity5.

Therefore to produce sense is especially to develop a good story, a vision, and to communicate it. In this respect design and architecture increasingly need to tell processes, creating opportunities and spaces for encounter and exchange, based on sustainable patterns, both ethically and energetically.

In the era of complexity, design not only has the task to develop solutions starting from a briefing or specifications given, but it has to move in the systemic dimension of the project and to act following a vision with representation, interaction and conviction tools, to open a dialog with people.

Communities and participation What emerges from the contemporary scene is a generic desire for citizens to act, to get into action, as a reaction to the paralysis brought on by a global crisis and by the urgency of a situation that in Italy counts over 11 millions of neglected areas and buildings.

It represents a complex social process, able to involve different competences, through a social mobilization that must meet the ability of the institutions to make room for social innovation.

Policy-makers and public managers should provide a strong relationship with their own communities through dialog, in a way to promote people’s participation in elaborating strategies at different levels: starting from simple information, providing citizens with communication tools, to end with the consultation of stakeholders in decision-making and active engagement of all relevant parties.

With regard to individuals’ will to participate in the improvement of the environmental life quality innovation must be carried out through processes that are oriented to an open system.

In the field of waste and recycle of products and materials, quite similar to the topic of abandoned and disused spaces, a case-study that could develop a design driven innovation process successfully is represented by

118

the LIFE+ project LOWaste, carried out in 2013 in Ferrara experiencing a pattern of circular economy based on prevention, reuse and recycling of waste in a logic of public-private partnership.

The project was set up with the aim to foster the emergency of a genuine local district of green circular economy through the development of a market for recovery and recycling of specific waste streams. The local district allowed to put together the supply side with the demand one: it intercepts and exploits the materials that can be reused and it promotes green shopping by citizens, cooperatives and companies. The form in which it has been developed is the one of a sustainable market of products in their second life, but the process was also orientated to spread information on the prevention, reuse and recycling, increasing the awareness of consumers, retailers, manufacturers and local authorities about the possibility of reducing waste by reusing or buying green products.

LOWaste represents a project of community engagement with a design driven approach to enhance innovation and to create partnership to place developed recycled products into a market fostered by green public procurement.

In this event design-driven innovation is generally meant for a user-driven approach in the ideal phase in relation to the development of new products, where innovation is pursued by investigating users’ lives, practice or needs, latent or expressed.

In the same way spaces, as objects and products, can find new life through a process that starts from the users’ needs to identify functions and to visualize what we can hardly imagine at present.

119

The process is also characterised by the use of design competence from the initial phase of the project, to ensure user focus and the ability to transform and translate information into new opportunities via conceptual descriptions and visualisations. In this case the designer has the ability to translate user insights into entirely new solutions that can inspire him and other stakeholders, disseminating ideas, good practices and stimulating participation.

From product to spaces and places: people use products and people live in places. Citizens can recycle abandoned spaces taking care of them in an open process that enables inhabitants to control and shape their personal environment. As Habraken6 pointed out, “to Inhabit is to Design”.

To share recycle issues, both related to products and to spaces, needs an open source logic, an unusual field for architecture, even if it represents a well established paradigm that describes new procedures for the design based on standards of collaboration and its facilitation.

“This aspect is enhanced by today’s fully sentient networked spaces, constantly communicating their various properties, states and attributes – often through decentralised and devolved systems”7. The role of design performs in transforming physical space, so far opposed to the digital one, into a relational active space, where users take advantage of continuously changing technologies, convergent through various platforms, belonging to everyday global world, that allow an active participation of temporary tactical communities able to join just for a specific purpose and to split as soon as it is achieved8.

120

1. Lynch, K., “The Waste of Place”, in Places, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1990, pp. 10-23.

2. Source: www.oecd.org/env/waste., Sustainable Materials Management – Making Better Use of Resources, 2012.

3. Landry, C., The art of city making, Earthscan, London, 2006, p. 77.

4. Fagnoni, R., “[Ri]costruire il senso. Verso un marchio di qualità Re-cycle Italy”, in Marini. S. et al., Re-cycle Op-positions, (Roma: Aracne, 2014).

5. Wilson, J. Q., and Kelling, G. L., “Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety.”

Atlantic Monthly, 1982, pp. 29–38.

6. Habraken, J., Supports—An Alternative to Mass Housing, The Architectural Press, London, 1972.

7. Ratti, C.,“Open Source Architecture (OSArc)”, Domus 948, 2011, I-IV. 8. Jenkins, H., Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press, 2006.

121

Euro Disney Resort, 1991 Park construction (now Disneyland Resort Paris), opened on April 1992

8

RE-CONDENSED VALUES Elisa Angella

> University of Genoa

“Man identity supposes place identity.”1 In times of crisis – economic, political, cultural, social – you look at the wrecks and the rubble of the past with melancholy, sometimes with frustration and bitterness. And when there is an urgent need for a recycling action, recovery, re-attribution of meaning to 'fossil' areas and places, the awareness of available resources takes over. It is therefore necessary to design models tuned to contemporaneity.

Moreover, investigating current time, individual and collective discomfort emerges, caused by the massive ‘evaporation’ of places and territories, initially defined liquid2, then vanished as a result of phenomena such as globalization, the ‘non-stop-city’, the strong presence or complete absence of boundaries, the contemporary assertion of extraterritorial community3.

Those circumstances are confusing the awareness of the individual towards the concept of belonging to a certain place or territory. In a New York Times article, proposed as a reflection on the concept of nationality, Taiye Selasi observes:

123

“There was nothing eternal about nations, nothing biological about nationality. […] There was nothing eternal about nations, nothing biological about nationality. In a precious few states, one ethnic group still comprised more than 95 percent of the population […]. In the rest, the “nation” of nation-state fame had to be invented.”4 It is therefore possible to confer meaning, to activate places – or maybe 'non-places'5 – such as they can be perceived by individuals and communities through a renovated sense of belonging? It is possible to reconfer meaning to them, re-activate them?

The design of territorial identity can take action to connect the two sides of the coin – few resources to act and disorientation of individuals and communities.

“After all, identity is a last resort that remains when there is shortage of tools to imagine a different future, when you close your eyes in front of the possibility of the alteration.”6 Some cases can help to understand the role of the identity project in creating sense of belonging. This process is based on the construction or on the recovery of the values, then perceived in the imagination of individuals in relation to a given place – intended in the broadest sense of the term.

Let’s consider the birth of the European Union and the ‘unconventional actions' that have promoted it, discreetly located around 1992, the year of the Maastricht Treaty and its foundation.

‘Jeux sans frontières’ was created in 1965 by an idea of French President Charles de Gaulle who wanted to organize a kind of tournament in order to strengthen the friendship between France and Germany. The transmission was interrupted in 1982 and then resumed in 1988, broadcasted by the ‘European Broadcasting Union'. Its participants were the main states that today make up the European Union and it became a real phenomenon, so that Ettore Andenna, historic presenter of the program and euro-deputy, proposed to the European Parliament an EU directive about television entitled 'Television without Frontiers'.

In 1985 the 'European City of Culture' was born, in 1987 starts the ‘European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students’ – ERASMUS –

124

Europe according to the future 2022 Yanko Tsvetkov, 2012

and in the same year of the foundation of the Union, in Marne-la-VallĂŠe rises Euro Disney Resort, before demonised as American invasion, then used as a pole of union at the center of Europe.

Those ones are just some of the elements of the strategy 'without borders' of the European Union, performed in order to obtain public acceptance, both internally and internationally, and create in the confused and suspicious citizens a sense of belonging to these renewed widened boundaries.

However, Pietro Rossi in his book 'The Identity of Europe'7 emphasizes how the concept of European identity is artificial and speacious, stating that the territorial identity in general, not just the European one, can not be conceived as a constitutive element of a permanent and invariant core, but as a continuity in time that does not rule out the change of what defines the identity itself. “Ever since there were leaders, there is an awareness of the power that gives a strong reputation for being able to achieve political, social

125

and economic objectives. […] But only recently it became clear how the discipline of marketing could contribute to the political strategy, socioeconomic development and international relations: in other words not only the promotion, but also to the strategy. […] as the developed world organizes itself according to business lines, it becomes clear that a science that shows how to persuade large numbers of people to change their minds on many things, has many kinds of interesting applications.”8 For example, Las Vegas is a place that over the decades has shown to have clear this concept. It is voted to continue actions to re-semantise itself through a sort of evolution of its identity, shaped on the ‘anything goes’9, typical of the American dream. The city rose from nowhere in 1855, in one of the rare vaguely fertile areas of Nevada desert, through a Mormon settlement whose mission was to convert the natives.

But only in 1946, fifteen years after the legalization of gambling, when Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo, Las Vegas started to take the shape of the artificial city that still is the mecca of consumerism and evasion for the 'middle class man’, seduced by the thin border between reality and fiction that fascinates contemporary society.

Initially capital of gambling, then 'Atomic City' and finally ‘looks-likedisney’ destination for families. From Main Street to the Strip, finally Las Vegas Boulevard, a succession of changing identities have not threatened the utopian perception and the success of that world that has just retuned from time to time on a new artificial dimension aligned with social trends. “[…] it is realized once and for all the plastic and proteiform nature of contemporary capitalism, always ready to change his skin rather than lost it. […] This is why, as pointedly noted Ventura, Las Vegas is a city that continuously descends to compromise, fitting to all the desires, satisfying all needs, even the most extravagant […].”10 Another interesting action is performed by Enrico Mattei by the design of ‘Metanopoli’. This fraction of San Donato Milanese was born in 1952 as the ideal city of ENI company and its workers. Now protected by the Superintendence for the Environmental, is different from Ivrea – the 'City of Olivetti' – for the load of meaning. Starting from the name and going through the School of Advanced Studies in Hydrocarbons and the motels

126

Las Vegas, 1951 'Atomic Lookout', Hotel Fremont

for truckers and motorists, there is a clear desire to create a strong identity and to give to the city of Metanopoli a semantic value built on the articial ENI imaginary, for which it almost represents an utopia.

But what could happen when we talk about recycling the meaning? Can the identity project and its communication condense places, individuals and communities by conveying values, activating shared processes aimed at re-attribution of consciousness and re-activation of forgotten and abandoned areas? ‘Superelevata’ can be considered a pilot project, a simulated test. The event allowed to dress for a new identity, for one day only, a little known area, closed to the Genoese citizens.

127

The original project developed an action on the Aldo Moro road, the 'sopraelevata'. However, precisely because of his controversial relationship with the city and its inhabitants, it is strong of a rooted and spontaneous identity, protagonist in the organic system in which it resides. The area below, the ship repair sector, has instead lost its identity, once strong and with a strong communicative effectiveness. Superimposing a different identity for a few hours did not change is nature but to renewed it.

Francesco Remotti links the new millennium obsession for identity to the need for consistency, stability and unity - all values closely associated with the concept of identity - and supports it, in a relationship of ambivalence, with the alterity, which refers to the values of the opening , of communication, of change, of transformation.

None of these values, even though in contrast between them, can be sacrificed to the benefit of the other one. A flexible balance between the two extremes – identity and alterity – can compensate for the phenomenon of contemporary disorientation; a system of coexistence of different values, re-condensates to the aim of creating a reasonable stability condition in the relationship between the individual and the territory.

In this context, temporary redevelopment projects, which are flexible, open to change and development, appear today as one of the few practicable roads in order to restore meaning to the places. However, it is necessary to use caution with the identity project, powerful tool, taking care to not create semantic cages, inflexible traps in disagreement with political, economic and social factors that dominate current time, aware that the real available resource to control the present is the ability to tell stories.

“Why and in what sense identity is a poisoned word? Simply because it promises what is not there; deceives us on what we are not; because it pretends to make real what is fictional or, at best, an aspiration. We say then that the identity is a myth, a great myth of our time.”11

128

Metanopoli, 1952 San Donato Milanese, Milano

1. Norberg-Schulz, C. (1979). Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture.

Firenze: Electa (1992).

2. Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Bari: Editori Laterza (2008).

3. Bauman, Z. (2001). Community. Seeking Safety in an Insecure World.

Bari: Editori Laterza (2007).

4. Selasi, T. (2014). "Who Am I? Who Are You?", in The New York Times, December 4, 2014.

5. Augé, M. (2009). Non-Places. Milano: Elèuthera.

6. Remotti, F. (2010). L’ossessione identitaria. Bari: Laterza.

7. Rossi, P. (2007). L’identità dell’Europa. Bologna: Il Mulino.

8. Anholt, S. (2007). Competitive Identity. The New Brand Management for Nations, Cities and Regions. Milano: Egea.

9. Bégout, B. (2002). Zeropolis: The Experience of Las Vegas. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

10. ibidem 11. Remotti, F., op. cit.

129

Bruno Fernandes, Minhoc達o, 2012 @ Flickr

8

POP-UP EVENTS. FROM VISION TO ACTION Giulia Giglio

> University of Genoa

A group of women sipped wine from paper cups while watching a group of boys kick a soccer ball back and forth. Next to them, a pair of families pushed strollers. None of this would have been particularly notable, except for the fact that all of it was taking place in the middle of a fourlane highway.1 Technically, this road is named the Via Elevada Presidente Costa e Silva, but every Sao Paulo inhabitants knows it simply as the Minhoc達o (earthworm). On weekdays this highway is packed with cars, traffic and noise, but on Sundays and holidays, for the entire day, it is closed to vehicular transit. These events change completely the vision of the street, transforming it into a public space, giving a new significance to the city infrastructure.

Nowadays, in urban field, to talk about recycle actions often is associated with the topics of abandoned, dismissed or forgotten areas, but what happens when the project site is a still working part of the city?

Our cities are growing and changing faster and more drastically than any other point in human history. Urban environments are typically created by a cohort of urban planners, architects, governments and engaged citizens.

Usually the process is long and drawn-out, involving significant political

131

manoeuvring, many levels of planning resources and large expenditures of capital. Improving the liveability of our towns and cities commonly starts at the street, block, or building scale, producing an incremental evolution of urban spaces.

The Pop-up Urbanism is a particular articulation of “creative placemaking”, an ethos that today shapes many local urbanist initiatives in cities across the world, praised for its ability to catalyse “vibrancy” and civic engagement. “Guerrilla urbanism,” “tactical urbanism,” “city repair,” and “DIY urbanism” all describe the same set of phenomena that are categorically linked together. These (guerrilla gardening, weed bombing, mobile vendors and gourmet food trucks, pavement-to-plazas, intersection repair, and pocket parks) are the “tactics” for reclaiming urban public spaces and involving a myriad of innovative ways to test potential urban design improvements.

These urban actions often includes temporary events and special days, that try to generate new visions and uses of the city, such as Park(ing) day, Ciclovia, which originated in Bogota and it diffused in other cities all over the world, Summer Streets, etc. All these experiences transformed streets and boulevards in public spaces, where go walking, bicycling, doing yoga or dancing; they encourage people to transform their relationship with the communities and with the city.

It was 2002 when Bertrand Delanoe, Paris' mayor, decided to truck sand and palm trees into the city centre, setting up a single beach on Paris' Right Bank. A pop up event, starting as a temporary event, that since 2002 have been reproduced every summer, transforming Paris' grey riverside walk into a vibrant beach oasis, complete with ice cream vendors and free lounge chairs. It generates, like a butterfly-effect, a new polarity in the city centre: in 2014 the Louvre has created a tandem gallery next to the Seine (and obviously near Paris Plages) while Flammarion, the fourth largest publishing house in France, offers a pop-up library with around 300 books available on loan.

Urban actions, new paradigms of contemporary, that prove how the idea of urban recycle is not only dictated by the emergency and by the crisis but it's also a way to generate new visions and to enhance the liveability of the cities.

132

Sharat Ganapati, Paris Plage, 2012

With these aims the special event SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] acted on the Cantieri Navali area of the Genoa Harbour, on September 20th 2014. A temporary event trying to generate new flows and a new public experience.

A snapshot of what is no longer there and what is not there yet.

The urban development of Genoa has been, over time, inextricably linked to the morphology of the places, a linear city, extended for fifteen kilometres along the coast, for the major part shared with the Port. The response to the lack of space, in particular to answer at a productive nature, has always been the conquest of land at the sea, a practice that has given rise to a new species of the territory, completely artificial, and intermediate between land and water.

As in many port cities in the Mediterranean, unlike the major ports of the North, the geography of the places has imposed a difficult coexistence between the city and the port, bringing these two reality, separated but inextricably, linked to contend for the same territories.2 Today, they have radically changed their attitude to the idea of a relationship more complex and articulated, trying to generate a common ground for the public spaces. In this sense, the Genoa Harbour has been the object of various and different urban projects, since the project of Manuel de SolĂ -Morales in 1996-97 to the Renzo Piano's Affresco in 2004 and, after

133

ten years, nowadays the Blueprint Project, mostly projecting and focusing on the Cantieri Navali areas.

Complex and monumental urban projects, trying to design new public spaces and to generate a new relationship with the sea, too highest, slow and expensive to be realised by the Muicipality.

In this point of view SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] is a recycle strategy to give a rapid and flexible answer to the interaction between the City and the Port. Like in Sao Paulo, New York or Paris, this temporary event tries to redefine an urban land, to return to the public sphere a central part of the city.

Through the pop-up exhibition of 38 installation – footprints – the event transformed a weekday productive area into an open air laboratory, a walkable and bicycle path, a social infrastructure for the collectivity. It was able to redefine the urban and social role of the harbour, and to invert the point of view. The focus is not on urban design, but on urban use.3 More than a response to bureaucracy, the transformation of what already exist seems to be the key to the urban development of tomorrow. It is about how what is given can be perceived, used, changed, or removed.

Existing structures, structural atmosphere, and structural environments are valuable resources, and it is essential that they be integrated into development concepts.4 In a recycle vision, temporary use can so constitute an important impetus for a new form of processual urban development concerned with the recording and reprogramming of existing space, a strongest tool in the field of city building.

A short-term action, a long-term change.

134

Calata Nuova B. Industriale, Genoa, 2014

1. Borden S., “A Highway Doubling as a Haven”, in The New York Times, June 25, 2014.

2. Urban Lab Genova, “Quaderno n.1”, 2008.

3. Oswalt P., Overmeyer K., Misselwitz P., Urban catalyst. The power of temporary use, Dom publishers, 2013, p. 375 4. Ibidem., p. 374.

135

The Misburg area, Hannover.

Source: Landraum 2014

8

RESEARCH ON FIELD. SURVEY AND IMAGINATION Maddalena Ferretti

> Leibniz Universität Hannover

Recycle. A shared action “Recycle is a shared action against the crisis”. With this formulation the Recycle Manifesto aims to draw attention on a new challenge for architecture and urban disciplines: the possibility to return to life abandoned and dismissed materials with the power of creativity, but also with a coordinated action involving professionals, institutions, associations, stakeholders, city makers. This heterogeneous and complex set of actors should indeed work together with a common objective: save resources and make good use of available materials in order to propose an alternative model of development in times of crisis, or perhaps in a critical condition that is no longer an emergency but rather a de facto state of urban contexts today.

Recycling interstitial and marginal areas should indeed become not only an option but a regulated set of operations that would lead to a more convenient and appropriate use of urban space and that could guarantee land preservation and avoid further soil consumption. Starting from these premises, this paper investigates Hannover’s recycle potential, in order to suggest a different interpretation and use of its land capital.

137

Such as for many German cities, Hannover’s population rate will slightly raise in the next years1. Despite unclear perspectives of growth, new residential areas are already embodied in the City’s strategic plans, which indicate abandoned and dismissed urban contexts as possible land reserves for future housing developments. But are these developments really necessary, if considering the demographic trends? How long it will take for the transformations to be implemented? Are there other options to reintegrate these brownfields with a faster process, e.g. including forms of temporary uses and involving different actors in the reconversion? A process-oriented design based on a step-by-step recycle strategy could have the advantage of flexibility and quickness. An overall vision for the city, including a reflection on networks and infrastructures, could represent the opportunity to create a coherent and effective system of transformation sites that could bring new values and qualities to the whole urban environment.

Recycle. Research on field Starting from the idea that a strategic vision must arise from a comprehensive and deep analysis of the existing context, the Seminar “Recycle. Research on field”2 aimed at surveying and describing Hannover’s available land capital for future transformations. The specific objective was to demonstrate the possibility and convenience of an urban development working on the vacancy as well as on the underused wastelands of the city.

The definition of a Recycle Footprint Map of Hannover city was the main result of this didactic path. The term footprint is usually describing the negative impacts on a surrounding environment. Here it has a positive meaning as it represents the physical space where to intervene with the recycling operation. The Recycle Footprint Map is an interpretative thematic map focused on specific urban systems, which are investigated by measuring their consistency, roles and new potential functions. Mapping the city’s reserve areas means also to highlight the objectives of urban quality and environmental performances to be obtained with the recycling actions. The map is the composition of three different layers showing:

138

warehouses

harbour

channel

woods

The Misburg area in Hannover. Section and aerial photo.

Source: Seminar "Recycle. Research on field", 2013|14, students: R. Heine, J. Schäfer

a) b) c)

abandoned and dismissed building capital; abandoned and dismissed infrastructural system; abandoned and dismissed open space system.

Moreover, through specific data-sheets, selected focus areas were analysed according to different parameters: dimensions, accessibility, volumes, distances, connections, voids, state of conservation, land-uses, values and risks. The selection process started from the City Government’s map but included also further areas that are likewise potentially relevant for ecological and sustainable targets. Still-in-use areas were also considered if, for example, they are strategically positioned or if they would eventually become leftovers in a near future.

A further goal was to provide a new set of temporary and flexible design tools that can respond to the new needs of Hannover city. The tools were meant to be adaptable and exportable to similar contexts. By changing and updating the methods of urban design, the Seminar wanted to explore the possibility that also design disciplines can be converted from the simple expression of standards, financial investments and land-uses into a wider landscape sensitive development, giving a new sense of necessity to what real-estate market consider as urban leftover. There are some important key issues concerning the operative aspect of the recycle strategy:

139

- the transformation of building typologies in the post-production city; - the rapid re-use or progressive abandonment of city spaces or infrastructures; - the new ecological urban dimension connected to environmental issues; - the social participation and bottom-up principles into the decision making process; - the interdisciplinary and multi-scalar approach (from planning to architectural design).

The final goal was to compare the different selected focus areas, underlining their transformative capacity and adaptability. A collection of virtuous scenarios connected to the relationship between city densification, resource optimization and reuse of existing urban materials was presented by means of speculative visions. The didactic target of producing an accurate survey campaign was therefore extended to the proposition of a set of preliminary guidelines of future interventions.

Recycling Misburg3 As an example of the results obtained with the Seminar, the area of Misburg, to the West of the city, outlines quite clearly the methodological and didactic path addressed with the class. The students were asked to study this former cement factory erected in proximity of a marl pit and to propose a recycle vision for the future development of the area.

Misburg is the biggest coherent derelict land of Hannover, a strategically located industrial site, positioned at the confluence of three main infrastructural axes: the intersection between the A2 and the A7 highways, the tramway line heading for the city centre and the Mittellandkanal, the main water channel of northern Germany. With the discovery of marl reserves in the area (1860), the construction of the whole cement factory started and flourished along the years since the destructions of the 2nd World War. After it, most companies resumed their work, but since 1975 the industrial uses withdraw gradually, also due to the quarry’s exhaustion. In 1986 the Deurag-Nerag had to close due to overcapacity in German crude oil processing. The factory buildings were demolished during the following

140

The Misburg area in Hannover. Axonometric view.

Source: Seminar "Recycle. Research on field", 2013|14, student: J. Sch채fer

years, leaving behind a void. The two marl pits are today characterised by the presence of rare plant species, such as orchids and algae, that have settled here during the years of abandonment. Nevertheless, Misburg remains an important logistic centre due to its good connection to waterway, rail and street infrastructures.

The detailed analysis of the focus area underlined the potentials for an ecological and recreational recovery of the former industrial site. This operation already started in 2003, when the GENAMO mbH, a publicprivate company in charge of the sustainable and leisure development of the site, was established. The GENAMO main task is to define the future addresses for Misburg. But beside these long-term perspectives of development, such an intervention requires also punctual and fast actions that might ease the process of reintegration into the urban environment. A comprehensive and process-oriented design defining phases, actors and differentiated financial resources is needed.

The research on field and the analysis of maps made evident the predominance of open spaces: 430 ha of permeable land over the total 570

141

ha (75%). The speculative vision has been thus mainly addressed to the valorisation of this vast land capital. The open space reactivation would strengthen the environmental qualities connected especially to the former pits, one of which is today an enclosed biotope under protection.

Misburg’s open spaces are initially reactivated with the introduction of bees, in order to test and possibly increase the site’s biodiversity rate. Because they are sensitive to their environment, bees are indeed considered as major “bio-indicators”, which makes it relevant to see them as an emblem for biodiversity. As a second step, the vision proposes to raise public awareness on ecological concerns through communication of the bees’ project via events, advertising and information materials. These activities, such as the “bee dance class”, are temporarily established in the former industrial site and work as driving forces for new ideas and concepts.

The final phase refers to the accessibility improvement. The abandoned factories and furnaces are today mostly enclosed by wild vegetation.

With the implementation of simple but necessary interventions, such as the realization of bridges to overcome natural obstacles, realized with a common design brand to stress their belonging to the project, Misburg becomes accessible and recognizable, an attractive place also for young start-ups that aim to find an affordable but attractive environment where to produce new knowledge.

Recycle. Survey and imagination The work developed during the Seminar has been crucial to survey Hannover’s Recycle areas but also to specify the new objectives of quality assumed by the Recycle strategy. In particular the visions allowed a diverse key to the reading of the urban environment. They also increased the students’ imaginative capacity, a necessary skill to realize even concrete actions for public space re-appropriation and to foster a crucial change such as the one subtended and strongly solicited by the Recycle Manifesto.

142

1 STEP | Open space activation

2 STEP | Public Awareness

3 STEP | Accessibility

"Misburg. The place to bee" Design proposal.

Source: Seminar "Recycle. Research on field", 2013|14, student: J. Schäfer 1. Deutscher Bundestag, Stadtentwicklungsbericht 2012, Berlin, 2012.

Available from: http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/144/1714450.pdf 2. The Seminar, organized by the Department of Urban Design and Planning of the Leibniz Universität Hannover, run during the summer semester 2013|14.

3. Kloten M., Nachhaltiges Flächenmanagement Hannover. Brachflächen-Fonds: Entwicklung und Überprüfung eines privatwirtschaftlichen Fonds-Konzepts zur Mobilisierung von Brachflächen, Hannover: Landeshauptstadt Hannover, 2010.

143

5

Recycling is active. It is not limited to be a cultural approach, an ecological sensitivity or a social action. It requires concrete actions and a strong ethic of responsibility oriented to the changing.

144 8

0.5

RE-CYCLE IS A POLITICAL ACTION THAT ANTICIPATES THE FUTURE

145 8

Under The Sopraelevata, Genoa Ph: Sara Favargiotti, 2014

8

BEYOND THE SOPRAELEVATA ABOUT CONTINUOUS RECYCLING Luca Mazzari

> University of Genoa, Chamber of Architects of Genoa

The never ending guesswork about the fate of the flyover highway flanking Genoa along the bank, while providing a breathtaking cinematic vision of the town, not only suggests revamping for different purposes, not excluded the partial or total demolition of the highway, but also enhances new meditation about the broader concept of recycling in architecture and about the way this has recently been achieving a new and clearer meaning.

The hope of overcoming death through Resurrection is to read in the Bible in Isaiah and Daniel. According to prophets, death might be defeated by an act of God, and nonetheless only at the end of time, when corpses would be resurrected and rejoined to souls. Only by the advent of Jesus the Resurrection of Body could take immediately place, even though after death, and this nevertheless remaining a remote event not for everyone.

After World War II the concept of recovery in architecture was rather similar to that of Resurrection; much like as in Scripture, the idea of recovery was to be triggered exclusively after the death of architecture, what often happened by technical obsolescence rather than by physical, and still very seldom, as Divine Resurrection imposes.

147

In those years many of politicians, technicians and designers, were advocating the demolition of large parts of the city, after decreeing their alleged or apparent death by means of a progress figured out just to put them aside, since their complete demolition and reconstruction would guarantee more profitable and ready to cash financial returns than whatever recovery.

A few years before, the historic centre of Matera had forcibly been grabbed out by a law sought by the then Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, also known as «The special Act for the restoration of the Sassi» which read, among other, passages as «The State shall bear the expenses for the rehabilitation of Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano districts in the town of Matera and for the erection of public housing particularly suitable for farmers, workers and artisans, while replacing those currently existing in these neighbourhoods, that will be declared uninhabitable and torn down.» The desired euthanasia for the village of Matera did not take place, and the same stones which survived bulldozing will be starring again in 2019 when the town, also thanks to them, will act as European Capital of Culture.

When in the 70s the Genoese historic Madre di Dio district, heavily splintered by World War II, got demolished to clear the way for a reticulum of dark and fake rooms, just like the «plastic gardens» they still overlook, the mayor of the time, while facing the catastrophic evidence, did say «I do not feel guilty for the demolition, as I was told by city planners this is the way cities are to build up».

Historic centres shattered by time and wars were soon joined by entire dismissed industrial fields with their sudden and icy vacuum. While the former were already gaining battles in favour of a new and conscious recovery supported by intellectuals such as Antonio Cederna who in his The Vandals at Home wrote: “Vandal is whoever destroys the old. But not only. Vandal is whoever destroys the old so as to have the city assume an appearance more suited to private rather than public interests, so as to have its territory squeezed like a resource to milk as much income as possible from", the lot for industrial wasteland seemed to be imprinted by degradation, carelessness and demolition.

148

Genova, Multiplicity of Languages Ph. Andrea Demori

149

The first trials of recovery had found some achievements in the historical centres of Bologna by the projects of Pierluigi Cervellati and Urbino, and of Giancarlo de Carlo, even though a proper awareness of industrial wasteland was still far to come, especially in Italy.

It was Giancarlo De Carlo to grasp the great cultural and social opportunity to have large industrial wasteland revamped as a chance to re-launch the whole contemporary architecture. In No. 25 of Space and Society, dating September 1984, in his editorial titled "Empty to lose", Giancarlo De Carlo wrote: “So in many Italian cities, now, the phantoms of the inner city are being joined by the phantoms of derelict manufacturing sites. These are usually sites on high-value locations, laid out in a ring or in line, depending on the breadth of the outer city and the positioning of freight stations. They are covered by large-scale structures which are generally disregarded as being recently built and for utilitarian reasons. Yet they often possess the rare architectural virtue of having been designed with an eye to a specific use to meet present need and also to some extent future predictable ones as well. So they are specific structures and also, by virtue of their specific qualities, fairly flexible. Their flexibility is an endogenous quality, in the sense that they prove to be able to change, grow, shrink, form clusters or be spread out, have bits added on or knocked down and replaced, without (in most cases) declining into formal incoherence because a fair level of coherences is always secured by the clearness of the spatial matrix and appropriateness of building technologies. This is one of the few cases in which it is possible to claim there is an organic relationship between forms and functions, since their interdependence is a means - and not an end - which continues to adapt through a continuing reciprocal development.

Now many such buildings – or, rather, build-up complexes – are obsolescent, but their obsolescence is technical and not physical because though they have dropped out of use they are still structurally sound and even earthquake proof. They also happen to enclose interior spaces of a size and eloquence that are difficult to achieve nowadays, and they define external spaces unrivalled elsewhere for clarity and vigour. It would thus seem urgent to decide how to use them and their sites, yet responses are coming in tardily. Obviously the most important building project and much of the architectural work over the next few years is going to centre on this field, but there is little discussion of approaches by architects,

150

entrepreneurs and planners. The reticence may be a delaying tactic, counting on the automatism of destruction which vigorous periods have often unleashed against whatever appeared irrelevant or inappropriate for their development. But it can’t be taken for granted that ours is a vigorous period, while it could be that vitality nowadays manifests itself in different ways from in the past. After all, the discovery that resources are limited is one outstanding factor that could cause an upheaval in previous systems of value. So one might suppose that the reticence is due confusion and that the adaptive re-use of the building stock in becoming part of the more general problem of saving energy; not just the energy extracted from coal, oil or possibly atomic fission, but also energies the that are generated by human activity, by the functioning of material cultures worked out in the course of centuries, by the presence of significant events in the physical environment, by historical continuities in which lie the coordinates of future developments. If it is so, then the already much manipulated question of reuse would take on an ethical colouring clarifying its aims in depth and dispelling its shadows. But in order to prevent the ethical intention from becoming translated into a false moralistic and declamatory consciousness, one point still needs clarifying. Wasting energy calls for no particular qualities, while saving it calls for great skill and imagination. No plans are needed in order to waste it, but planning is essential if there is to be renewals.�

Nowadays, flexibility and energy saving are still the central issues of a new vision of recovery as something wearing out to make room for revamping as for project infrastructure; recycling to fostering transformation flexibility, to re-circulating energy and sustainability, meant as quality of life.

By figuring out recovery as something occasional and, on the other hand, recycling as a permanent activity, we may form a new ethical way of transformation where recycling is no longer a sporadic event related to the need of resurrecting artefacts, places, and contexts, but a continuous process animating projects, equally and symmetrically involving both what already is, with its shapes, materials, and broken relationships, and what is going to be, with just as many shapes, materials, and relationships ready to unfold.

151

Continuous recycling is the new frontier of modernity, intended as militancy and battle on which betting the whole architecture project while assuming cyclical and never ending renewal actions relating to the contexts they are tackling with.

Continuous recycling so to give oneself a challenge, or to get back in the game, to change or to give new form to the game, as well as to thought, to action, to the system. Continuous recycling due to need, to remake, to accumulate, to remember, not to waste, to regenerate what we change, with no befores and afters, in an eternal present where everything keeps on recycling by continuously turning.

Every day we unwittingly recycle the space we live in, we make it compliant to new life demands, to the changes of a changing context, to the changes of our thinking.

But continuous recycling presupposes another continuous changing, that of perception, which, as for forms and relations, calls for design. Only the ability to differently perceive what already exists, given that everything exists, may trigger continuous recycling. Project does not invent things, but simply the way we perceive them, the way they stick together, their relations one another; within the ability to keep perception project alive and fit, continuous recycling may open new scenarios in which every day, every month, every year, countless permutations transform and constantly recycle forms and meanings, while establishing new relationships which dissolve and rejoin in time and space, according to new configurations and meanings, without solution of continuity.

Continuous recycling as a new secular form of thought, of continuous resurrection, capable to figure out the eternal life of things yet in this life, with no necessary line up for death.

152

Continuous recycling, vision Sketch of Luca Mazzari

153

Brunetto De Battè, Sofronia, 2009.

Sofronia Brunetto De Battè, 2009

8

URBAN INJECTIONS Chiara Olivastri

> University of Genoa

"The city of Sophronia is made up of two half-cities.

One of the half-cities is permanent, the other is temporary, and when the period of its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant lots of another half city.�

Italo Calvino, Invisible cities, 1972 Recycling, rather than anticipate the future, makes it possible.

Without recycling there is no future for the abandoned spaces, but a new story that starts with a blank page, a cleared out land.

The abandoned spaces scattered around the city, as an object of degradation, ruin, dirt and danger, and therefore reason for a change of the image of the landscape in which we live, become a very hot political issue, because they go to affect the res publica.

Then talking about recycling refers to the issue of responsibility: taking care of an existing reality that has ceased to exist.

It is therefore necessary an immediate action, an injection, effective because of its rapid therapeutic effect.

This urgency clashes against a bureaucracy that has not adjusted its means to the new demands and requirements that the population raises about flexibility, dynamism and the temporary nature of the everyday life.

The temporary reuse is the more timely and militant injection, and therefore by nature very operational, able to prepare the ground for multiple possible scenarios.

155

The temporary reuse becomes an interesting scope of the design discipline, which puts the focus on the subjects, which often operate with spontaneous acts of re-appropriation of spaces.

The use of design for and in policymaking has its roots explicity in the development of service design, especially in social situations, but more implicity design for policy has evolved from the notions of user-centered design, participatory design and co-design, in which everyone is engaged in planning products, services, experiences and social processes and in the visual and textual expressions of these processes1.

The role of design is to bring the administration closer to citizens' needs, trying to operationally visualize different strategies and possible ways of intervention on the spaces.

How can democracy be improved in an age when people are profoundly disenchanted with government?

Part of the answer lies in the design of public policy that works to advance citizenship by listening to, educating, and involving ordinary people2.

Supporting Temporary uses is part of a new, alternative practice of urban planning that creates potential space by means of experimental demand.

Such a bottom-up approach, informed by the desires of the community, and harnessing its energy through immediate action, within a long-term vision.

Italy, with a 20 years' delay compared to Germany, has been experiencing for a few years the continuous emergence of many involved associations and activists; we can currently count about sixty of them on the national territory, indifferently spread throughout the boot, which prompted activation about the subject on behalf of administrations.

Milan was the first administration that has politically supported the issue; in fact an online3 map has been realized and it is constantly updated, showing the spaces owned by the Municipality of Milan, part of these confiscated from the mafia, that since 2011 to date, have been reopened, recycled, often after years of abandon.

Thanks to the new rules of the calls, introduced in 2012, aimed at rewarding projects designed to animate the city, spaces are indeed being reborn with social, cultural, sporting, small business, associative and creative projects.

156

Temporary City, Masterplanning principles"Value, Nurture, Define".

In July 2014, the Municipality of Milan has set up a working group on social spaces, entrusting it with the task of building a participatory itinerary and of thinking about possible new modalities of allocation of public buildings.

Mapping is a very useful first step to completely reverse the view to display the abandoned estate as an available resource and not as part of a city to hide and reveal its "spatiality"4, in other words not the space but a condition of possibility of more spaces in relation to the many needs and possible conceptions.

Many regions like Emilia Romagna, Veneto, Sardinia, Puglia, despite the good and spontaneous intentions of associations or individual groups that have committed to draw up maps and provide videos and photographic material, have not been reflected in the implementation of plans and policies of reuse and recycling, remaining in a contemplative state.

The next step, possible only thanks to the entry of government, is to set up programs and switch to the assignment of empty spaces through public calls.

However, small steps at regulatory level were made about the principle of subsidiarity, which takes place in the context of the relationship between authority and freedom, and is based on the assumption that care of collective needs and the activities of general interest are directly provided by private citizens (both as individuals and as associations) and

157

public authorities are involved in a “subsidiary� operation, programming, coordination and possibly management.

From 2001 to 2014, the principle of subsidiarity is in our system only through art. 118, last paragraph of the Italian Constitution.

Since that time and until last year the principle of subsidiarity was unknowingly applied by thousands of citizens, but was instead ignored at institutional level, because the shortage of law sources other than the Constitution made the application very difficult by public administrations, especially the local ones.

Labsus, the Laboratory for subsidiarity, tried to make up for this deficiency by drafting together with the Municipality of Bologna the Regulation on shared administration, which from February 2014 to date has been adopted by 40 municipalities, while 70 others are adopting it.

But, as a municipal regulation can be a great tool at operational level, it is not a law, especially a law that aims to regulate a whole, very important sector of our society such as the Third Sector.

Third Sector means all private bodies established for the non-profit pursuit of civic and solidarity purposes and that, in implementing the principle of subsidiarity and in accordance with their respective statutes or deeds of incorporation, promote and implement activities of general interest also through the production and exchange of goods and services of social utility and through forms of mutuality� (art. 1, paragraph 1).

The constitutional reform, by recognizing that citizens can act for the common good and instructing institutions to support and encourage such efforts, confirms both that citizens have several capabilities and that they can use them to solve not just their own problems but also those that concern the community.

A good example of subsidiarity is the program of Apulia Region for Youth Policies and Social Citizenship called Bollenti Spiriti, a set of measures and actions to enable young people from Puglia to participate in all aspects of community life.

The program is organized into five main actions: urban laboratories, to transform abandoned buildings, owned by the municipalities of Apulia, into spaces for young people; active principles to fund the ideas of young people from Apulia with a contribution of up to 25,000 Euros; legality

158

20.02.2015 Exi"Beyond the empty spaces, there is more" Agile associations present the map of 555 vacant spaces in Verona.

construction site to spread among young people a culture of legality and the active struggle against mafia; laboratories from below to strengthen the skills of those who do or want to do business in Apulia; school, to train new professionals dedicated to the activation of local development projects.

Genoa, in this overview of active administrations, has shown, with its support to the Superelevata event, to be interested in undertaking a process of activation of the dismissed area together with the university, the team of Re-cycle lab Genoa.

In fact the events have the aim to attract people and create a debate, but they are only the beginning of the long process of change.

After the first step of the event, the municipality have undertaken a collaboration with the academic world sanctioned by a convention, where we will begin participated realizations of temporary reuse projects in some abandoned spaces, with the direct involvement of citizens and active association, both in the conception of the most appropriate solutions and in the implementation of local injections.

In fact the most exciting development, both from a practical and an academic standpoint, is the exploration of different ways of creating innovation, design offers a different approach to the task of understanding public problems, to visualizing the architecture of problems, and to provide means for cross-cutting dialogue.

159

Another goal is to study a strategic and wider implementation plan that will identify, depending on various features of the problem, a range of available options with the corresponding procedures, as simple as possible.

How can policy thinking and policy doing be combined?

In fact, despite the often illegal origins of temporary reuse actions, it has later been seen that only thanks to political support have they had follow up, diffusion and successful.

The link between the policy and vacant spaces is the new active role of citizens and associations, if policy recognize and support them by legislation, the true driving force of the urban injections, the vacant spaces can be seen as the spaces of oppotunities (picture on the right).

Convinced that the only constant is the change5, more than ever we need a strong cohesion between visionaries and forward-looking administrations that can effectively interpret the needs of the present.

Luis Khan during a speech to students in 1969 said “If you know how something will be in fifty years, it means that you are able to achieve it now. But really you do not know, because that thing in fifty years will be what it will want to be�.

160

POLICY

CITIZENS/ASSOCIATIONS

ACTIONS LEGISLATION

1. Bason C., Design for Policy, Gower Publishing Limited, England, 2014 2. Bishop P., Williams L., The Temporary City, Routledge, London, 2012 3. Source: http://bit.ly/mappa-MilanoSpazioComune 4. Tagliagambe S., Strategie per la riqualificazione urbana, Territorio n.56, 2011 5. Bauman Z., Liquid Modernity, Polity press, Oxford, 2000

161

Jogger on the Minhoc達o, S達o Paulo Ph: Sarah Hartmann, 2013

8

PLACEMAKING ALONG SÃO PAULO´S HIGHWAYS Sarah Hartmann

> Leibniz Universität Hannover

“The city and its architecture are never just lifeless stone. Despite its fixed structures, the city is a social fabric made up of actions and occurrences, encounters and interactions.”1 This essay aims to investigate different forms of recycling processes, that claim the re-reading of fixed infrastructures in space, through processes of placemaking in favour of the public domain.

Highways are an almost omnipresent element of the city fabric of São Paulo. Their construction took place mainly in the 60s and 70s due to enormous population growth and rapid industrialization. In consequence various existing urban areas have been incised by railway or highway lines.

The resulting interstices, are until today often generating uninhabitable zones and problematic discontinuities in the physical and social fabric.

They present difficult existing conditions and unglamorous realities and are often conceived as ugly, ordinary and out of the way. "Of the manifold types of existing situations, evoked by infrastructure, perhaps most challenging are the linear cuts incised by highways through the morphological continuity of the city".2 But there is a growing interest for these marginalized spaces, especially in the dense Megacities, like in São Paulo. As urbanisation is progressing

163

extremely dynamic and is mostly built up on private capital, the economic pressure on all kind of urban spaces is extremely high. In consequence public and non commercially used places are extremely rare to find. As a result, several nameless, ambiguous sites, determined by infrastructural artefacts are increasingly seen as fortuitous seams that offer “found” land in the apparently built-out urban areas. To transform them, urban recycling processes, such as reconceptualization deriving from small scale transformations are a potent alternatives to the highly economically driven mega urban developments, like the construction of globally equal looking shopping malls and entertainment plazas.

But how can publicness and energetic urban life be installed? And even in extraordinarily spaces, that exists literally at the margins of high speed movement?

While trying to portray different transformation processes predominantly focussing on the physical form, this essay addresses as well a range of other decisive factors, such as political influences, economic values and social justice. It argues, that design has the capacity to positively influence and beneficially intertwine all those aspects.

Two infrastructural situations in the inner parts of the city of São Paulo are chosen as case studies. Both are located within spaces of every day movement, where designing in favour of an aesthetic approach played a very subordinate role. Nevertheless, both places show a process of recycling: previously undervalued infrastructural spaces in the inner city have been transformed due to a small scale process of “placemaking” into places with multidimensional meaning. Hence they are now newly rooted in the existing city fabric.

Placemaking, is seen here, as a part of an urban recycling strategy, that takes “advantage of the community assets, their ideas and activism in aiming to create public space".3 The concepts behind placemaking originated already in the 1960s, when writers like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte offered ground breaking ideas about designing cities that are committed to people, not mainly to cars and shopping plazas”.4 In general the term delineates a process, that improves the setting of a place through transformative projects or activities – no matter if initiated top down or bottom up. While being shaped by new and strong meanings, that may

164

"The main asset of the city is infrastructure“5- Minhocão closed on sundays Ph: S. Hartmann

have an magnetically effect on people and new developments, the place is transforming in a relatively short period of time. Although the case studies portray a different processes of placemaking, they have spatial similarities as they are both elements of everyday transit. Furthermore they demonstrate, that the pro active transformation was initiated in cooperation of people and politicians.

Case N°1 - the Minhocão Highway as temporary promenade The elevated highway, unofficially named “the Minhocão”, is roadway to around 40,000 cars a day, that are passing through the inner parts of the megacity. The so-called "black worm" has been constructed in the 70s.

It is cleaving two neighbourhoods and has been placed so close to the surrounding buildings, that it hardly leaves any privacy to the residents and causes extreme noise pollution. Through its construction real estate prices fell rapidly in the adjacent districts, and the entire area changed rapidly. Five years later, the flyover had to be closed every day from 20:00 h -5:00 h and on Sundays and Holidays completely - due to pressure of the residents. Since then, the surface of the highway is used on Sundays as free urban space – stimulating a broad social spectrum. In the beginning

165

happenings and uses were mostly informally organised by several small groups. Over time the way and the variety of usages changed and intensified. Now also formally organized events are increasingly taking place. The highway is in on going transformation into a temporary, linear track of possibilities, providing the qualities of an undetermined and raw space.

The following aspects are important to highlight: Specific architectonical qualities - “the extraordinarily promenade” can surely not draw back on the beauty of a sea or the sugar loaf mountains, which are commonly essential elements of the success of the promenades, like in Rio de Janeiro. But it has other unique qualities: an elevated catwalk like posture, the background of a high-rise scenery, the precise linear shape and a uncommon width, that is rarely elsewhere perceptible in the city. These are just some of the specific spatial qualities, that are essential for the great appeal, that has been testified by skaters, joggers, stroller, cyclists, street vendors, etc.

The limitation of time - plays an important role, as it prevents the track from permanent buildings and interventions. The Minhocão is invented by people each Sunday newly. With its barbecues, cinemas, marathons, installations, political demonstrations, etc. the highway has become an important space not only for the city, but has achieved national and international awareness.

Political decisions - although the recycling process of the elevated highway has been driven mostly by Paulistas, it is clear that political decisions have created the frame for it. The law for the temporary closure served as basis for the development of the mono functional highway into one of the rare public places in São Paulo The mixture of specific spatial qualities, different social groups and a huge variety of pro active usages turn the Minhocão into a highly meaningful and identity creating place in the city.

Case N°2 - the Viaduto Glicerio as new social nucleus The second case study is, in contrast to Minhocão, far less fancy. São Paulo has, like many other mega-cities, a large number of homeless people 6. During a field research phase I got to know some of the places and situations where they spend the nights. As such they are extremely

166

superimpositions of transport infrastructures located in the inner parts of S達o Paulo Minhoc達o Viaduto do Glicerio (c) S. Hartmann based on Google Maps, 2015

Viaduto do Glicerio | Inside - Infill of new social functions (c) www.http://amrmc.blogspot.de, 05/2015

167

precarious. Then infrastructures, viaducts and bridges are serving as the only shelter and protection from sun and rain. The Viaduto Gilcerio is one of the sites. The aim of this essay is not at all to glorify these places by an architectural view point. But it tries to show, that even in this fragmented, poor and unattractive seemingly places, lie chances for recycling processes, that have the capacity to contribute positively to the social life of the city.

The Glicerio situation is formed by the intersection of two road levels, a node situation that leaves residual spacs. Along the entire margins of the highway ring, there are numerous of this areas existing. They are not part of any design or functional planning and most of them have been neglected for decades, thus they are economically unattractive. Extreme fragmentation, complexity of layers, transit function such as ugly, dirty and dangerous are commonly assigned attributes. Hence they are, despite their monofunction, not part of the everyday urban life.

At the Viaduto do Glicerio, however, the organization "Minha Casa Minha Rua"7 (my street my house) designed together with volunteers an infill construction under the elevated highway. Creditor for this project was the city of S達o Paulo. In the midst of the enormous traffic transit of S達o Paulo, the space beneath the viaduct has become an important social nucleus to help disadvantaged people from nearby, but also of the entire city. The place and the organisation is now known by both a cinema and the local television.

From an architectonical point of view the presence of the highway as a roof, is notable. It creates a cavernous situation, that is consistently integrated as a shelter for the entire center. From the outside, the social centre is barely visible, but inside it forms a large, protected area, which is supplied with daylight by the slits, that are deriving from the road construction. The place can accommodate about 350 people.

There are different programs and socio-educational activities offered, such as preparing meals, workshops, sanitary facilities, but also a cultural activities as well as the psychological health care and prevention from alcohol and drugs. The former "non-place" under the bridge in the vulnerable area of Baixo do Glicerio, where homeless people stay in inhumane conditions, is presently in an ongoing recycling process.

By installing an infill building volume, that inherents a new social nucleus, the former void is turning into a culturally hybrid and meaningful place.

168

Through its new attributed capacity it has as well far reaching effects that contribute positively to the social life in São Paulo.

From the research that has been undertaken, it is possible to conclude that both examples stand for a re-reading of monofunctional infrastructure situations. The reinterpretation process has been initiated by a combination of bottom up and top down approaches.

Nevertheless it seems reasonable to point out that the examples were not portrayed, to derive a general strategy of action from it.

Instead the essay wants to point out that each situation affects, due to its specific location and spatial impact, both political decisions and civil engagements in various intensities.

Hence the spatial capacity of the site, which often recedes into the background in urban reseach, influences each placemaking process and thus the negotiation of what is public spaces fundamentally. The examples elucidate furthermore, that infrastructure spaces are in any case inherently site specific. Each of them has a precise and significant history, function and shape, that generates unique characteristics. Therefore it becomes apparent, that each individual situation asks for a particular recycling strategy, which is conciously facing the spatial capacity of the place.

The ideas explored and portrayed will be thus useful to enlarge the vocabulary of recycling, but only as ideas, not as strategies.

1. Goethe Institute, Urban Places – Public Space: Eine globale Debatte zum Leben der Stadt, (München 2015) http://www.goethe.de/ges/prj/urp/deindex.htms, retrieved 05/2015 2. Crisman P., Inhabiting the In-between: architecture and infrastructure intertwined, University of Virginia, 2006 3. Fleming R., The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design, Merrell Publishers, 2007 4. "What is Placemaking? Project for Public Spaces". www.Pps.org. retrieved 05/2015 5. Quote from De Mello Franco, F., Secretary of Urban Development of São Paulo 6. Cazalis C., Occupy São Paulo, Photodocumentation, Kehrer, 2013 7. Associaction "Minha Rua minha Casa" Information availibe online: http://amrmc.blogspot.de, retrieved 05/2015

169

8

TOWARDS

8

Aerial view Forggensee in Allg채u, a territorial portrait Photo: Klaus Leidorf

8

URBAN INITIALS Jörg Schröder

> Leibniz Universität Hannover

The contributions to this book - collected as a Re-Cycle manifesto originate in the research work and discussions between the group of Mosè Ricci of the University of Genoa and the institute for Regional Building and Urban Planning of Leibniz Universität Hannover; for initiating and organising the public manifestion Superelevata at the Old Harbour and the Superelevata Highway in Genoa September 2014. The overall theme of the research project Re-Cycle, funded within the Italian national programme PRIN, has provided the framework for this event and for the connected research activities. Thanks to the Hochschuldialog funding by DAAD the scientific conference at the event and this book have been made possible, in order to combine research experiences and to spread scientific debates between Italy and Germany.

The core idea of the manifestion was to explain and apply innovative international research approaches and to rise public awareness for the huge development potential of Genoa's extended harbour area; and especially for the elevated highway zone that now separates the old harbour as only requalified part of the artificial shoreline from the old centre of Genoa. Main tool of research and communication in the event have been

173

installations of "footprints", visualising the ecological impact of city life and offering alternative ways of using soil, density and community initiatives for urban development. Beyond the immediate success of the installations for addressing and involving many visitors and stakeholders, to attract awareness to this neglected part of the city, the project Superelevata has offered definitions of the role of installations in urban planning processes.

This valuation seems necessary due to the interest that in research and cultural debates, but also in urban planning practices has been raised towards installations as new tools of communication. In this sense the installations in Genoa illustrate themselves as Urban Initials.

The term Urban Initials1 has been introduced for spatial interventions realised as combination of artistic performances, explorations into everyday uses and focus points for bottom-up initiatives; with the aim to influcence and guide larger scale and longer term urban transformation processes; the approach to create urban life and urban spaces from the very start of extension, intensification, requalification projects necessarily demands a certain vision of desired future shapes. It furthermore calls for the design and visualisation of different processes of territorial governance, urban planning and of the production and appropriation of space by society.

These approximations to "Urban Initials" may frame a critial appraisal of installations as starting points or continuous appearances as placecreators within urban projects.

Placemaking A re-interpretation of place has emerged in many regards in cultural terms, and has been discussed in social and economic sciences2 in the last years, also as analogue concrete spaces that complementarily balance or even contradict digital living worlds. This renewed and enlarged understanding of place beyond mostly formal or aesthetic concepts3 considers communities as main component; placemaking is seen as a social activity that in any case is driven not only by the dynamics of the involved groups, but also by a certain desire connected with the space itself in the future. With the open question how to possibly combine ever more divided and differentiated spaces, even fostered through increased appropriation of distincitve parts of the city by active groups. In a larger frame of urban space and society, many researches address these phenomena, e.g. as "Urban Catalysts"4

174

or "Microplanning"5, with the intention to systemize practices of citizens and so-called "urban creatives" in appropriating and transforming spatial fragments with intents of urban transformation in general; and as careful and innvative views on bottom-up practices and their neo-vernacular logics to create urban spaces. Inventions of community and public spaces have been recorded in many forms and functions, at start-ups and artistic projects, informal markets and economies, leisure, gastronomy, music and gardening, ecc. In this regard Urban Initals conceptualise a "city founding" movement, that embodies creativity as actual urban utopia.

Focussing on transformation of spaces, the core theme of Re-Cycle as the urban dimension of an ecological paradigm already established in product design or in architecture, it aims at embedding urban projects in systems of ecology, economy and socio-cultural contexts; and - as more explicit creative act - enfolds the possible incentive role of urban-architectural projects to shape, connect, transfer and communicate complex urban networks in material and immaterial regards.

Founding Installations in an actualised version of city founding can be understood as symbolic gesture, very appropriate for the creative paradigm as urban utopia. After pragmatic sacred rituals (the groma instrument for the Roman city) or mechanistic imaginery (the photography of the crossing of dusty lanes to become Brasilia), the symbol of performative installations may represent a shifted awareness of time-horizons; for example compared to the "constructed" founding act of Brasila: Initialising urban places from the crossing of field lanes in the dust of inner Brasil, that three years afterwards became the central crossing of Brasilia's urban highways, seems a remote past of dealing with the built environment. Nevertheless three years for the call for proposals, the competition, the planning and the building of Brasil's new capital can be opposed the 70 years before of the thorough search for the right location in the hinterland, seen as the core of the independent nation, carefully formulating topographical and ecological criteria. Brasilia as instant city had been connected from the very beginning to social disparities and missing urban multidimensionality6.

The economic, social and political dimensions inherent to large scale development projects today are increasingly problematised, e.g. in the Luz quarter project in Sao Paulo, the station area transformation project

175

in Stuttgart; recently also in the public votes in Hamburg and M端nchen deciding against an application for Olympic Games. In this regard the gap between top-down planning, large scale projects, investments and infrastructures, and local small scale community projects seems to have even enlarged since Brasilia; this may be another appealing argument for looking into timelines, life-cycles and rhythms of urban transformation projects as an actualisation of urbanism in general, not only of the form and role of masterplans; looking for new mechanisms of "founding".

Reading Exploring the conceptual frameworks and the promises connected to "research in action" or the "design research"7 approaches in the installations in Genoa and in the contributions of this book, the idea of Urban Initials refreshes a notion of city reading that has been already coined by Team X (e.g. by De Carlo8). Embedded in refinded methodologies of analysis as central innovation of urbanism in 20th century, the creative aspects connected to the understanding of context, situation and framework of urban operations today are clearly defined as explicit knowledge.

This refers also to the very interesting dialogue processes between participation and expertise based on "reading", that are highlighted by De Carlo. The operative creativity in analysis nevertheless is commonly separated from the constructive creativity e.g. stressed by Picasso: "In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing" (7, p.

2). Creative analysis as project in being, for example Archigram's "Instant City" for a plug-in capital of England9, tells in this case not only a very accurate story about the territorial centralities' discussion in England in the 70ies, but also about cutting edge research in architectural forms and technology in this period. What classically has been addressed as strong connection between science and arts with the paradigm of the artist as researcher, following Leonardo da Vinci in exploring the sculptural body and helping to establish empiric principles of science; today is observed to be in an ongoing process of differeniation and exploration of concepts and tools, especially in regard to an urban or even territorial dimension, to refresh science with artistic inputs. So the use of performances and installations in Genoa can be seen as new tool for urban design in many regards: for the "reading" of the context, the start of the transfers between involvment and participation of citizens and expertise of planners, for the

176

Aerial view Munich and Prealpine Arc, a territorial portrait. Photo: Klaus Leidorf

start of placemaking processes to communicate and establish areas or parts of the city in common awareness, for testing design proposals, for exploring different aesthetics. For an understanding of "reading" between analysis and conceptualisation, particularly the aestethics of "as found"10 and the connected interest in the "everyday spaces" can become anew a relevant reference; they have been evolved by situationist researches as early principles of reflexive modernity in 20th century art.

Installations as mirrors Encircling the shifted role of design in urban analysis and planning processes, installations as research "in place" impersonate different figures of classical products and tools of urban design, after, before and beyond "the plan". They also include different manifestions of narrativity as design paradigm, starting from the situations of telling and hearing, from instant to repeated practices, events and moments, storylines and role-plays, shifting always between time and place in processual logics.

The installations therefore show mirrored images of tools that actually are being reinterpreted: Measures – between virtualisation and placemaking

177

Models – between materialisation and typologisation Portraits – between likeness and composition Collages – between situationism and programming Scenarios – between trend and projection Visions – between utopia and strategy Already the very basic tool of measures has undergone considerable repostitioning with georeferential and geopositional appliances as new modes of representation and as basis for many interactive digial worlds, in confirmation of Corner's statement that "Measure is intrinsic to the design, habitation, and representation of land. It underlies the variety of ways land is traversed and negotiated; it enables the spacing, marking, delineation, and occupation of a given terrain; it reflects the values and judgements of the society that live upon the land. Whether for purposes of navigation, cultivation, protection, or security, measure is taken to orient a particular reality, guiding a society`s relationship to the land qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Measure, then, is as much a conceptual apparatus as it is a mode or representation, facilitating events while constructing a particular cultural world."11 The double role of urbanism Working on the relations between the smaller and the larger, between the object and the context, the figure with the ground, dealing with puzzles, fragments, concentrations, dispersions, patterns: the double role of urbanism - as already coined by Geddes - includes the articulation of spaces as processual logics as well as the creativity in communication and visualisation; and finally also the reinvention of contexts as multirelational though fragmented territories. A step towards this redefinition of the double role has been proposed for a territorial scale with the "vision building" in the European project RURBANCE12: in an intersectoral analysis and concept approach combined with multiple participation and communication steps, working on the overlapping of polycentric settlement and mobility logics with a watershed eco-systematisation and the imaginative redefiniton of rural-urban relations in territorial portaits.

178

1. Urban Initials / Urbane Initialr채ume. Zwischennutzungskonzept Freiham. By Agropolis M체nchen and raumlaborberlin. 2014 2. e.g. see Pier Carlo Palermo, Davide Ponzini: Place-making and Urban Development. 2014 3. Christian Norberg-Schulz: Genius Loci. 1976 4. Philipp Oswalt, Klaus Overmeyer, Philipp Misselwitz: Urban Catalyst. Mit Zwischennutzung Stadt entwickeln. 2014 5. Marcos Rosa: Microplanning. Urban Creative Practices Sao Paulo. 2000 6. Carmen Stephan, Gleice Mere: Brasilia. Stories einer neuen Stadt. 2005 7. Christopher Frayling: Research in Art and Design. 1993 8. Giancarlo de Carlo: Architecture's Public. 1970 9. Peter Cook: Archigram. 1972 10. Peter and Alison Smithson: The "As Found" and the "Found", In: David Robbins (ed.): The Independent Group: Postwar Britain. and the Aesthetics of Plenty.1990 11. James Corner, Alex S. MacLean: Taking Measures Across the American Landscape. 1996 12. cf. the concept of territorial visions, in: Directorate General for Environment, Energy and Sustainable Develpment of Lombardy Region (ed.): RURBANCE Final Publication. 2015

179

8

SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS]

8

SU

Re SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS]

Genoa, 21|09|2014 For one day the area of the Ancient Harbour and the seaside promenade were finally connected, and creating one 5 km long path, open to the public and closed to vehicle traffic

Authors Authors: Sara Favargiotti; Jeannette Sordi

on edited by Marichela Sepe

SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS]

SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] Recycle, Reuse, Urban Happy Mood

C

Urban happiness can be found in the discovery of new emotions as well as in the sense of security that familiar and liveable places provide, but we believe it also has to do with the feeling of being part of the process of contributing to the creation of a better place to live in

E c R R A O F C J w A A B G G V D S A M T

R L o S P S o

I w o A C P S A P A

P S C J S J

C p d t a w

“Asphalte à dessiner”. Installation realized by Claudia Battaino, Chiara Rizzi, Luca Zecchin, Anna Berloffa, Alberto Rossetto, Francesco Zardini, Matteo Zeni (Re-Cycle Italy UdR Trento).

Ph: Silvia Pericu, 2014

8

SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS]

21 september 2014 > Genoa

The need to reconnect the increalingly separated professional and scientific fields of urban infrastructure, urban design and planning, architecture and landscape architecture, is based on the necessity to create new relationships between city and country, between built structures and nature. The Manifesto specifically addresses the potentials of interweaving established practices in urban renewal and landscape regeneration in the European contexts of spatial transformation as main field of action for territorial futures. European urban landscapes are evidently shaped through stratification, conversion, and reuse. This phase of redevelopment requires new paradigms acting as new points of view towards the future.

The Manifesto stresses that working with existing material and immaterial contexts in architecture, infrastructure, and public space is the decisive challenge for architectural culture and educational practices for sustainable urbanism. With the invention of conceptual devices working on the shifting of meanings and on new life cycles, the Manifesto states also the demand to establish temporary practices in urban operations as one of the core parts of a participative and effective governance of urban space; new forms of story-telling, of communication techniques and practices, information design, lead to design open processes of urban transformation as networks of material and action-created patterns.

This section presents the results of SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS], an operation of temporary recycle and a successful injection of urban regeneration. On the 21 of September 2014 one of the most interesting spots in Genoa – the industrial shipyards next to the Ancient Harbour – has been temporarily opened to the public. For one day, this area stretched between the city and the sea, the only part of the central waterfront of the city that hasn’t been transformed by the conversion of the city of Genoa into a

185

public space, has become the theatre for 40 installations that connected the industrial past of the city to its contemporary touristic connotation.

SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] was organized by the Recycle Genoa Lab of the University of Genoa, in collaboration with the Municipality of Genoa and other private and public association underneath the most representative urban infrastructure of the city: Strada Sopraelevata, the highway running between the coast and the historical center of Genoa. Organized in occasion of the 2014 edition of the European Mobility Week “Our Streets, Our Choice,” the event thus offered the possibility to experience this hidden line comprise between the land and the water in the shadow of the Sopraelevata highway, aiming to sensitize the citizens on the relevance of the ground in the experience of public places and highlighting the ability of citizens to imagine new uses for urban spaces. For one day, the dream of a continuous urban promenade along the city-coast line becomes reality.

SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] has been also thought as a call for projects open to public and private entities: citizens, artisans, architects, artists, enterprises, communities, cooperative societies, informal groups,students and every form of private or public association. Everybody was invited to participate in the construction of an urban performance with visions and proposal that would express and construct a conceptual manifesto for the recycling of urban spaces. This performance offered one day to experiment, communication, experience share and disseminate the idea of a possible future. The selected proposals ranged from temporary urban furniture, interactive installations, to social plays, urban performance and happening. Every group have realized one “Footprint Manifesto” whose shape resembles the recycle symbol and that have been personalized using different materials, preferably wasted or recycled (i.e. textiles, gypsum, sand, chippings, plastic, colors). Each installation was easy to transport, and it was mountable and demountable in few hours.

The SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] manifestos became temporary installations expressing a conceptual interpretation for urban recycle.

Recycle is indeed a well-known and not-elitarian practice, that everybody can understand, appropriate, and bring forward; a spontaneous collectively shared practice that right know is probably also the only possible strategy for communitarian policies and urban planning, at all levels. Recycle is a very contemporary attitude, which has the potential of transforming invisible places into livable urban spaces.

186

187

M

Rome 21-24 Ma

M

VARCO QUADRIO VARCO CALATA GRAZIE A

M

VARCO GIANO

B

A’

VARCO PORTO ANTICO

D

ACCESSES SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] AREA SEGWAY, BICICLES, SKATING EMERGENCY VEHICLES ACCESS INFORMATION SPOTS FOOT[PRINTS] INSTALLATIONS URBAN WATERFRONT BAR MUSIC AND PARTY COUNTERS KM

SU

Rec SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS]

Genoa, 21|09|2014 For one day the area of the Ancient Harbour and the seaside promenade were finally connected, and creating one 5 km long path, open to the public and closed to vehicle

VARCO DI LEVANTE

C

Happiness and Public Space. Exhibition edited by Marichela Sepe

-24 May 2015

SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS]

Recycle, Reuse, Urban Happy Mood

“We don’t know what we expect from life. we don’t know what we expect from our country, from our city, from our neighbourhood. we don’t know what we expect from this performance. we don’t know what we expect from the audience that maybe will reply us or will sit by and watch us. at the end of all, we know what we will see: do we live in a clean and false world or in a dirty and real one?”

01 SEE YOU(RSELF) Matteo Pendenza, Giovanna Zampagni > Matera

keywords action, sign, change

The city wharf is shining with a new light, gestural and concrete. The public is present, walking, looking. That place so little known lives in this way.

Emotional tension, art, architecture, fusion of ideas and collaborations, real and surreal.

The imprint of Giovanna Zampagni and Matteo Pendenza, respectively artist and architect, was born from the research of a metaphorical movement which describes an ever-changing world, with subtle bitterness.

Ours is a country so wonderful and rich in art, culture, landscapes and other kinds of riches, nevertheless it is still backward.

Around themselves, the two artists see distracted, careless people that are unable to catch (or perhaps learn?) the simplicity of a movement: the concept of re-use, for example, because recycling is a fantasy in some towns.

But that not all. Details of degradation, urban alternation, exclusion diseases. And it is by observing "what it is forgotten", common areas so expected and soon abandoned, dirtiness, scarps and those colored empty bins, that the gesture has been originated.

"Our streets, our choice" is the slogan proposed by the European Community, which underlines the importance that citizen have when they

191

decide in which way the surrounding space can be used and organized. It is here that the two performers have understood that everything is possible.

Their track is the track of the others: people, the whole citizenry, present during the artistic exhibition, will leave their mark in those four square meters of plectrum, will choice colors, by deciding every time which excitement and determination to use so that their sponge are hurled in that space.

The two artists, in a fixed and rigid look, will be in the center, with white dresses, on a plectrum of white painting, and around them there will be bins full of different colors, with a sponge inside. It is the metaphor of the terrestrial Paradise, pure white, naturalness, primordial origins, purity.

The colors represent future, a future already declinable to present, that floods the pale almost sacred white of the platform of a possible world.

People can become protagonists of the same action, by exercising their freedom and by leaving a colored imprint on the white slate.

In this way the tracks of every passage will be returned plastically, unpredictable summary between chance and personal decision. Artists will be only temporary target, fleeting aim, pretext to do and to act, the final goal, that hope that always gets away, until disappearing, to be replaced by a new scene allows to glimpse the planimetric imprint of our urban space, out of each ordinary vision ‌

192

193

“What is the city but the people?� William Shakespeare

02 CITY, REFLECTIONS OF STORIES G&S Green and Sustainable > Italy, United Kingdom

keywords new identities, participation, urban social recycle

Metaphore The actual economic crisis leads us to think about on how lifestyle changes in relation to risks and opportunities which creates. We must constantly address to different social and cultural realities and new identities. Past economic wellbeing provided people a standard professional identity and allowed us to live and work in our own country. Nowadays, in the light of the necessity to compete in a global market, we constantly have to acquire different types of knowledge and ability.

Therefore the metaphore with 60 -70 city designed by Le Corbusier. The city designed for urban traffic is obsolete, so Genova causeway is an outdated symbol that does not coexist with the contemporary urban system anylonger.

Our proposal aims to make the public aware of regain its own urban space, actively participating in its revival. The public must be included in the urban regeneration project.

The architecture must create interest and stimulate “one’s appetite� instead of resolving the problems. Just resolving problems could take too much time to be done.

Interaction towards an open process The public opinion must be taken in to consideration during the urbanistic transformation especially now against the backdrop of the critical thinking crisis.

The project describes the course of the transformation both in the social

195

and urban identities. A precondition for this is that people gain awareness of its potentials in terms of participation. In fact, the white ribbons are the spaces on which the citizens can write their proposals for the recycling of the causeway.This aims the citizens to take part in, and to become coouthers of the work through its own experience and stories.

Genova 2014, reflections of urban and social reality In its experiment the proposed footprints become reality.

During the SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] DAY, the proposal was brought forward thanks to the participation of the citizens of Genova. Their interaction and participation brought the discussion towards complex but real topics which, at times, become provocative. This provocations often come from the unexpected city-users: children.

Andrea writes: “I would like Genova to be full of skyscrapers…”. Emanuele and Lorenzo, write on the white ribbon their desire to go and live in America. Francesco would like to live his city life using a bike. Matteo, instead, would like to do a lot of outdoor activities.

The coloured words on the white cotton ribbons express some ideas for the city of Genova. Ideas for tomorrow different from today.

The scenario of the SUPERELEVATA FOOT[PRINTS] DAY was held on 21 September 2014 in which, the emblem of an idea that is a different future from today, was presented. The old port of Genova, which is usually closed off to the public, is an urban area full of suggestions for recycling its spaces and structures. A recycling which must necessarily begin from an impulse that has to give birth and lead to a real change.

The impulse which is nothing but the voice and the action of citizens. They should final be able to take part in the choices of the transformation of the city. Up to what point is the city a reflection of the people who live in it?

It is necessary to create the conditions, in a city, where both urban and social recycling can come alive.

The paradigms of a diverse modal of inspiration are the new and important values of cultural flexibility and integration.

We can find an urban conscience, only, through the cooperation between society and the city.

Responsible of the group | Erblin Berisha Members | Erblin Berisha, Fabio Finotello, Federica Gatto, Francesco Iovine, Giuseppina Romanucci, Flavia Sinisi, Prof. Alona Martinez Perez (Plymouth University, UK)

196

197

Leave the car at home and get ready to experience a new sustainable mobility!

03 TAKE A BRAKE! UdR IUAV > Venice

keywords break, brake, slow mobility

The Re-Cycle Italy research group based at Iuav University of Venice proposed to transform for one day the Genoa flyover in an ample rollerskating rink, allowing adults and children to perceive an infrastructure commonly devoted to the transit of heavy vehicles from a very new perspective, demonstrative of a sustainable approach to the fruition of the urban landscape.

Playing with the homophony existing in English between the terms “break” and “brake”, the initiative was called "Take a Brake!", emphasizing the need, collectively understood, to distance ourselves from the condition of chaos and congestion that characterizes life in the context of big metropolises through the identification of new forms of “slow” mobility. It was actually possible renting roller skates at the footprint area by giving your car keys as deposit to the staff.

The footprint area was displayed as a small urban sitting room where visitors could sit down, waiting for the right time to skate, or even to stay over, chatting, listening to music, reading books or magazines on the topic

199

of recycling and its the benefits. The footprint area flooring was as a sort patchwork made up by remaining from Canadian shingles production, while the furniture was arranged by different components coming from low sustainability means of transport such as cars or motorcycles (e.g. wheels, tires, rims...).

Re-Cycle Veneto Lab (Università Iuav di Venezia)_ Elisa Beordo, Giulia Ciliberto, Ettore Donadoni, Flavia Pastò, Luca Velo

200

201

"Just when you think you know something, you have to look at in another way." Robin Wlliams, Dead poets society

04 DARK ROOM CLAB > Verona

keywords inverted city, structural economy, economy of the materials

The current economic and political crisis and the changed relationship with the landscape leads us to imagine the future from keywords such as efficiency, reuse, recycling and urban regeneration, as flywheels for a reaffirmation of cultural and economic life based on new models of development and transformation.

"How can this transformation take place?" This is the question that we put in the middle of the project darkroom. "By transforming before our whole perspective on the existing" is the answer that suggest provocative.

The impronta that we present intends to show himself as the manifesto of the way we think, sometimes, the regeneration of urban space can be more efficient through a millimeter displacement of the point of view rather than with large operations unable to grasp the complexities of a body built such as a city. For this reason the centerpiece of the project is a darkroom, the optical device that through a pinhole lets light into returning the external image upside down: observe, what we think we know, from another point of view is the urge to imagine new scenarios, it lets look at the city through a different angle to overturn stereotypes and allow us to give it new and unexpected meanings. The experience of entering into the dark room is not only to be interpreted as optical phenomenon, but rather

203

as an approach where mental attitude are reversed in looking the existing sorroundings, that is able to grasp into the landscape all the elements necessary for processing, in which each element is a resource. This concept is inspired by the entire pavillon intended as a real architecture that can show unusual approaches with common materials and simple building elements.

Three pillars support a fully reciprocal coverage where the rectangular volume containing the darkroom is the hanging weight that stabilizes the entire structural model. The used mutual structure allows to build a plan using the fewest number of elements, a construction technique known since antiquity, able to solve a structural difficulties easily. The used materials (discarded cartons, pressed cardboard tubes, scraps of the production cycle of the carton and panels in OSB) come in toto from production waste.

In order to keep on going the recycle, it was considered essential to achieve the installation in a completely dry construction to ensure, once the function is off, the re-entry of every single material in the recycling process.

TEAM: CLAB (Andrea Castellani, Leila Signorelli, Matteo Fiorini, Nicola Bedin, Paolo Rigodanzo) with Paola Sprea, Giulia Salandini, Paolo De Beni

204

Camera Oscura

Pannelli di legno truciolare OSB recuperati da un cantiere edile.

Fogli di cartone da imballaggio.

Nella camera oscura si proietta l’immagine capovolta della realtà grazie alla luce che entra dal foro stenopeico. Guardare la città attraverso la camera oscura per ribaltarne luoghi comuni e permetterci di conferirle nuovi e inaspettati significati.

economia strutturale

Tubi di cartone che servivano da suporti per grandi bobine di carta per la produzione di cartone.

città invertita

economia dei materiali

"E' proprio quando credete di sapere qualcosa che dovete guardarla da un'altra prospettiva."

Robin Wlliams, L'attimo fuggente

Le strutture reciproche sono strutture tridimensionali realizzate con travi che si sostengono vicendevolmente mediante vincoli di semplice appoggio. La struttuta reciproca permette di costruire un piano mettendo in gioco il minor numero di elementi necessari.

instruction prendi coraggio..fai un bel respiro..e infilati nella...CAMERA OSCURA!!!!!

4

....aspetta qualche minuto che l’occhio si abitui e....

???

3

rovescia il tuo punto di vista ...

...e riformula scenari...

205

Alternative views on Genoa

05 UNTAKEN SPACES UTC+1@EViDEnte > Genoa

keywords pictures, views, untaken spaces, alternatives, recognize

IDEA To define our footprint we started to think about the existing space around 'Sopraelevata' (the elevated road centered by the whole initiative) and the visual barrier that it represents, it separates the historical city center from the old harbor and the sea.

CONCEPT Our footprint represents the city with and without Sopraelevata, in continuity with the dual feeling of love/hate that most of Genoese citizens have towards the elevated road.

So we imagined a reality without 'Sopraelevata', the result was a space visually and spatially connected, where pillars were the only signs that carried memory of the old elevated road.

FOOTPRINT We divided into two parts our footprint: on the left, we represented the current status through the use of recycled material, on the right, the possible alternative. On the left, reality is simplified, we envisioned to dissect the 'Sopraelevata', so its presence was recognized only by the

207

shadow projected on the canvas and pillars made from recycled bottles.

On the right there was the alternative reality, with no 'Sopraelevata', with a continous space.

People were represented by pebbles and were concentrated on the right half of the footprint, as a stimulus to think how connected and continous space can arouse greater interest to people.

The elements of continuity between the two sides were represented by what would not be changed in both realities: the harbor with its docks and the buildings that overlook the street Via Gramsci.

The facades of buildings were represented in two dimensions with a design on the canvas and in three dimensions with recycled wood from pallets.

To engage the public in our installation our sponsor provided some printed pictures of unusual views of Genoa.

In thisway, the public was encouraged to question and reflect on the subjects that represented their city from unknown corners.

Team: UTC+1@EViDEnte (Maria Elisa Marini, Valeria Diminutto, Daniele Longobardi, Enrico Dalla PietĂ ) Sponsor: D.Gaudio Foto

208

209

Take back your space, leave a trace

06 NEW URBAN SPACES UTC+1@EViDEnte > Genoa

keywords public spaces, unusual, extrusion, taking back

IDEA. The formal and conceptual idea was immediately aimed at raising awareness on the subject of rational and conscious use of public spaces.

For this reason, as a basic theme we have assumed the slogan proposed by the European Union: "Our roads, our choice" and we set a focus on empty spaces, the places where real social and cultural activity of urban spaces takes place. Although void spaces are often relegated to contour figure and as a corollary of much more evident emerging structures, they can be considered as the real shapers of the city as place of relationships.

CONCEPT. The project proposal was defined representating a part of the old historical town and old port, this portion of the city is significant for topics of the dialogue on public spaces. The footprint was made from a fabric used as cover of 20 ft containers. This material connects the historical and contemporary side of Genoa, it is a reference to the marine and commercial aspects of the city.

The main element of the proposal was the representation of the empty city. Unlike a classical massing plan approach, we have extruded and given

211

prominence to the empty spaces that normally are neglected and forgiven.

Therefore void spaces emerged from the support and acquired their own three-dimensionality.

In this way the audience had to interface with a representation of the city which is diametrically opposed to that which is used to live in.

Viewers were encouraged to think consciously about what their roads and their choices are, restoring dignity to the pedestrian spaces that, initiatives such as "Superelevata!", want to put at the center of the dialogue on the reuse of urban volumes.

Therefore, the extruded elements were the real protagonists of the project proposal, deliberately ignoring the built space in the same background.

The engaging activities connected to the installation was defined by giving colored markers, pens, crayons, so that it was possible to color, mark and highlight the extruded urban voids, acting directly on an area that is lived every day, less consciously.

Team: UTC+1@EViDEnte (Maria Elisa Marini, Valeria Diminutto, Daniele Longobardi, Enrico Dalla PietĂ )

212

213

Recycling consists to give a second life to an object otherwise destined to the disposal

07 ECO-BARTER Lantlos > Genoa

keywords hands, exchange, second life

Our team started from the idea that recycling is to give a second life to an object otherwise destined for disposal. In this perspective, the exchange of new life to objects that do not longer we use but that are still in good condition and therefore can be used by others users in an exchange in which everyone wins.

THE FUTURE VISION Now we wondered if also objects to which usually is not recognized value exchange as the plastic caps, bottles and cans can become a part of this network not as a commodity but as a currency. In a future vision of bartering these materials can be used as money to compensate exchanges between objects to which usually is not recognized the same value. Some international experiences show us how this is possible (see the case of distributors placed in supermarkets in Germany that return good-spending in exchange for bottles or those in China that reduce the cost of transportation by metro).

THE ACTIVITY To promote this process, which begins to take hold in Italy (Mr.Pet,

215

Ecobank, ecopunto, RD Italy) in agreement with the Association of Not Just Words - Genoa non-profit organization hat for years has the project forward, "we turn caps" we decided to organize a barter market in which bottle caps can be a symbolic sum to be paid to participate in the same.

THE MANIFEST The manifest is the act of exchange, real action of recycling as exchange resources. The act of passing from hand to hand arrows, symbol of unused objects, It expressed through its circular motion the double life that they are destined to have. It is a virtuous circle, not only for the concept itself but because who does it is a mirror of virtues future.

THE INSTALLATION OF THE EXHIBITION SPACE The space plectrum is marked by arrows, made up of a patchwork of articles intended to second Life. Alternating the arrows have the stands for the barter market. The distribution within the plectrum is affected by the circular movement of the arrows, this It allows the visitor a view of the poster-activities in the round. The arrow close input will be formed by the visitors themselves as the tip, left on purpose empty, will be filled gradually from the caps. After the arrow will be available for visitors a collection point provided by the association. In fact, to access the market, visitors are invited to leave a symbolic amount of caps almost want to specify a form of payment.

THE REALIZATION The objects which form the patchwork are all of lightweight so as to be easily each sewn on his arrow. The arrows so comprehensive will in turn be sewn on the basis of plectrum made of a plastic sheet by the thickness consistent. The decision of sewing items instead of using glues or derivatives is a device that does not contradict the philosophy of the project. This process will be partly achieved by us in the time period prior to the event (production of arrows) to then be assembled in toto September 21 (the seam of the arrows on plectrum). Thanks to the technique of sewing objects disassembly installation materializes in a short time.

Research Team: LANTLOS + ASSOCIAZIONE NON SOLO PAROLE GENOVA ONLUS Members: Francesca Malecore, Luca Leonardo Preziosa

216

217

Mandala|City – Mandala|House Mandala is a geographic map … is a mental map… is a body recover… is a spirit refuge

08 RECYCLE MANDALA Officina5 Architetti Associati > Rome

keywords Recycle|Mandala, geographic map, mental map

The footprint is a plectrum where is inscribed a mandala made by recycle materials from flats renovations.

The recycle material is applicate to design the main lines that compose the mandala. The base drawing is the Genoa historical center with the sea and the mountains all around. There is just a 3d sing constituted by the Sopraelevata infrastructure.

Mandala is a Sanskrit world that means circle. In the oriental philosophies, they use this term like a tool for doing meditation. Through the mandala’s construction, the human being release his spirit, purify his soul and connect himself with the positive forces of the universe. In the point of view of the symbolism, it means the two different points of the human life: the material and the spiritual aspect. In the Southeast Asia they use a mandala for support the main lines those make the new foundation cities.

It seemed that a mandala originate the Dolmen’s disposition or some cities’ shape, like in the case of the city Nicosia in Cyprus. Leonardo da Vinci draws his Vitruvian Man inscribed in a mandala which the square represents the material aspect, that symbolize the planet earth, and the circle symbolizes the celeste sphere. The human role is the conjunction between these two elements by a dynamic effect.

219

Carl Gustav Jung writes four essays about mandala, being an expert on this argument because he studies them more than twenty years. These kind of drawings are started from a center respect to all the composition is oriented, are delimited by a circle or a polygonal figure. For Jung mandala represents the ancestral aspiration to find the spiritual dimension, the mystic sense of the existence: the man, as a human being, stays in between sky and earth, for this reason he express the perfect synthesis between these two elements.

In a metaphoric, but also, physical sense we want to create a space with some recycle materials from flats renovation, that has like a covering a mandala who represents Genoa city. A city map that become a refuge for the inhabitants who go across the harbor space dedicated to the artistic installations.

Mandala|Recycle is a mental, intimate and individual space; it is like a home, like a shelter, like a refuge but is also a geographic map, than is a collective and multiplicity space where are drawn some physical thinks like the orography, the urban morphography and the infrastructures.

The mandala construction has made by the wastes of an old flat renovation.

We reused the same elements. Tools and staffs from a construction site, wallpapers that we removed from the interior walls, plasterboard ceilings fragments, mirror’s pieces, buttons and lights switch from the electrical system, cables and element from the house’s systems.

The office Officina5_Architetti Associati works, from the beginning of 2000, in the field of public space renovation and interiors restoration with particular interest for the relations between context and preexistence.

The DESA Osvaldo Sartorio Company works in the field of construction and renovation buildings, Tonino Perfettibile is a hi-quality artisan works mostly like a blacksmith, Edoardo Maria Cici is an architectural student at Sapienza Rome, Laura Federici is, and an architect and an artist, she paints urban landscape making exhibitions in Italy and in Europe.

Officina5_Architetti Associati: Lucia Manfredonia, Cristiana Monti, Federica Morgia with Osvaldo Sartorio DESA SAS and with Tonino Perfettibile and Edoardo Maria Cici Artistic Advice Laura Federici

220

221

“Bycicle is the transcription of energy in equilibrium, the glorification of leap, the visible conception of the wind. Generally flies; brushes against the land but doesn't touch it.� Cesare Angelini

09 RECYCLE MACHINE Associazione Culturale Emsteludanza > Savona

keywords challenge, action, recycling

Recycle machine is both a performance and an art installation.

The installation it is composed by a footprint made of advertising material and by a four meters high tower filled by pictures, prints, mechanical parts, tools and other equipments. Every piece is tied by cables and plugs to the tower and the footprint. It is a kind of grande macchina that it needs the human action to work correctly.

The deep soul of the installation is made by bicycles that are anchored to the tower. Performers act inside the tower riding bicycles and making work the machine with the transformation between the dirty energies that come from the urban footprint in a new and renovated energy.

The man is the center of the machine; his pulsating heart is charged by movement and his body shows internal machinery as it were a machine itself. Human body and machinery appear as they melted and now work together: pipes are like veins, wires are like nerves and the bicycle wheels are extensions of human legs and feet as in the Marshall McLuhan theories.

223

Recycle machine is born from the ensemble of five eclectic artists’ ideas with different skills that have learnt to know each other thanks this project.

They are involved with the same passion for art, for motion, for antique and fascinating tools, as an old style conception of a fin-de-siècle Melies’ movie.

Project by Associazione Culturale Emsteludanza thanks by Roberta Calcagno, Lucia Folco, Alessandro Gimelli, Giovanni Occhipinti, Eleonora Paparella.

224

225

How will Genova be in 2492?

10 GENOVA 2492 BEYOND A NONEXISTENT MOBILITY ALTERNATIVE Burrasca > Genoa

keywords mobility, vision, utopia

“..Canta, ride, svaria ferrea la sinfonia feconda urgente al mare: Genova canta il tuo canto!”

Dino Campana Because of its nature Genoa is not willing to host classic mobility interventions.

Its tricky morphology has always required atypical solutions, and the Genoese people have endeavored in realizing them. Looking for those testimonies, the enthusiasm and the imagination in the flourishing metropolis of the past, Burrasca wants to wake up the creative impetus of Genoa's inhabitants.

Our installation called GENOVA 2492 wants to encourage the citizens to have an utopic vision of the city’s mobility network and of the landscape in which it is inserted.

The footprint that we have created is a place where every visitor can draw their own interpretation of the means of transport in the city. The

227

performance aims to recover the intellectual and historical avant-garde that Genoa had in the field of infrastructures during the 19th century. The result will be a city that is created hourly by the desires of its citizens.

The design is a metal structure, located on the perimeter of the pick, on which there is a translucent canvas where the citizens can draw.

Each visitor helps give an inspiring view of the city skyline representing the seafront, from the lighthouse (the Lanterna) to the Trade Fair. The maps produced during the day are part of the final artwork.

At the center of the pick is placed a spool, where everyone draw their own alternative mobility proposal on Genoa's maps.

Team: Chiara Federico, Andrea Anselmo, Ilaria Cazzato, Carlo Occhipinti, Federico Sarchi, Greta Scarzo, Stefano Stecchelli.

228

229

“What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”

LAO-TZE, The Book of the Way and Virtue

11 BIOREACTOR GR.IN_LAB > Genoa

keywords algae, regeneration, biofuel

The installation “BIO RE_ACTOR� is an environmental art work that explores the boundaries between art, science, technology, recycling and environment, investigating the potential of new technologies and the interaction with the context in which it is inserted.

It's a work in progress as it reflects the changing nature of its environment, emphasizing its dynamics. It's composed by trees-devices that create a landscape of low-tech algae bireactors.

A bioreactor is a device able to provide a suitable environment for the growth of biological organisms; we use a type of microalgae called Nannochloropsis oculata.

The algae are often defined the raw material of the future, because they can be turned into biofuel.

They are a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels and they can catalyze CO2 present in the air.

The bioreactor is entirely composed by recycled materials: the support structures are metal poles from a broken gazebo, the balls are made from plastic ampoules of exhausted craft beer.

The ampoules are filled with water containing a small amount of algae that

231

reproduce thanks to sun light and to CO2 produced by a simple mixture of sugar and yeast in aqueous solution.

The installation “BIO RE_ACTOR� aims to engage and sensitize citizens on ecology and environment through the regeneration of waste and the creation of a virtuous cycle of reuse.

GR.IN Lab is a group born in 2013 in Genoa that research and investigate ecological issues emerging in the arts. It's the result of a collaboration between two groups from Genoa: Gruppo Informale and FabLab Genova.

Gruppo Informale is a laboratory of collective architecture composed by young architects who are carry on research and experimentation around a new ecology for architecture, made of recycle, reuse, reduction of consumption and active participation in the project dynamics.

FabLab Genova is an interdisciplinary team made up of architects, engineers, chemists and electronics who want to promote Digital Manufacturing and Design, Free Hardware, Free Software and sustainable development.

Team: Gruppo Informale ( Silvia Cama, Greta Solari, Elisa Tozzi) + FabLab Genova (Chiara Farinea)

232

bene di riuso

P ROC E S SO

AT T I VATOR E

CONT EN I TOR E

bene naturale

+ damigiana birra

+ tappo

+ bottiglia di plastica

E tubo di plastica

+ acqua

+ microorgansmi

bene acquistato

+ zucchero

+ acqua

recipiente diffusore

+ lievito

+ acquario

CO2 conta bolle

anidride carbonica

recipiente

233

produzione bio-massa

produzione energia

città

città con energia bio re-actors pulita

anidride carbonica

+ CO2 + sole

bioreattore

alghe

An apple a day keeps the Sopraelevata away

12 KEEP THEM FOR ME / THROW THEM TO ME. A PERFORMANCE FOR A WOMAN, A MAN AND 402 APPLES* Giardini "Poggi" > Genoa

keywords apples, couple, post-infrastructural

Young apples and old apples are used as recycled material to set a 4m x 4m space during the event, Superelevata.

Our forms are several green plastic boxes usually used to transport fruit and vegetables. Empty or full of apples, single or stocked, these boxes are used to draw boundaries, to assemble chairs, tables, beds for a postinfrastrucural couple : Poggi Gardens**.

Sunday, Sep 21 A man and a woman walking in the middle of a story, perhaps more in the future than in the past. No cars. They are tired, the city seems three times larger: you can feel the quiet chat of somebody close by.

Noon. Suddenly a place to have a rest. It looks like a circle of apples. Fallen apples. Apples to eat or to listen to. Some apples are already rubbing the soles of their feet.

The road is kind of unrolling as if, suddenly, it stopped to let millions of cars pass by, like it had always done.

Now three apples are getting closer to the couple because they have an idea to share.

Five apples are being transformed into stools to sit on. An apple that was

235

looking at the sea has just whirled.

– Throw them to me! – the woman says laughing out loud – Keep them for me! – he answers, then.

Extract from her diary, the following day: Today I’ve seen a movie, La Boum (in Italian, Il tempo delle mele) and I’ve listened to the song Cogli la prima mela (Life is the only teacher). Our neighbour was cycling with his wife and children while I was taking my English class: What's your name? Today I'm very tired. Repeat: TODAY I'M VERY TIRED. They stopped for a chat while you were reading your sunday newspaper. Nobody should ever bother you while you read it. I gave some apples to the kids, then they called other friends and we started playing together : take the apple, throw the apple, something like a strange volleyball…fun!

It was already 2 pm. Time for a little nap on the asfalt with the help of my comfortable plastic box pillow.

Impressions and words taken from some passersby: “This couple reminds me of Julio Cortazar and his wife. It seems they’ve lived on Paris-Marseille highway for 33 days, without ever leaving the autoroute. Hey on this box there’s that Cortazar’s book, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute. Read it and you’ll see”.

“What is she doing under that box? Ok she’s writing, no no…sleeping: ok she fell asleep while writing, just because of the shadow, there… Excuse me sir, can I have an apple? They’re so red and tasty! And you, what you’re reading? Poetry? Ok”. *We’d like to explain a play on words here, that doesn’t translate well into English. Inside tienimele and tiramele there are two actions (keep, throw) but at the same time the apples (mele) are present: and inside the apples there is also that "them to me”, just in me (“to me) and le (them). **Here’s another little play on words. Poggi is the name of one of the two members of the artistic group, while Gardens is almost a translation of the second member’s name (Giardina) which is very similar to giardini, which is the Italian noun for gardens.

Team: Giardini "Poggi" is Fabio Poggi and Marina Giardina Photos: Luigi Fogliati and Sara Spallarossa

236

237

There is an intrinsic strength in recycling that is not only nourished by the necessity of reusing but also by the energy of giving new possibilities to things.

13 IMBALLO DI IDEE Giulia Cavallari, Andrea Aragone > Venice

keywords to know, to think, to behave

There is an intrinsic strength in recycling that is not only nourished by the necessity of reusing but also by the energy of giving new possibilities to things.

Abandoned and socially detached public spaces must be relinked to the social layer of the urban realm and from a passive role in the public life they can become active and establishing an intense relationship with the inhabitants. Nowadays there is this necessity of re-integrated objects of the city, threaten by political and economical decisions, with the socio-spatial layer of the city following the stratification of events that characterized a dense urban environment.

Genova, 26th October 2009: the fruit and vegetable wholesale market located in Corso Sardegna was entirely moved in Bolzaneto, in the outskirt of Genova. From then on, the former wholesale market has been abandoned and turned off into a residue for the district. Since 2002 the city demanded a new project for the area. The winning project for the competition to reuse the wholesale market area did not respect the public standards demanded by the inhabitants: 75% of the ground floor for green public space. In 2010 the inhabitants committee for controlling the building site reported that the project was not answering the right requirements.

239

After the flood of the Bisagno torrent of the 4th November 2011, an institutional fight started between the municipality and the province.

The revised water basin masterplan of the province prohibits changing the program of buildings located in the flooding areas. This rule blocks completely the project of the municipality that wanted to transform the area. The debate between institutions is still continuing and it is actively followed by the inhabitants committee and by many Internet forums.

Within this context, “Imballo di Idee� is the space for the inhabitants voices representing the power they must have in the decision making process for the urban public space they live in.

The plectrum is suspended of 50 cm from the ground floor by a structure made of reused pallets, typical elements of the fruit and vegetable markets, and of scaffolding pieces that reminds the scaffolding that currently surrenders the wholesale market of Corso Sardegna. The plectrum, suspended on the structure, is on purpose not walkable in order to emphasize the idea of inaccessibility and downtime of the market and the plectrum shows the elements that marked the events: the market itself and the Bisagno torrent.

Team: Giulia Cavallari, Andrea Aragone (UniversitĂ IUAV di Venezia) Thanks to Caste, Stefano, Domenico.

240

241

Stratified flows

14 TRACCE UNOAUNO_ spazioArchitettura > Pescara

keywords absence, dynamic, trail

The project "Tracce" proposes an experiment for the reuse of waste material of the works in general: the dust of the material processing, as a waste of a Michelangelo sculpture, or what remains from the rubble of the contemporary city.

The dust is often associated with "nothing", the absence, inconsistency, perhaps because its impossible to reuse. This project therefore wants to reuse "nothing" (in this case the chalk dust) through the movement / location of the active user.

It's a stratified flow (fingerprints, trace) of slow visitors paths. The perceptual / cognitive map of an invisible process. The invisible process is made clear: a trace of the absorption of information (as in the experience "newspaper" Hendricks in 1994).

What remains?

- The memory of a place, the discovery of a new horizon and views over the city, but especially the track of the paths to the places scrutinized and points sighted; - The Map of the tracks that will be the soul and the memory, not nostalgic, of a new way of getting a place to live temporarily.

"Traces" is an "extended release" exibition; it brings out the force at the

243

end of the game, when the lights turn off. On the asphalt there are signs of the people's behavior, moods, uncertainties. Triangular mark on the landscape of Genoa.

What is the main actor of all this?

The chalk dust previously made in the form of pick now becomes memory of a party's over.

The proposed project has an ease of assembly / disassembly on site quickly. It's cheap, recyclable and removable.

"Tracce" (concept: UNOAUNO_spazioArchitettura) was built thanks to the collaboration and enthusiasm of some students of the Pescara Faculty of Architecture.

Unoauno is Marino La Torre, Alberto Ulisse with Luigi Cefaratti, Maura Mantelli, Tommaso Sciullo.

244

245

Nature of plastic

15 ZOLLA UNOAUNO_ spazioArchitettura > Pescara

keywords Earth, nature, artificial

The proposed project, "Zolla - nature of plastic", starts from the evening of the day before in a pub... what's left? an empty glass and a straw?

Often the mailbox of our architecture studio, we find the residue of a toast, drank a few hours earlier with friends.

Could that gap, that rubbish have new life? This gives rise to the proposal "Zolla": an artificial carpet who lives the city in a nomad way, and colonizes one of the picks of the Genoa Superelevata.

A rhythmic-dynamic system that scans the surface of 9.60 square meters of the pick, that the user can pass through feeling immersed in a sitespecific work that can be easily assembled / disassembled, reused and recycled.

The wind is part of the project, makes it dynamic and variable. Artificial flowers move emitting a relaxing rustle, typical of natural environments.

Through the dense weave of stalks gaze penetrates to the views of the city: the port, the lighthouse, the sea. ZOLLA become a natural / artificial

247

microcosm to look at but above all to live crossing it. During the day of the event the installation was used by children playing inside, by adults relaxing and guys that crossed with skates and bicycles.

"Zolla" (concept: UNOAUNO_spazioArchitettura) was built thanks to the collaboration and enthusiasm of some students of the Pescara Faculty of Architecture. Occasionally, from the straws/stem, a flower springs!

Unoauno is Marino La Torre, Alberto Ulisse with Luigi Cefaratti, Maura Mantelli, Tommaso Sciullo.

248

249

Ricicloverino – recycle your mind

16 RICICLOVERINO Il sentiero del Movimento Ragazzi > Genoa

keywords recycle, game, participation

Activity: Rethink one of the games that we usually suggest to our children in terms of "education for recycling".

Materials used: anything that can be identified with the 4 major trash bins: glass, plastic, organic, paper Installation: the outline of the footprint was made out of recycled plastic fabric, which we covered with recycled pink and white news papers Once finished, we wrapped the whole thing with a plastic transparent cloth, also recycled.

To build the two information desks, we decided to recycle old plastic fruit baskets found in the garbage of the streets of Genova. The glass, plastic, organic and paper targets were made with anything we could find We ask the participants – children but anyone who shows up - to recognize the right container for the disposal of various waste presented by us (in the form of a ring).

After thinking it out, participants are called to throw the ring to the right container – based on what kind of waste they are throwing out The idea was to generate a feeling of belonging, in which people could forget about where they were – a dismissed and stinky area of the port – and could have fun, enjoying the moment.

An architecture of people surrounding the game made this condition possible

251

Story: It all began with the right spirit and too much garbage on the floor We frequently took breaks during workshop to get ideas flowing in our minds Some studied other groups others were already finishing up After many attempts Ricicloverino was born So here we are at 8 in the morning gluing the last parts refining the compositions after a healthy breakfast The first people arrive and show off their skills like perfect aiming but finally the real players start to appear trying to figure out how to recycle and everyone wanted to learn more Some gave hints and in the meantime lines started to form Some were scared and felt intimidated Others were perfectly captured in the recycling game A game for everyone in a land where nobody passes A day full of life and full of throws!

Glass, plastic, organic, paper

Name of the group: Coop soc. “Il sentiero del Movimento Ragazzi” Head of Group: Federico Antonini Group components: Laura Marino, Francesco Bernardi, Simona Bargi, Chiara Simonodo, Matteo Cirillo with Joshua Pagano, Nicolò Zavaglia, Irene Mantero, Miriam Dreist

252

253

Preventing means living

17 "PINK RIBBON”: BREAST CANCER AWARENESS CAMPAIGN LILT Genova > Genoa

keywords prevention, breast cancer, lifestyle

LILT had purposed to realize a footprint with as much as possible recycled material.

The materials were accumulated ever from the right daily alimentary customs of the volunteers and from the people that are part of the association; for example, the 36 wooden boxes that normally are used for the fruits and vegetables, were used as bases for the tables, so the visitors could consult the LILT informational brochures and gadgets.

The PINK RIBBON plectrum was handmade shaping with a simple string and pencil, and was realized in cardboard (2mm of thickness), and then was covered with hundred pink sheets of an Italian sports newspaper (that is a lot loved by a variety kind and age of athletes), using water and glue. On the plectrum was put in large letters the principal slogan of the association: “PREVENTING MEANS LIVING” Even though the central element of LILT project was big PINK RIBBON symbol, which was hanged in the air(about 2 meters high from the ground) with a fishing line; this big symbol of womens’ fight against breast cancer

255

was realized with flexible tubes in pink PVC (that normally are used in pools). Hundred pink woolen threads were linked to the big symbol making a pleasant feeling of flying and levity.

During the day, the “PINK RIBBON” visitors were invited to leave a message for LILT, using post-it; the post-it in fact were linked (using clothespin) on the PINK RIBBON woolen threads.This was a symbolic sign and a nice way of contribution, leading so to the final realization of this whole project.

On the footprint there was a subdivision of this project in 4 areas, each of them symbolized one of the four principal keys of the primary oncological prevention: the start began from the healthy alimentation area, where it was demonstrated how food waste could be reused (such as the fruits and vegetables peels). After this, the visitors could go through the NO SMOKING area and LILT gym; this area was dedicated to the physical activities using sports equipment obtained from recycled materials, such as plastic bottles, newspapers boxes ropes, inners tube etc…

The final area was the LILT bar, a relaxing area, where the visitors could tasted real non-alcoholic cocktails, but however not less good as the original ones.

Realized in Genoa by: Carlotta Pollero, doct. in Naval & Products design, Veronica Tixi, national civil service/LILT volunteers: Francesca Bruzzone, Martina Pietrasanta, Tommaso Favarin, Fabio Villone.

256

257

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.�

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

18 PAINTING UNDER THE SOPRAELEVATA_ DRAWING THE STREET Francesca Marina, Silvia Sangriso > Genoa

keywords imagination, drawing, colours

It is an installation of a plastic transparent cloth covering the street area and enabling children to create freely, while lying on the ground, in this way “ drawing the street”. Children’s drawings may be really useful for designers, offering a different, more simplified and immediate vision of reality, as it happened to us, a drawing can be transformed into reality.

Therefore, we decided to let children expand their imagination. The installation has been completed by means of a recycled paper box, given

by Associazione ReMida di Genova, in which we placed some coloured markers. Furthermore we created a column with recycled paper boxes, covered with white paper, made available by Associazione ReMida Genova; our model project (a primary school located on a pier near the Museo Galata, in the area called Darsena), inspired by a child’s drawing, has been pasted onto the column together with the game rules: 1 cut your own paper, 2 draw, 3 attach the drawing to the print to make it colourful and rich of various drawings.

This playing solution was really appreciated by children, they stopped in large numbers and gave us different childish interpretations of Genova and of the harbour. The intention was to stimulate a creative reaction thanks to our print and to demonstrate that simple and low cost elements are enough to entertain children for some time.

259

"The higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by the elaborate frivolity of chess." Edgar Allan Poe

19 DRAUGHTS' TIME UNDER THE SOPRAELEVATA Francesca Marina, Silvia Sangriso > Genoa

keywords body, game, black&white

It is an installation consisting of a black cloth, created with recycled bin bags, pasted by a paper tape, and white sheets to recreate black and white squares. The inspiration was given by the draught game and we decided to make it bigger to allow users to play directly becoming themselves draughtsmen. The main aim was the creation of a collective amusing enjoyment, rediscovering an old table game, updated and adapted to this event. The inspiration came from the game of the living chess, which is played twice a year in September in Marostica, a little town in Veneto.

The construction of the print was a bit difficult because of the big dimensions, so we didn't succeed in making it at home, but we had to build it in a square. After that we rolled it and finally placed it in the right space. The dimensions of each square were 0,40 m x 0,40 m and the entire chessboard was 2,50 m x 2,50 m of black and white squares.

In spite of our efforts, we realized that people were shy and wavering about the way to use this empty and odd space during the event; so we had to play ourselves the game to inspire the visitors.

May the chess game be not really popular nowadays?

261

Creative recycling is a real art capable of giving a new birth and a new form to old and useless objects, transforming them into something completely different and creative.

20 IN&OUT_THE RECYCLED HOUSE Associazione Palazzo Verde, Francesca Marina, Silvia Sangriso > Genoa

keywords home, recycle, in&out

It is an installation recreating the structure of a house with parking. In & Out is a name referred to inside and outside spaces: our print recalls a small sitting room with coloured walls. Each wall has pockets containing objects of different shapes (bottle caps, straws, curlers) and colours (red, red and black, red and white). Most pieces of furniture are made of recycled cases of wine ( a writing desk, a stool and a drawer), there are also a coil with the name of the Association and three chairs partially handmade.

All these objects are leaning on a green and orange carpet and there is an empty space, marked by a paper tape, to define the limits of the four parking places, reserved to disabled people and to bikes maintenance.

Next to the paper welcome mat, there is a pair of paper shoes on which we have written the title of the print and the name of the involved Associations.

The print dimensions are 4x4 meters and the shape of all the prints is a music plectrum, inscribed in a circle, contained in a square. Our recycled house was built thanks to Palazzo Verde Associations in Genova, that are AlVerde, CicloRiparo, Festival della Scienza, Legambiente, Matermagna, ReMida, Terra, Terre di Mare. They provided us in particular with recycled wooden furniture, the carpet, transparent walls decorated with colourful recycled materials, plants, electric motor scooters, bikes and chairs.

263

Come clean your thoughts!

21 [IN]URBAN ANALYSIS Psychiatric help Laura Arrighi, Giovanni Carli > Genoa

keywords hysteria, contrast, sharing The project is designed as the interior space of a psychiatric cabinet. The perimeter of the room is drawn with industrial tape over a black oilskin surface where are placed the conventional pieces of forniture of this kind of medical ambience: a chaise-longue, a writing desk, an armchair, books, a silver tea set. The intention is to create a space of dialogue, a space for the most intimate confessions, but also for the emotional involvement in a choral story. Patients and doctors, crazy and wise, friends and enemies: all leading actors of a never ending urban tale‌ Analyzed by a contemporary interpretation of doctor Freud, and his assistants, the visitors (the citizens) can express their feelings and their doubts about the present and future time of the city of Genoa, which is the very real topic of our urban analysis.

Session I: (P_patient_Miss Galata (alias GENOA) D_doctor_Friedrich van Pelt) D: Good morning Galata, please take a seat.

P:Thank you doctor van Pelt. I am sorry for bothering you, but it is an emergency.

D: Do not worry, miss Galata. This is my duty. But please, elaborate, what is the reason of your distress?

P: I fell so confused and miserable. On the edge of a nervous breakdown.

D: For what?

P: A dream. The same dream. Every bloody night. It is becoming so frequent and invasive.

D: Miss Galata, I would like you to explain all the details.

P: They kidnapped me. They used me, recycled me, rebuilt, demolished,

265

modernized, post-modernised. I have thousands of faces and no voice.

D: Your thousand faces, miss Galata, are your profound being. Do not reduce everything to a single view.

P: The earth shakes!

D: They are the vibrations of a brand new world.

P: My sight blurs. I am innocent victim of hallucinations.

D: They are lights of architectures close to come.

P: I am tired, doctor van Pelt. But I can not stop.

D: Miss Galata, you will never stop. You can not stop. Who stops, is lost.

P: I have been loosing control of my body. I fall apart. The earth is shrinking, but my body is spreading.

D: Have you taken Xanax?

P: Yes I have. Too much.

D: Do not exceed.

P: But I need it!

D: What else is disturbing you, miss Galata?

P: I am waiting for something. The wait is too long.

D: The wait for changing always requires long terms.

P: Then I will ask the Almighty to stop the Sun. D: Time is not your enemy. It is Space you have to fight with.

P: The sounds of the Planets will drive me crazy.

D: Manage the space, miss Galata. Measure it, and it will be yours. Be over it. Some times you have to be cruel against our daemons.

P: My daemons speak an unknown language.

D: Go beyond the names, miss Galata. What is a name?

P: Ah, my name! Once everyone knew it! Once I was beautiful. I was perfection!

D:And now? How do see yourself?

P: I am only Superb without reasons.

D:Look on your inside, miss Galata. You are not what you have been so far.

Do not live in the past, do not draw traces of copies of copies.

P: I will try, but everything is so obscure.

D: So obscure, but so sublime, miss Galata.

P: I am scared, doctor van Pelt. I will not stand still, I promise.

D: I am glad to hear you say that. For today the session is over. I will see you on Thursday P: Thank you indeed doctor. Later I will take a stroll to the Lantern. After all today is such a beautiful day.

266

267

“… the world is full of people walking around with small glass marbles in their pockets …” Castelli di rabbia, Alessandro Baricco

22 ASFALTO, GOGHIN GOGĂ’ UdR Ascoli Piceno/ Camerino > Ascoli Piceno

keywords landscape, re-cycle, playground

The specific matter of the Superelevata is the main element of the project: the asphalt transforms, creating a space, which when seen appears undefined within the boundaries of its assigned plectrum.

In striking contrast to the hardness of the original road matter, the new bituminous landscape portrays the echoes of the swampy Genoese marina, prior to its urbanisation by mankind.

Relationships are inverted: whilst in the lower pier area, interventions of an anthropic nature define a specific relationship with the excavation and with water matter, on the Superelevata, inalterability disappears, making room for the alteration of matter, for an extrusion of the asphalted strip, to be precise.

The possibility to develop an installation on the Superelevata theme gave birth to the idea of recycling those products that are consumed on asphalt, which belong to the landscape of infrastructure on rubber.

"Asphalt" therefore becomes a radical symbol of road waste, a receptacle of objects that share a common belonging to the world of motor vehicles, and which in a recycle logic acquire new meanings and new uses: the plectrum imprint is connoted as a space for playing marbles, for recreational activities with roots steeped in the seaside tradition of the

269

city of Genoa.

"Asphalt" becomes "black hole", swallowing up the road surface, revealing the strength of recycling actions through the possibility of estranging an object from its original function and reusing it with a new level of meaning.

The project therefore develops the notion of constructing a renewed asphalt landscape, also comprised of reliefs and depressions. Through the dunes, used to overcome uneven surfaces and various obstacles, a path is developed for the game of marbles.

All products used for its construction originate from productive waste and in particular, that derived from the roads industry. The base and the dunes have been developed using second choice cardboard, the asphalt has been reproduced using a continuous bed of small rubber pebbles made from ground tyres at the end of their life cycle, bound with a non-toxic aqueous emulsion, a product normally used in building activities. Finally, all the signs and obstacles have been made from defunct motor vehicles, such as rear-view mirrors, antennas, windscreen wipers, steering wheels and tyre parts.

The expected outcome is that the installation will convey a sense of infrastructural recycling through a logic of estrangement with respect to the horizontal dimension offered by the road parterre, and that in the new recreational acceptation of the asphalted surface, with legs astride on the path, the exclamation "göghin gogò”, typical of Genoese seaside games, can be heard reverberating as the marbles strike.

Team: University of Camerino, SAD - School of Architecture and Design “Eduardo Vittoria” of Ascoli Piceno, Responsible of the group: Marco d’Annuntiis, | Tutor: Sara Cipolletti, Emmanuele Pedicone Members: Ludovico Luciani, Caterina Mari, Giannella Cocco | with: Marco Di Eusebio, Gianluca Lattanzi.

270

271

“New life cycles for disused mobility infrastructure�

23 GREY TO GREEN UdR Reggio Calabria > Reggio Calabria

keywords community, recycle, slow mobility

The recycle of disused infrastructure is, now day, a very topical issue in the international debate, also thanks to the success of critics and the media of the famous project “High Line�, in New York.

In Calabria, the topic is a central issue with the case of the ex highway A3, in the stretch Bagnara - Scilla of the Reggio Calabria Province.

A case that makes one think, since some years, especially for the mobilization of the Provincial Administration and the citizens' committees and associations who report damage and inconvenience caused by demolition work.

A story of great interest, particularly complex, which underlines the clash between local interests and global logic and for which it is necessary to involve the community to give an opinion on the issue "demolish or recycle".

This is the case study that the Research Unit of Reggio Calabria aims to tell with the installation "Gray to Green"; examining possible new life cycles for the highways turned into "roads of landscape" in which it is possible recover the slowness and promote the usability of new spaces for economic, environmental and social sustainability.

273

In agreement with the slogan "our streets, our choice" of the "European mobility week 2014" the installation exhorts people to interact with it to complete the puzzle and to transform the gray layer of the pick, in a second green layer, which overlaps the first, contributing to add a symbolic sustainable layer to their city.

For every piece of the puzzle corresponds a response to a question, written on gray layer: the interaction with the pick, through the game, it becomes a moment of reflection on the themes of recycle, sustainable mobility, environmental pollution.

Therefore, "Grey to Green" focuses attention on the responsibility that each individual has towards their places, possibilities of effective joint decisions, alternatives to enjoy the space, the value of active participation in the management and transformation of its landscape.

Conceptual message is, then, the recycle considered as an opportunity to re-posses urban spaces, places, landscapes, from the local communities, as the beginning of new approaches to sustainable development, endogenous and shared.

The experience of Reggio is compared with two other Italian cases, the "elevated road" in Genoa and the " Presidents' Viaduct" in Rome, in the forum "Grey to green: recycle disused mobility infrastructure " that the installation hosts during the event.

The pick, become a lawn, turns into a garden that welcomes theorists, planners and residents to discuss the three Italian cases. A moment to wonder about the role of citizens in the decision to transform its landscape, the intervention modalities and the design approach for the disused roads that have not only a functional value but also, in the contemporary world, the meaning of identity signs, landmark, spaces for a new sociality.

Re-Cycle Italy UdR Reggio Calabria Case study: The recycle the rubble of the A3 in linear park of the Costa Viola Responsable of the group: Prof. Arch. Vincenzo Gioffrè Tutor: PhD Antonia Di Lauro Students: Atelier Re-Cycle - Erika Fammartino, Antonella Franzè, Vanessa Furfaro, Vanessa Giurlanda.

274

275

Asphalte Ă dessiner to re-inhabit the residual empty spaces of the city

24 ASPHALTE À DESSINER UdR Trento > Trento

keywords Re-cycle morphology, itinerant architecture, Re-inhabited empty space

Asphalte à dessiner aims to introduce a new morphology in the continuous and flat strip of Genoa’s superelavata. This artificial topography is able to reconfigure and to reinterpret the sense of an infrastructure that, unused by cars, can contain new urban functions and can transform a link space in a relational space.

Asphalte à dessiner is an urban device. It is a dense architecture that fulfills a multiplicity of uses and ways to stay, an architecture articulated in different spatial configurations for people that cross or occupy it.

It is a new layer of urban landscape superimposed on the existing one to trigger new cycles of life, giving a new time on what already exists.

Asphalte à dessiner is a tribute to the landscape of the Trentino territory.

The shape and the material of the footprint, remember the Valley of Adige, a landscape of extraordinary quality made of natural elements, infrastructure system, fields and urban settlements.

Asphalte à dessiner is a manifesto of the possibility of infrastructures to become “the other-than-self” through the recycle of their materials. It

277

is a process of transformation that occurs by consecutive modifications: the scarification of road surface, the re-composition of waste materials, the induction of a process of naturalization and re-naturalization itself.

The footprint simulates this process through the use of readily available materials: PVC balloons inflated on site and the anti-hail net recovered from seasonal waste, cut and sewn with nylon thread to configure a soft and continuous morphology with variable section.

Asphalte à dessiner is easy to carry, it can be dismantled and reassembled in a few minutes; it is an itinerant architecture - a kind of small “World Theatre” - that highlights the opportunity of designing residual lands.

From Genoa’s superelavata to the voids of concrete and asphalt of the old harbor, where it was assembled on this occasion, this “cloud with legs” is designed to transform the empty space in a urban space to inhabit again.

Research team (UNITN): Claudia Battaino (coordinator), Chiara Rizzi and Luca Zecchin (tutors), Anna Berloffa, Alberto Rossetto, Francesco Zardini, Matteo Zeni

278

279

A glance of territorial re-cycling through mobility infrastructures

25 SUPER VIEWPOINT UdR POLITO > Turin

keywords infrastuctures, territorial recycling, public space

Recycling belongs to the normality more than it usually appears. The reuse of organic matter in the countryside, the differentiated waste collection in cities and the many products based on recycled materials, like plastic, metal, paper etc. are now an increasingly essential part of everyday life.

The recycle paradigm acts always more like an “ought to be”, a kind of a moral imperative influencing both the public opinion and the collective imagination, raising new expectations and unprecedented requests.

However, the wider the scale of reference the more blurred the contours of the problem appear. It is easy indeed to understand that wasted glass or paper could generate in turn new glass and paper, and even that plastic matters could be transformed in new consumption goods. But, widening the scale, the territorial dimension of the recycling model – involving public spaces, infrastructures, urban fabrics and whole parts of the territory – tends to elude the common consideration, mostly because these categories of problems still belong to a scale larger than everyday experience.

SUPERVIEWPOINT is an installation aiming at revealing this dimension of the problem, showing how old and new infrastructures, as permanent presences, could be eventually renewed and recycled for new purposes

281

when surrounding conditions change and new questions emerge.

The experience of the installation begins with the entrance in the middle of the “footprint”, where a circular hole transforms the paving of the Genova’s “Sopraelevata” in an observation point. The visitors’ first step, thus, brings them to the flyover itself, recycled for this occasion in an outstanding viewpoint on the city.

Starting from this ideal centre, a series of sunburst arrows – shaped like road signs – virtually leads the sight towards other further or nearer similar cases around the world: a selection of successful recycling experiences.

We easily discover hence that, in Europe and abroad, infrastructures often survive their original function and become something else, following different opportunities. Some of the cited examples – like, for instance, the High Line in New York or the Promenade Plantée in Paris - are very renowned and they already belong to the shared cultural background of architecture and planning, while others are still lesser known, like the Rebecca Walk in Australia or the Koganecho station in Yokohama.

Some recycled infrastructures are mostly self-contained, thus becoming themselves new places, like the Hofpleinlijn in Rotterdam or the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, while others are more faithful to their original “reflective” role, like the Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail.

But they all demonstrate how infrastructures, besides being a technical response to a social need, could offer a new starting point to reconsider and recycle the city and the man-made landscape. In the installation every case of study, summarily resumed in the arrows with its geographical position and the names of the project’s authors, is associated with a QRcode addressing to a dedicated web page (www.superviewpoint.altervista. org), where a detailed description of the project itself can be found, as well as other references.

SUPERVIEWPOINT becomes therefore a multidimensional hyperinstallation, ideally extending the consciousness of the problem to the entire world.

Team: Gustavo Ambrosini, Mauro Berta, Carlo Deregibus

282

283

Bicycle and cities may be Beautiful, Useful, Smart.

26 BEAUTIFUL, USEFUL, SMART Manager on bicycle© > Genoa

keywords sustainibility, recycle, growth

"Manager on bicycle © 2014" is a project to network freelancers, training consultants, marketing and sales people, and all managers who know the technique, the effort and the sweat which keep us company when we go bicycling.

Cycling means to free our mind, movement pushes away stress and makes our creativity brighter, creating those new ideas and projects which companies need to be dynamic and successful on the market.

The installation informs, sensitizes and involves the visitor about one of the opportunities of eco-sustainable urban mobility and about re-using materials; it’s a challenge in terms of innovative communication, a path of personal growth through a healthy lifestyle for personal wellbeing.

During the event it has been possible to see how to transform – by a few, money-saving decisions – your own bicycle into a trendy product: “Beautiful, Useful, Smart”. Engineers, designers, trainers, managers: all people of the team have worked to restore an old, rusty abandoned bicycle, transforming it into “Bella”.

By creating accessories through recycled materials as the ISObag and a bicycle-rack made of recycled materials too, ready to be used as street

285

furniture into commercial or buildings areas, whichever bicycle may become more equipped and “Useful”. By mounting an electric wheel/ powerassist kit and by installing a multi-app digital phone on the handlebar, our bicycle becomes “Smart”.

The “Beautiful, Useful, Smart” Imprinting may be the slogan for each installation designed to be shared and shown in whatever exhibition or urban lab dedicated to virtuous Smart City all over our country, presenting to citizens projects and solutions for eco-sustainable mobility.

People shared enthusiastically the viral marketing actions implemented on social networks, like the video-call to experience the Superelevata Foot path, or answering to QuizBike questions, presented through QR technology, designed to test their knowledge about the bicycle world.

Top experts have been rewarded with a voucher for buying sponsors products at special prices, sponsors who supported the expenses for the installation set up.

The money raised by selling T-shirts with “Manager on bicycle© 2014” logo, designed by Luca Bertolotti, and the auction on a bicycle gave us the chance to make a donation to AMAA, Alzheimer Association in Abruzzo, right during the XXI World Alzheimer's Day 2014, celebrated on the same day.

Team: Giorgia Bruzzone, Annalisa Rossi, Luciano Ruggeri, Junior Venturi (Responsible of the group)

286

287

Single equipment

27 0°57’39,2’’N 14°04’19,6’’E UdR Napoli > Naples

keywords land, waste, selector

An archaic, rural, metallic structure like a mobile vector over a territory stratified by use and abuse.A tension, perhaps the only one possible, to effect, recycle and regenerate from depth a history of fertility: Campania Felix. The operation wants to set itself in the visible contradiction between a "tempting disgust" of a trail of so-called ecological bales and the "reassuring ambiguity" of a hovering machine.

An instrument, therefore, that like a drone must move over a geo-metry of the city of Leonia surveying with the point of the needle its corrugated surface, appears then like a metaphor of a territory not left by itself in its cycle of percolation but controlled and predisposed as waiting for interlaced solutions and not for a single one.

The Footprint plays a zenithal image area known and called “Taverna del Re” near Giugliano. The ecological bales , by piramydal form on a rectangular base , draw an urban pattern ordered in blocks. The urban pattern with streets and blocks includes the patetic presence of several little and antique rural houses. The Pyramids of trash, covered by a black plastic fabric, wait for more than 10 years to be burned in an unlikely

289

incinerator. In face of the moltitude of hipotheses inciting the immediate transition from protest, now exhausted, to the action - as an unlikely provisional cover with solar panels with EU fund-project M2RES - the “single equipment” is a metaphor for a clean cut to center of the problem, into the coordinates ….. 40°57’39,2’’ Nord - 14°04’19,6’’ Est.

Responsible of the group: prof.Roberto Serino with Paola Galante architetto PhD Responsible of research: Carlo Gasparrini

290

291

New dynamic cycles of life for un-licensed territory

28 UN-LICENSED TERRITORY UdR Pescara > Pescara

keywords fragile territory, minor infrastucture, dynamic devices

The objective of the land-mark is to describe the condition of minor territories and the way in which a critical approach can demonstrate their fragility.

The minor territories are weak systems, not related to the traditional instruments of government of structured contexts: urban or metropolitan, tested for condition and dynamic of transformation.

By means of some devices, such as recycled car materials, gears, nolonger suitable helmets, that are set up in the land-mark, we intend to represent through a metaphor, the condition of “not being approved� of fragile territory.

Specifically, the land-mark describes the rail frame in Abruzzo inland, its local nodes as starting points of re-generative dynamics, here implemented through the metaphor of a mechanical gear.

Each point, as identified from the land-mark, describes the size of the elevation of the rail frame, that is a damaging condition for transport efficiency, but at the same time an opportunity for the crossed territory.

293

The map is structured around these points of gear that record "not approved" places, that are symbolized by confiscated helmets because they does not comply with the requirements of safety regulations.

The gear system is placed at the base in the shape of a plectrum with a frame on which to build relationships that can be referred to the categories of re-cycle.

The information pointed out will then be crossed through cables by viewers, who will connect independently, drawing a personal itinerary.

Used Materials Un-safe helmets, provided by the Prefecture of Pescara UTG - Prefect Dott. Vincenzo D'Antuono Recycled car materials (differentials, suspensions, flanges etc.)

Recovered wood and pipes UNICH – UdR Pescara (Prof. Francesco Garofalo, Coordinator) Prof. Carmen Andriani (in charge of 'Minor Infrastructure’ Laboratory) Arch. PhD Emilia Corradi, Arch. PhD Raffaella Massacesi, with Federica Acquaviva, Giulia D'Ignazio, Luca Mancinelli, Riccardo Radica

294

295

Half of Eight

29 HALF OF 8 UdR Roma > Rome

keywords material, waste, space

The production processes of contemporary interiors and fittings use more and more advanced technological instruments such as pantographs and CNC machines. These require the use of less precious woods, called SUPPORT PANELS, which are used to protect the countertop when cutting and processing precious plates. Thus, engravings of different size and shape are realized on these protective panels, depending on the kind of work that is carried out, with figurative results that can often be rather interesting.

Shall we consider these panels, as it often happens, as simple waste materials or do they represent a VALUE, a BEAUTY that only an open glance free of preconceived ideas can grasp?

An involuntary BEAUTY, produced by numbers and automated processes, and maybe also by casualness, only visible to those that can GO BEYOND CUSTOMS. HALF OF 8 is not only 4, as David McCullough Jr. reminds us, but it is also EIG. HALF OF 8 is also 0 (zero), the lower half, 0 the upper half.

HALF OF 8 is also 3, the right half, and a capital E, the left half...

297

Our installation aims at awakening the attention on the aesthetic dimension of materials considered as waste resulting from contemporary production processes.

It aims at REVEALING the hidden value in these materials that can be transformed in spatial value, functional value and/or aesthetic value according to the perspective used; by changing the point of view new perspectives and new re-use scenarios are open.

Group: Andrea Grimaldi (designer), Domenico Ferrara; Valerio Ottavino, Francesca R. Castelli, Lina Malfona; with Devoto Arredamenti s.r.l.; Research Unit of PRIN RE-CYCLE ITALY, Dipartimento di Architettura e Progetto, Sapienza UniversitĂ di Roma (Resp. Piero Ostilio Rossi) Materials: MDF/HDF WASTE PANELS (PANNELLI MARTIRE) MDF/HDF; sawdust; pluriball packaging sheets

298

299

New Urban Metabolism: from brownfields to talent cycles.

Creativity and innovation as new city life cycles.

30 THE FAB CITY UdR Palermo > Palermo

keywords Reverse Urbanism, creative city, city making

Makers, fablabers, urban farmers, startuppers, smart citizens, coworkers are the new protagonists of the contemporary city: actors of urban regeneration, of the new economy and of the active society. Born in the economic and technological context, today they are new producers of the city in the third industrial revolution in which we entered. More and more are the urban policies and planning practices fueled by the DIT (Do It Together) paradigm that transforms the city into a place in which citizens are people that not only ask for something, but increasingly are people that answer, act and, above all, that produce. Citizens again become producers and not only of goods and services to market, but they become farmers to return to animate parts of the abandoned city through urban agriculture, or they become knowledge workers through workshops or creative incubators, or realize cultural events through crowdfunding, run occupied theaters, administering them as an institution and not just as a reaction to abandonment. Or they are new artisans of the digital revolution: turners of objects with 3D printers, makers of sensors for environmental monitoring, or repairers of objects and spaces, in a time when repairing becomes more important than throwing away, and when recycling becomes more important than discarding or producing something ex novo. Today the

301

urban makers not only adopt parts of the city, but they become generators of new public spaces, adopting and promoting more adaptive lifestyles and behaviors, adopting and generating supportive and fair consumption patterns.

From these considerations, the Laboratory Re-cycle Palermo is applying the paradigm of re-cycle to the Talent Map, developed by Smart Planning Lab of the Department of Architecture, identifying and analyzing the urban effects of all the sites devoted to creativity and innovation, in order to understand the logic of the localization of new urban makers - today spontaneous - but also to guide future planning decisions and the "city forming" towards a creative ecosystem that facilitates the rebirth, the development and the profitability of the innovative productive city: the Fab City.

The Map of Talents of Palermo shows us the footprint of the creativity and of the innovation on the city, highlighting an interesting clustering through creative combinations that should be facilitated or re-oriented to be more effective. The Map of Talents of Palermo is also a first contribution to build the Fab City network as a network able to act on urban policies following the principles of circular economy and fueling not only the digital revolution of the producers, but also the social revolution - and so the Urban Revolution - based on recycling.

The footprint of the Laboratory Re-cycle Palermo, a red plectrum with a map of places of creative metamorphosis developed during the workshop PMO/Re-verse, is producing its regenerative and reactivating effects in the urban space of Palermo, while its Digital "Avatar" reached Genoa for the event Superelevata [Footprints].

Recycle Palermo Lab: Maurizio Carta (coordinator), Daniele Ronsivalle (responsible), with Barbara Lino , Annalisa Contato, Carmelo Galati Tardanico, Jessica Oliva Collaborations Michele Anzalone, Maria Teresi Caeti, Gaia Pandolfo and with the Association CREACTIVECITY

302

303

If tomorrow the abandoned has a value...

31 GENOA RE-CYCLE FOOTPRINT UdR Genova > Genoa

keywords abandoned industries, forgotten value, possible futures

FIRST PLECTRUM The first plectrum conceptually represents the urban development of the city of Genoa and it introduces the project of the Genoa Re-cycle Research team. Precisely, it proposes three phases (pre-industrial, industrial and today) showing how much is congested the situation of the city today and how influenced is the presence of spaces abandoned or in phase of decommission.

The city is not growing anymore with the same trend of the modern age but rather it empty itself. The installation highlights abandoned and obsolete areas dividing in four zones and showing the total amount of surfaces (sq.m.). Therefore, it is urgent to rethink an re-cycle these empty volumes and areas with new paradigms and ecological interpretations.

SECOND PLECTRUM The second plectrum allows to quantify the square meters of brownfield or disposal areas of the four macro-zones of Genoa, using a visual and universal parameter: 1 bottle = 4 football fields = 2580 sq.m. In addition

305

from the macro-zones, showed as in a grocery store, some alarming data emerge regarding some of the well-known areas. For those areas, the installation shows the status of use: if they are on sale (disposal areas) or if they are close out and from how long (abandoned areas).

THIRD PLECTRUM The third plectrum shows some of the proposals (visions) developed by the students during Design Studios activities, Workshops and thesis projects.

The projects propose interventions to recycle some of the areas identified, identified and investigated in the previous plectrum.

This plectrum shows how the recycling projects don’t restore previous functions, but rather they contribute to generate new possibilities to the areas and they are imaginable and feasible for the recovery, reuse and reappropriation of our industrial and railway heritage.

Ideation, design and installation team (Recycle Genoa Lab): Simona Benelli, Margherita Dagnino, Caterina Lavarello, Jorge Mosquera, Laura Nazzari, Benedetta Pignatti, Elena Pisano, Barbara Pitto, Ester Sirito, Carolina Queirolo, Andrè Daniel Roca Borja, Arianna Spinale, Carolina Tuiller, Francesca Vercellino, Camilla Zenezini

306

307

Urban mobility

32 RECYCLE MOBILITY Tomaso Martino, Linda Pierozzi, Fabio Torterolo > Genoa

keywords alternative-way, seg-way, recycle-way

Recycle a space, a place, a building is also take into account the way in which we move in it: respectfully grace, carefully and without forgetting the requirements of a world increasingly ruled by time and therefore needing flexible motion, in the displacement. Segway is thus a utility of recycling, whose extraordinary ability to deliver quick and loose movements, in accordance with its focus on the environment, become winning formula for a way of thinking about the dynamics closely linked to contemporary expectations.

This interactive plectrum intends to display a city that moves, a spot differently accessible, where mobility from instrument becomes pleasure, where the dynamism is not violence towards the natural and built environment, but chance to savour it. Recycling is seeking alternative ways to achieve higher goals, as does the Segway in the area of urban mobility. Alternative way, Seg-way, Recycle way.

The project started from the recreation of the company logo: the bigo of the ancient harbor of Genoa is designed by Renzo Piano. Thanks to the recycled materials provided by ReMida association, the "bigo of bigos" has

309

taken shape, with cardboard tubes and other waste materials, then placed on the plectrum portraying the intuitive map of the city centre; the set becomes not just representative of the company but also of a city that recycles its decommissioned parts, a memorial glorifying a conscious and increasingly popular ideal.

In addition to the plectrum, which is the central part of the installation, was set up a small obstacle course practicable with Segways, to prove their ability in mobility especially at architectural barriers, such as those you meet in daily life driving along our towns and cities, in particular in the historical ones rich in unevenness, as Genoa is.

Genoa is an atypical case of mobility: as public transport does not provides a tool that is available, and ecological vehicles, for an alternative displacement, are difficult to use because of the vibrant topography of the city and a net of services to the outline not yet grown, Segways can offer a capacity to adapt to a situation like this: his answer is a functional combination of ecology and comfort.

310

311

P.P-P. 4.2 is a distraction during transit: the serendipity, namely finding a thing by chance while you were searching for another one, is an event that takes especially place within the scenery of a city.

33 P.P-P. 4.2 / PLASTIC PLAY-PEN 4.2 AN EXPERIMENT BETWEEN IN AND OUTSIDE Olivia Giovannini > Genoa

keywords i-pod, sound, enjoy

P.P-P. 4.2 is an urban game that changes and evolves according to the context of action.

An individual is standing in whatever place (or non-place) where people are supposed to pass: a station, a museum, a waiting room, a supermarket, a street.

The individual is wearing a plastic overcoat and is standing still.

She is showing passers-by the INSTRUCTIONS and some EARPHONES on the back of the overcoat.

Her motor: an I-POD. P.P-P. 4.2 is also a distraction during transit: the serendipity, namely finding a thing by chance while you were searching for another one, is an event that takes especially place within the scenery of a city.

P.P-P. 4.2 is an urban game format that can be observed from three points of view: THE UNMOVING PERFORMER A performer is standing in whatever place (or non-place) where people are supposed to pass.

She is wearing a plastic overcoat, on whose back there are an I-POD, the

313

INSTRUCTIONS and some EARPHONES which she points to. The I-POD is her motor, the sound her need, and the environment surrounds her but does not belong to her.

THE WIRED PASSER-BY The passer-by who chooses to wear the earphones crosses a threshold, allowing one of the possible actions (or dances) within the plastic overcoat to happen. After reading the instructions the passer-by can wear the earphones, select a tune (the duration of each piece varies from 30 seconds to approximately 4 minutes) and run the I-POD. A strong intimacy emerges between the one who is performing the action and the one who is just present connected to the wire of the earphones, which is the only kind of relationship between them since the wire takes along the sound environment thus creating the space of the inner vision. The wired passerby is visible from the outside exactly as the performer, and together with her. The action exposes them to sight, whilst the sound hides them within a private atmosphere.

THE VOYEUR Those remaining outside go through a different experience. Being excluded from the intimacy of a shared sound environment, they have no other choice but to watch. The absence of sound creates a strong difference in meaning and fruition, but what may appear to be a mistake is, on the contrary, a value since it alters perception between in-and outside.

Conceived and performed by: Olivia Giovannini Packaging: Daniela Cecchi and Angela Castellano Assistant: Luca Serra Photo: Donato Aquaro

314

315

Finito di stampare nel mese di gennaio del 2016 dalla tipografia «la Cromografica S.r.l.»

00156 Roma – via Tiburtina, 912 per conto della «Aracne editrice int.le S.r.l.» di Ariccia (RM)

Re-It 16

Towards a pro-active manifesto aims to share the connected approaches in research and practice to develop professional and ethical competences in relation to local urban development practices in strongly globalized contexts. This Manifesto is based on two workshops held in 2014 in Genoa and Hannover and supplemented by a thematical framework provided in research of the Università degli Studi di Genova (DSA Department) and the Leibniz Universität Hannover (Department of Urban Design and Planning). This international collaboration has been supported by the programme Hochschuldialog with Südeuropa of DAAD, the German Academic Exchange Service.

isbn

16 TOWARDS A PRO-ACTIVE MANIFESTO

978-88-548-9006-0

Aracne

euro 34,00

Towards a pro-active manifesto

Towards a pro-active manifesto è il sedicesimo volume della collana Re-cycle Italy. La collana restituisce intenzioni, risultati ed eventi dell’omonimo programma triennale di ricerca – finanziato dal Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca – che vede coinvolti oltre un centinaio di studiosi dell’architettura, dell’urbanistica e del paesaggio, in undici università italiane.

Obiettivo del progetto Re-cycle Italy è l’esplorazione e la definizione di nuovi cicli di vita per quegli spazi, quegli elementi, quei brani della città e del territorio che hanno perso senso, uso o attenzione.