Urban Landscape Strategies E-Book

Giuseppe Marinoni

• Herausgeber: SMOwnPublishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The projects illustrated here exemplify the way contemporary urban planning is moving in practice, and how it is precisely in the effective transformation of cities and landscapes that it is finding the theoretical and practical forms of its action. An urban planning that, as has recently been pointed out, having emancipated itself from the typo-morphological tradition focused on the built, is now coming to embrace the open spaces of the city within the horizon of the landscape, allowing it to incorporate infrastructures and other complex systems once considered incompatible with the urban character. From this is emerging a set of attitudes and fragmentary reflections that in a process of trial is defining lateral approaches, routes that cut across the habits of design and planning. A research that does not set itself poetic and stylistic goals, but manipulates building, landscape, geographical and infrastructural materials as an inevitable condition of operation.

Leseprobe

Giuseppe Marinoni

URBAN LANDSCAPE STRATEGIES

© Copyright 2013

by StudioMarinoni OwnPublishing

Corso Sempione 36

20154 Milano

www.studiomarinoni.com

[email protected]

EUROPEAN PRACTICE / series

Editor: Giuseppe Marinoni

Advisory Board:

Annegret Burg, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Kurt W. Forster, Luigi Mazza, 

Giuseppe Marinoni, Luis Raúl Moysén Mason, João Nunes Ferreira,

Santiago Quesada, Pierluigi Salvadeo

Planning of the book and texts: Giuseppe Marinoni

Translation: Huw Evans

Design and cover: Vilma Cernikyte

www.vilmacernikyte.com

I would like to thank Chiara Conti, Susanne Elisabeth Eggeling, Francesco Repishti for the final reading of the text and their advice.

EUROPEAN PRACTICE / 2

ISBN: 978-88-907773-6-3

This ebook was created with BackTypoby Simplicissimus Book Farm

Table of contents

INTRODUCTION

ABBIATEGRASSO 2009 / Territorial Administration Plan

BERGAMO 2006 / New Centre of Greater Bergamo

FRANKFURT AM MAIN 2004 / Hafen am Main

KÖLN 2012 / Deutzer Hafencity

MILANO 2007 / Landscaped Centre of the Grande Bicocca

MILANO 1996-2007 / Metropolitan Gateways

MILANO 2007 / Expo Village 2015 at Cascina Merlata

MONZA 2009 / Urban and landscape renewal of Bettola Casignolo

NOVARA 2007 / MoviCentro Intermodal Hub

SARONNO 2008 / Cantoni Campus

SEVESO 2009 / Urban and landscape strategy

AFTERWORD / Luigi Mazza

Credits

Bibliography

List of Works

​Biography

EUROPEAN PRACTICE series

INTRODUCTION

The projects presented in this book were all born in complex urban and landscape contexts and in planning situations often bristling with difficulties. Sometimes they concern residual parts of the city and territory left in marginalised conditions of settlement and use, after having been mangled by processes for the development of infrastructure as intensive as they are short-sighted (Bettola Casignolo in Monza and Cascina Merlata in Milan). Or they deal with areas made available by the abandonment of production activities that have compromised their patterns of settlement and environmental equilibria (the Hafen of Cologne-Deutz and Frankfurt am Main or the Cantoni and Schwarzenbach factories in Saronno and Seveso respectively). Other projects attempt instead to complete the interrupted designs of excessively autonomous parts of the city: morphological enclaves that have neglected the problem of the relationship with their urban and landscape environs (Bicocca in Milan and the north-east sector of Abbiategrasso). Or again infrastructural fringes that have found themselves, over the course of urban development, in privileged locations, so that they have ended up close to the city centre and yet extensively degraded from the perspective of their morphology, environment and use (the railway yards of Bergamo, Novara, Seveso or the Linate motorway junction).

Starting out from specific situations and hemmed in by the concrete nature of the case, these projects imply questions of a more general nature, such as the fragile condition of the contemporary city and the difficulties inherent in plans to transform or renew existing cities, towns and urban landscapes.

The reckless character of infrastructures in urbanised territories and cities, the emergence of the phenomenon of the abandonment of manufacturing areas and infrastructural fringes in the vicinity of urban centres and the advent of a new environmental awareness connected to the conservation of land and non-renewable resources are resulting in a shift in perspective and new ways of looking at the cities and landscapes we have inherited. The urgent need to reorganise and introduce innovations into the networks and hubs of public and private transport, the economic benefits expected from processes of urban and landscape renewal and the aspiration to shape new kinds of settlement suited to contemporary rituals of habitation – where the urban component and the dimension of landscape often coexist and overlap – create the conditions for a continual evolution in the approaches, methods and theoretical and planning instruments used to intervene in the city.

If in the sixties there was a tendency to derive urban and territorial layouts from policies of economic planning, and in the seventies and eighties the focus of interest shifted to a “critical reconstruction” of the city, since the nineties there has been a move towards the project working out its own modes of intervention, tackling in practice the conflicts generated by the incessant pressure for change.

The projects illustrated here exemplify the way contemporary urban planning is moving in practice, and how it is precisely in the effective transformation of cities and landscapes that it is finding the theoretical and practical forms of its action. An urban planning that, as has recently been pointed out, having emancipated itself from the typo-morphological tradition focused on the built, is now coming to embrace the open spaces of the city within the horizon of the landscape, allowing it to incorporate infrastructures and other complex systems once considered incompatible with the urban character. From this is emerging a set of attitudes and fragmentary reflections that in a process of trial and error is defining lateral approaches, routes that cut across the habits of design and planning. A research that does not set itself poetic and stylistic goals, but manipulates building, landscape, geographical and infrastructural materials as an inevitable condition of operation.

By the term “coordinated urban strategy” we are referring to the mutable set of practices that, in contrast to the long time, the centuries, that it takes to construct the city, promote the building of large parts of the urban fabric in a relatively short span of time. Coordinated by a planner, building, infrastructural and landscape components are gathered together in a wide-ranging strategy of settlement that attempts to identify flexible principles for management of the processes of qualitative transformation of the city and its landscape, instead of fixing rules and forms in advance in arrangements of planes and masses whose realization is left for the future.

With its strategic values, the coordinated urban project on the one hand works as an agent of regeneration, a specific qualitative transformation in particularly reactive and complicated places, and on the other brings into play new energies of urban and landscape renewal, less and less represented within the traditional confines of governance. A refining of modes and practices, a building up of skills and expertise in order to be able to go along, in an action of planning with multiple offshoots, with the process of transformation of the settlement.

A specific knowledge of the city is accompanied by the ability to coordinate a complex set of levels related to questions of different kinds:

- strategic: on an intermediate scale between the overall urban form and the specific intervention of transformation;

- morphological: meaning and form of the spaces of the city, in its landscaping, building and infrastructural aspects, seen in relation to the traces of the existing city and its possible innovative implications;

- financial: the economic underpinning of the operation, the mobilization of investments, the rules governing public and private involvement, the control of profitability and redistribution;

- communicative: building of consensus around the project to bring about a sharing of intentions and objectives;

- managerial: continual management of the process in the change in its structures of form and use in view of plural interests and sectional contributions and the necessity to specify programmes and uses at the planning stage for a realization of the intervention in stages and by complete parts.

The incompatibility of the short timescale of decision-making with respect the long one of the city’s construction is reflected in the urgency of the media to anticipate the final scenarios of the configurations of the area, so that the mode of representation is always twofold: maps of the principles of settlement and views of the possible outcomes. These last are provisional visions, and liable to modification, but useful in orienting subsequent projects and in anticipating themes like the typology of the open spaces, the landscape, the forms of urban density, elements of ordonnance of the buildings and a relationship between fabric and outstanding elements. Views at eye-level borrowed from the veduta rather than the bird’s-eye views of a modernist plan-masse. In fact there is no need to illustrate the final stage of a plan showing the disposition of masses to be pursued. Instead it is the anticipation with images of city and landscapes that constitutes the indispensable conceptual backdrop to subsequent further steps in planning.

The values of the “compact city” expressed in density of uses, stability of the urban structure, morphological pluralism and the simultaneous presence of built, landscaping and infrastructural elements, coexist here with today’s principles of environmental sustainability and land conservation. And distance themselves from both the mimetic and conservative attitudes of the historic city and the enthusiastic visions that still see urban sprawl as a model suited to the contemporary world.

With the dichotomy of city and landscape overcome, two distinct disciplinary heritages, maintaining their principal differences and affinities, are now coming together to produce fragments of hybridization and fusion with unstable boundaries: a movable physical and conceptual threshold that is continually being redefined.

The frame of reference of the projects is the form known as the “intensity city” which, without indulging in a nostalgic re-proposal of the historical European city, or vice versa in a euphoric anti-urban escapism, is able to incorporate questions and themes that have emerged in the metropolitan dimension – intensity of flows, exchanges, experiences – into the city that is already there, in a “pact”, an accord between existing form and new contents.

ABBIATEGRASSO 2009 / Territorial Administration Plan

In its adoption of the principles of construction of the compact city, the document defining the general framework of the Territorial Administration Plan for Abbiategrasso prefigured a comprehensive vision of completion of the forma urbis, and thereby set out to usher in a process of qualitative, and not just quantitative, transformation of the town.

The working tools of the document were the coordinated urban projects that outlined settled principles of settlement – layouts, open spaces, built borders, arrangement of infrastructures – capable of managing the phases of implementation in a flexible process and orienting subsequent architectural, landscaping and infrastructural projects.

Three urban projects were identified to set about completion of the town.

- Urban and landscape renewal in the south-east. The presence of the town’s other canal, the Naviglio di Bereguardo, and farmland of particular environmental value confers great scenic quality on this part of the territory. With the passage of the new link road to Milan Malpensa airport and the change in the location of the railway station it will take on the role of a gateway to the city. The high degree of accessibility here justifies a reinforcement of manufacturing and collective functions on an urban and regional scale. The morphological and landscaping principles tend to define a unitary design centred on the figure of the agricultural park traversed by the Naviglio di Bereguardo. The edges of the park are reinforced by planted embankments, which like works of land art mediate the landscape qualities of the site with the morphology of a contemporary science park.

- Linear Park and landscaped borders to the west. A figure on a grand scale, the Linear Park is the new symbolic and physical boundary of the built-up area, just as the ring of walls was in the past. It takes the following form: towards the town, a vertical sign made up of rows of tall trees completes the frayed urban limits; towards the countryside, horizontal parterre designs link up with the pattern of fields and house the town’s prospects onto the Parco del Ticino. The new Strada Parco bisecting these territorial figures, with its cycle tracks and footpaths, favours the c [...]