University of Roma Tre
Generally speaking, place-making typical to the Italian urban design practice proves a most relevant part of the current reflection on cityscape, affecting the rules and codes of its composition and shaping insiders’ and outsiders’ perceptions. In Italy, such reflection has been especially relevant in historic centers, since the country hosts a huge urban heritage to be preserved and passed down to future generations. Amongst different attitudes, two main approaches stand out. They share two main assumptions: (i) an effective and socially sustainable recovery and possible re-use of heritage should be place-specific; (ii) the main focus should be on public space, deemed as the most authentic dimension of a city. Accordingly, both approaches entail dynamic surveys of outdoor spaces supposedly liable to incorporate new uses, thus renewing the vitality of the city.
1. The city as a text
The first approach, by far the most enduring in the Italian experience, is rooted in morphology, intended as the dialectical relationship among general and specific spatial elements, and claims for the city as an assemblage of meaningful forms standing like the words in a sentence. This metaphor of the City as a Text allows for overwriting, i.e. introducing new elements and uses, provided that they respect the span and rhythm of the pre-existing ‘text’. Thus, despite the ravages of time, historic cities hold on by accommodating new uses into a given Forma Urbis (‘city shape’), according to the inhabitants’ specific needs.
Therefore, the overall image of the city in the perception of its users is deemed stronger than the permanence of the original ‘building type’, hardly attainable after centuries of changes and adaptations. The building fabric displays continuous layers and rearrangements of pre-existing materials, more or less consistent with each other, often resulting in architectural units wholly or partly different from the original ones. Nevertheless, the overall image and identity of the city persist.
2. Landscape and Memory
In line with the European Landscape Convention (2000), the second approach is based on the aspirations of the public regarding the landscape features of their surroundings. In other terms, any public decision regarding the transformation of the cityscape requires knowledge of public opinion.
For some time now such an inclusive notion of landscape, combining expert and common knowledge, has acquired momentum. It offers the ideal ground to comprehend and guide future transformation, focusing on landscape as biodiversity reservoir and as the scenery of cultural heritage. Participatory planning, along with drawings, ‘parish maps’ and other communication tools, provides communities with the experiences of places, in order to keep alive the awareness of present times and to accept the allusive and often enigmatic sense of memories, merging common perceptions and individual inscapes towards a shared vision of the future.
In conclusion, any urban transformation, including those aimed at decarbonisation, should be underpinned by the ability to read the codes, forms and elements that shape the cityscape, and to understand their relationships with the inhabitants’ experience, memory, and needs. This is crucial to ensure the social sustainability of decarbonisation actions, as well as their compatibility with the life of urban communities. The Place-making Module developed by the University of Roma Tre within the CITYMINDED project is based on this assumption and intends to provide involved HE students with basic capacities of cityscape interpretation, taking into account their different backgrounds and the variety of neighbourhoods taken as case studies.
Figure 1. Montepulciano. Piano Regolatore Particolareggiato del Centro storico (G. Samonà, M. Marchetta, A. Samonà). In: G. Samonà, I contenuti e le linee del Piano particolareggiato di Montepulciano, “Casabella”, Issue 444, XLIII, Feb. 1979, at 17-25.
Such planning experiment initiated a long-lasting debate over the rules generating urban forms and the relationship between morphology and typology.
Figure 2. Lucca and the “Contado delle Sei Miglia”. List of the characters contributing to the identity framework in the Lucca Plain during the Ancien Régime (F. Balletti, M. Caponetto, A. L. Palazzo, Rappresentazioni “eterodosse” dell’identità locale progettando con gli abitanti: S. Concordio a Lucca, in: A. Magnaghi (ed.), La rappresentazione identitaria del territorio. Atlanti, codici, figure, paradigmi per il progetto locale, Firenze, Alinea, 2005, at 151-168).
The “Contado delle Sei Miglia” (the Lucca Plain) and the surrounding hills have been witnessing long duration in settlement pattern and land uses, that left both tangible and intangible traces. Such picture has been implemented combining fragments of maps, paintings, engravings illustrating the manifold aspects of life and society in the countryside. These details apparently randomly combined contribute to compose a first representation of the identity/identities in the area still resisting to change.
