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The commentary is about the Italian debate over 'peripheries' that recently gained renewed centrality in the political discourse, due to an initiative of the architect Renzo Piano, the eruption of protest and disorders in Rome between residents and migrants, and the Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's populism. One year ago the star architect Renzo Piano funded an initiative to stimulate urban regeneration and employment of young Italian designers. Although neither the projects, nor the approach are a novelty, the initiative gained great visibility and culminated last 6th December with the Italian government decision to allocate 200 million euro for the regeneration of peripheries. Beyond the many self-evident qualities, the successful initiative deserves some further speculations, especially in relation to the rhetoric of 'mending the peripheries' - a motto that suddenly became an architectural manifesto, stimulating a broader reflection on the role, the potential and the discourse of architecture and design, both in academia and outside. From our perspective, the idea to reconnect the periphery with the urban exceeds in architectural determinism and complies with a certain vision of design as thaumaturgic practice, that well fits the superhuman ego of the Italian prime Minister and its discursive practice. Rather than claim the political project of the city, the initiative, despite its good intentions, results as another attempt to reduce political instance to a mere spatial one, because it is easy to find spatial solutions. The commentary therefore seeks to look into this debate, ultimately willing to exonerate architecture from too many alleged 'failures'.
Society and the City. The Dark Sides of Social Innovation (Edited by Guido Borelli and Maurizio Busacca)
Beyond the Rhetoric of Social Innovation. Relational Sound Art as a Driver for Urban Regeneration2020 •
Participatory design is an emerging interactive practice currently informing different and distant fields such as relational art, urban regeneration, and social innovation. Among these fields, relational art is described as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” (Borriaud 2002, 113). Giving this assumption, can relational art practice support urban regeneration and social innovation? Can participatory design be independent from the neoliberal trend that social innovation and urban regeneration are fostering?
2018 •
This paper aims to analyze and understand the contemporary Italian approach to urban development and regeneration, which is structured around the category of decaying periphery. Inspired by the works of Michel Foucault, Henry Lefebvre, and Lois Waquant, the analysis of the discourses on urban regeneration takes into account the Urban Agenda of the EU, the urban policies promoted by the Italian government, and the ways in which the Municipality of Brescia (Northern Italy) is applying them in three specific neighborhoods of this city. Then, the analysis takes into account the ways in which the residents of this area (re)produce, negotiate, and contest the discourses on urban (im)properness; these processes produce specific effects on the conceptualizations, perceptions, and experiences of these spaces in the every-day life urban interactions. This paper suggests that the Italian approach of regeneration, and its local application in the decaying periphery of Brescia, sustain institutional forms of territorial stigmatization, framing the historical transition from the industrial to the post-industrial socioeconomic system through class, gender, and racially polarized urban representations and narratives.
2018 •
The present study debates on the issue of urban regeneration in contemporary cities, adopting a strategic vision which includes the use of vegetation and green infrastructure to create a network of public spaces. Especially, urban periphery lacks of public spaces, meaning a public use of urban space for outdoor activities and social networks. The extraordinary program for the Italian peripheries, addressed to all the metropolitan cities and provincial capitals in 2016, inspired to Renzo Piano idea of “re-sewing” urban fabrics, has been a good opportunity for testing new approaches to urban regeneration. The case study investigated in this study is the financed project for the city of Perugia, which provides different interventions aimed at improving (and developing new) public spaces through vegetation enhancement and a large area destined to vegetable social gardens as a strategy for urban infill. By recovering public spaces with social purpose and providing a comprehensive strateg...
The Design Journal
Built territories. Innovative regeneration processes for a participatory and sustainable designIn the last year conflicts arouse in some big Italian cities neighbourhoods. They started generally from the housing problems (evictions and squatting). This is not new in a country, where the public housing policy has never been able to cope with the demand, and since the explosion of the global economic crisis in 2008, with the increasing financial restrictions to the local authorities’ actions, the housing and related problems had worsened. If some attempt at implementing innovative policies and practices were not sufficient to cope with the social demand some years ago, now they are proving increasingly weak in the face of the quality and amount of the current housing and public facilities demand. Soon they involved also other problems: crisis is striking strongly, generating new social inequalities and new sources of possible conflicts. Housing and employment are basic conditions for the wellbeing of the individuals and families, and when they do not find a solution, other issues, such as immigration, refugees, ethnic or social diversity add up to the people situation and risk to be perceived as worsening factors of a general social malaise. Housing inequalities are often the spring that triggers the conflicts, but these ones foster, and are fostered by, different dimensions of what is generally called social malaise. The urban dimension is not indifferent in these situations, that is “space and place” play a role. In fact, the above mentioned conflicts generally take place in the peripheries of some big cities. The persistent crisis effects, together with the consequences of the middle east war (refugees) and the recent explosion of terrorism in Europe are bringing back in the urban agenda words as “peripheries”, “banlieues”, “ethnic neighbourhoods”, which have been revisited intermittently in the past 40 years. “Peripheries” does not indicate a geographical position, but neighborhoods where social malaise conditions are more serious than in other parts of the territory. And another word is coming back, “urban regeneration”. Urban regeneration is an ambiguous term which has changed its meaning many times through the recent decades, and calls into question many different concepts, covering also an evolution of the policies and practices which recently brought about quite different objectives. Some hints will be given about this evolution/involution. One of the meaning of the word, which refers also to a set of policies and practices, is the one introduced by EU with two initiatives, Urban Pilot Project and Urban. Summarizing, the main goal of these experiences was fighting against social malaise at the local, or better, at a neighbourhood level; the consequent action model was a place-based action model, whose aim was breaking the cumulative process by valorising local resources, that is an Integrated Area Development (IAD) approach. These policies and tools changed through times, and declined in the recent years, but they have grounded some common practices related to urban regeneration. Many times the above mentioned recent conflicts occur in the same neighbourhoods where in the last twenty years these kind of “urban regeneration” experiences were developed. Questions: what has remained of this season of urban regeneration? What were the theoretical and/or practical limits of the actions which were developed? But, above all, can this concept of urban regeneration, even revised, be again an answer to the new crisis situation of the peripheries and their neighbourhoods? Are the policies and tools being put in place consistent with this vision? In order to answer some very recent Italian experiences will be analysed.
2Nnd IConA International Conference on Architecture “Canon and Code. The language of arts in today’s world”
Visual spaces of change: use, perception, moment2021 •
This paper discusses Sofia F. Augusto’s project: Architecture and Photography - Photographic Mapping: Use, Perception, Moment about the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP). The article suggests the importance of photographic projects in the perception and design of architectural environments. The article is contextualized by the interdisciplinary research project Visual Spaces of Change, which combines contemporary photography and visual documentation with georeferencing. The project fosters a renewed understanding of contemporary architecture by inviting photographers to respond to the work of Portuguese architects. It instigates the research of new photographic approaches, which depart from the traditional imagery displayed in architectural press, offering visual narratives that enrich the discussion on architectural buildings and their uses. Augusto’s work is a visual dialog with the FAUP’s campus, which was designed by Álvaro Siza who might be the most prestigious Portuguese architect. The photographic work proposes an explorative visual narrative, which creates a strong relation between document and fiction that highlights architectural features and encourages the re-examination of this iconic architectural place, its complex dimensions and architectural language. Augusto’s photographic exploration suggests new ways of understanding and perceiving these spaces and buildings, how they are used by students, staff, and visitors. This photographic project enriches and informs the perception and memory of the spaces photographed, while creating “visual pathways” that intentionally interfere with the territory in a self- reflective representation of its process of change. It gives visibility to spatial and temporal aspects difficult to perceive without the use of photography and imagery, reinforcing the potential of photography as an object of thought and production of meaning for rendering visible transformations of architecture and urban landscapes. Augusto ́s architectural gaze is able of unveiling important spatial features of Siza ́s FAUP building, communicating through an architectonic vantage point the spaces of FAUP and its experiences in a visual narrative. It possesses a documentary and artistic character that expands the conventional categorization of photography of architecture. This article explores and deepens new artistic languages of looking and understanding the built space.
Ciric, Dragana. "Architectural Bordering: Concepts, Models, and Principles", in Bogdanovic, R. Third International Conference and Exhibition ON ARCHITECTURE - REWORKING THE CITY THROUGH NEW ARCHITECTURE, Conference Proceedings, Belgrade: STRAND - Sustainable Urban Society Association, 2015, pp.36-54
Architectural Bordering: Concepts, Models, and Principles2015 •
2021 •
The Article Outlines the experience of the international workshop SEW07 and the following master plan for the district of Sant’Elia in Cagliari, reflecting on the fortunes and misfortunes of the event. The first part describes the district and its recent vicissitudes, highlighting its apparent stillness. The second part describes its foundation in an ‘ideal condition of tabula rasa’, inspired by the vague of megastructuralism. The third part describes the process that will lead to the drafting of the masterplan: although started ‘in the best of ways’, it will finally end up unbuilt and discarded, mainly for a lack of funding. As a conclusion, the article retraces the last moments of the story, claiming that the project ignited a renewed interest in the care for landscape and architecture. It is argued that, despite the lost opportunity for an exemplary renovation of one of the most notorious districts of the city, the traces left behind by the process – which involved the participation of policy makers, professionals, academics and residents – are still vivid and that the signs of that important season are still visible in the local school of architecture and in the new generation of architects it nurtured. These are, in exchange, nurturing Sardinian landscape, architecture and design culture
2012 •
Debates on contemporary urban conditions often center on the periphery of the city where an ever-increasing proportion of the urban population is forced to live. This article focuses on the banlieue--the periphery of Paris--as a model for the breakdown of the spatial order in cities globally. We examine how France's urban planning, guided by political and economic influences, has created and sustained banlieue poverty and marginalization. With rising anxieties about civil disorder in Paris resulting from the spatial inequities and cultural stigma toward the banlieue, it is now generaly agreed that the city's historical planning policies have failed. We argue that any attempt to allocate space within a city equitably cannot emanate from the city center alone, but must also come from the marginalized periphery, which is equally a part of the system. Is Paris burning? Whether on the movie screen or in political history, this infamous question has never lost its charge. (1) The ...
Confini Movimenti Loughi
Peripheral corridors: the post-metropolitan landscape of Melville (Johannesburg) and Leganes (Madrid2019 •
Three key words: peripheral development, corridors, post-metropolitan landscape Workshop First Preference: Post-Metropolis Regional Urban Development processes in Italy and the world Workshop Second Preference: New mobilities and dialectics between places and corridors in cities and territories Thesis describing main arguments: This paper consists of a general history of the concept of periphery and aims to introduce the different definitions of periphery in architectural and other theories. It begins by setting out some of the difficulties encountered when attempting to define the periphery, before continuing with the three main parts to the paper. The first of these provides a general taxonomy and describes the characteristics of the periphery in architecture, based on historical general discourses; the second examines architectural discourse and typologies in more detail, developing a particular focus on the European context and thirdly it focuses in more detail on this difficulty of defining the peripheral condition in architecture theory. The architects Jonathan Woodroff, Dominic Papa and Ian Mac Burnie write (Woodroffe, J., Papa, D., and Mac Burnie, I 1994:6): "Today, it seems an almost impossible task to define a contemporary peripheral condition; and yet it is that very quality, its extreme elusiveness, that ensures its attractiveness for debate […] In Western Europe with the exception of Britain, the notion of periphery has historically been associated with the 'marginal'". This quote summarises recent discourse on peripheries, where the difficulty of the theme through its elusiveness has made the discourse marginal. So it is through these marginal figures that the exploration of the theme can be carried out in order to understand its language. Methodology/case study/comparisons, etc.: This paper will look at how the traditional categories used for interpreting the features of urban development are not anymore capable of grasping the distinctive features of the recent processes of urban transformation in peripheral areas and will focus in the application of peripheral theories in two urban corridors located in Leganes in Madrid (Spain) and Johannesburg (South Africa). Expected results: The paper will look at the theoretical difficulty to define periphery in architecture and its application to two peripheral corridors in two capital suburbs in Spain and South Africa.
OnCurating Issue 41
Centres ⁄ Peripheries -Complex Constellations2019 •
Proyecto Progreso Arquitectura
Ficciones. De La Arquitectura Narrativa y Las Narraciones Arquitectónicas al Arquitecto como Contador De Historias. | Fictions. From Narrative Architecture to Architectural Narratives, to The Architect as a Storyteller.2019 •
Re-Centring the City Global Mutations of Socialist Modernity
Phantom palaces: Prussian centralities and Humboldtian spectresBuilt Environment
From Impasse to Improvisation: Grand Paris Express as negotiation agent in the fragmented metropolis2021 •
sITA Studies in History and Theory of Architecture
" A Fabulous Painting in which I Would Live " Paul Delvaux's Pictorial Poetic of the Railway Periphery between Art and Urban History2016 •
Representing Irregular Urbanism Roundtable
Representing Irregular Urbanism Roundtable 25 03 2017The Journal of Architecture
The myth of informal place-making: stitching and unstitching Atarim Square in Tel Aviv2007 •
Southern Practice. Early works of a young Italian architect
Southern Practice. Early works of a young Italian architect2019 •
Frontiers of Architectural Research
Architecture, values and perception: Between rhetoric and reality2018 •
2020 •
2018 •
2017 •
Special Issue Journal of East Central European Studies
Introduction: Backward and Peripheral? Emerging Cities in Eastern EuropeRevue Urbanités
The (Lost) Children's Estate: Urban Milestone, or Landmark of the Downfall of a Utopia2015 •
Sámi Art and Aesthetics. Contemporary Perspectives
Strategies of Monumentality in Contemporary Sámi Architecture2017 •
proceedings of the fifth international conference of the European Architectural History Network
The materialization of power and authority: the architectural commissions of Charles of Croÿ (1596‐1612) [EAHN 2018]2018 •
Colombia desde Afuera / Colombia from the Outside
Magical Modernism: Latin American Urbanisms and the Imaginary of Social Architecture* Modernismo mágico: Urbanismos latinoamericanos y el imaginario de la arquitectura social2021 •