Each partner is responsible for the analytical-interpretative re-drawing of Aachen and Bologna, drawn up according to their specific approach to study, quality evaluation and the design of the Open Space of the European medium-sized city.
It must be understood as a graphic-symbolic base or a "language status" that allows to re-draw the parts of the city and the areas chosen as case studies according to the same language of representation, to starting from which to highlight the fundamental differences between the different approaches.
Naming Places. The monumental Structure of the City
It is the monuments that make a city a specific reality. There are many churches but there is only one Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna. Monuments are not mere buildings but places, whose nature manifests fully only in their relationship with the city.
Through monuments – considered as city landmarks – the Italian tradition of urban studies has been able to establish the relationship between permanency and transformation, avoiding both the quandaries of a conservative stance and the superficiality of the avantgarde’s tabula rasa approach.In this manner, the correspondence between city and architecture has been determined, so that a city can be described and represented through a list of its churches, monasteries, stately homes, towers and gates that delimit the parts of which it is composed. And at that point drawing becomes a knowledge tool to undertake urban planning as an “art of discovery”.
Like people, monuments have a given name, a name which expresses their raison d’être within the history of the city and ties the work of architecture to the vicissitudes of individuals.
Warm and Cold Spaces. A Phenomenological Approach to Mapping the Spaces of the City
The purposeful arrangement and establishment of spaces within locations is the task of architecture. In this respect, nothing has changed: buildings are constructed not primarily for the sake of walls, ceilings, or roofs, nor for the sake of forms or of a form, but instead for the sake of the spaces they contain. Architectural spaces are manifest not only within buildings, but outside of them as well - as courtyards, streets, and squares. But the city encompasses not just architecturally linked interior spaces, but also exterior spaces that are linked to urban structures or to the landscape. By virtue of their breadth, openness, and emptiness, these fields, within the city appear as landscapes and settlements, as parks and gardens, as roads, railway lines, and waste land. Fields are not architectonic spatial formations, but can nonetheless be determined more or less by architecture. Only this Structure of Four, of rooms and courtyards, of plazas and fields, can engender a city of spaces capable of doing justice to an altered cultural time order.
The red-blue plan represents the spatiality of the city on a graduated scale. Depending upon the scale followed by the plan segment in question, contents and legends are presented in a differentiated way.
Only two types of shaded areas appear in the large-scale presentation that corresponds more or less to the figure-ground plan: red for interior spaces and blue for exterior spaces. In terms of content, this so-called red-blue plan can by no means be equated with the figure-ground plan, nor with its simple inversion. As a rule, the figure ground plan represents buildings; all other elements are suppressed. This modification makes it possible to distinguish between built-up (black) and empty (white) areas. Accordingly, this type of plan registers architectural-formal structures in plan segments. An instrument of urban planning, the figure-ground plan is oriented toward the morphology of the city and its development. By contrast, the red-blue plan does not represent formal structures, but rather simply interior spatial and exterior spatial structures. On the basis of a scalar modification, interior spaces (red) and exterior spaces (blue) are not differentiated further, but are depicted uniformly. In contradistinction to the figure-ground plan, built-up surfaces (black) are registered as interior spaces (red), and empty surfaces (white) are depicted either as interior spaces (red) or as exterior spaces (blue). As an instrument of urban spatial design, the red-blue plan is oriented toward topological structures, and on a small scale, toward the depiction of typological structures: spaces (inner-outer), linkages (urban-rural), enclosures (covered-uncovered), boundaries (active-passive), and dedications (inclusive-exclusive).
Accessible spaces. Mapping pedestrian friendly public spaces
Our individuai approach for mapping urban open space basis on level of accessibility for pedestrian users. By doing so, we show the quality of pedestri an friendly connections within the city. We believe that public space represents a value that is the most important for people, that use it most frequently an d feel there well an d so they stay there for long. A good public is a space that provides area to meet, to trade and to move (Jan Gehl). In arder to provide ali three kinds of activities, different spatial characteristics is essential. Ali these spaces ca n be characterised by different levels of accessibility for pedestrians.
Usually the closer to the city center, the higher quality spaces are, an d the better pedestrian friendly connections we get. Especially the cities with historic origin, that have a market square and historic core provide the best pedestrian connections. The best test of a city would be a question: Where would you meet in the city? lf the answer refers to well recognised public spaces that means that they are successful.
Compact city. Densification strategies of the built space
The contemporary city must rethink itself in order to a regeneration of its built body. The compact city is the model to tend to as the only antidote to the extension of the urban form perpetuated until today, the main cause of the organic crisis of the European city and the land consumption phenomenon. At the base of the compact city there is a principle of economics concerning morphological and typological aspects, the relationship between the urban facts and the use of space. This economy is still legible within a precis urban portion that can be defined a merged city, the part of a city where physical continuity exists between its components. The development of the contemporary city has depended heavily on the so-called phenomenon of the peripheralization of historical city centers that originated from the advent of the nineteenth-century train stations. The city has therefore expanded by configuring urban areas that can be traced back to specific temporal thresholds, from garden cities to the fragmentation of the current extreme suburbs where the void space predominates over the full space. In this action framework, the SPINNER 2013 research, Design the built. New integrated quality models for the compact city, currently under revision, has experimented an intervention methodology on the merged city, opposed to the diffuse city, based on the densification technique of the spatial resource through the new urban centralities typologies. The anatomical analysis of the merged city, in respect of a transcalar vision, reveals a structure made up of centrality fields underlying potentially transformable spatiality that differ from the generic empty space by degree of accessibility, usability and visibility. The result is a polycentric city in which the new imaginable urban centralities, contextualised with respect to the project sites and the urban traditions of comparison, contribute to strengthening its structure, strengthening its public facilities and reshaping its form.
City-Nature. The natural space as urban structure
Our approach focuses on a specific type of public space, the urban natural space. Much more than the result of a simple visual approach to the project, the natural public space is an urban material which is the foundation of a project approach of the city and the territory in resonance with ecological issues and contemporary societal requirements. The reality challenges deeply the methodology, theory, and practice of the design. Working with reality means to consider how people can dwell this world, and to elaborate another way to think the man inside this materiality.
To think about the role of natural spaces in cities puts in the forefront the design of the ground: a ground not reduced to its surface, but which includes its basement and its identity as a living environment. These different aspects structure materials for both urban and territorial designs.
To map the urban natural spaces allows to prepare the students to the challenges of tomorrow related to the Urban Design. Not only describe them, but problematise them first at a local scale, in terms of lack or weakness, potentiality or opportunity, and second at a global scale of a contemporary general problem in relation with the transformation of human living conditions. Both scales are to be present in the mapping, providing a “territory portrait”.