Search results for "regeneration"

Editorial

2023

The article is an introduction to a special issue entitled "A spotlight on Italian cities: urban change, governance and planning", which reflects different ways urban questions can arise in the Italian cities and the many directions can be given to urban policy under the impulse of municipalities and local stakeholders.

The Resilience Revolution

2018

In the Anthropocene Age the world population is growing at a considerable rate. How long nature will be able to keep us with this growth is the main challenge for us, as citizens and planners. Climate change, water scarcity, pollution, broken urban cycles, and rising prices for resources show at an increasing rate that nature’s abilities are not inexhaustible. A resilience-oriented city, therefore, must have insight into its own metabolism. When we look at planning and managing cities as organism with their own metabolisms it becomes clear that city and nature are not separate entities. Cities use nature as their supplier of fuel, food, resource materials, and water, and nature also absorbs…

Reimagining Urbanism. Creative, Smart and Green Cities for the Changing Times

2014

We live in a world of cities, where more than half of the population lives and works in urban settlements, whether dense or sprawled, metropolitan or networked, expanding or shrinking. The city plays a major role in the Urban Age as habitat – the U.S. and Europe are close to 80% – not only as development growth machine, driver of communities’ evolution and dynamism, but bearing the responsibility to generate innovative lifestyles, more sustainable smart and creative, and to be the reformer of its own development pattern. The exhibition curated by Richard Burdett in 2007 at the Tate Modern on Global Cities showed us a world where cities produce more than 50% of global GDP, consume 90% of glo…

Renewed Sicilian Urban Landscapes. Transformation, Regeneration and Reuse of degraded areas

2020

In this study, through a multidisciplinary approach, some degraded Sicilian urban landscapes, today renewed thanks to urban regeneration interventions, will be ana-lyzed. Cities that look to the future and that react posi-tively to the current ecological and economic crisis. Urban centers that – through collective participation, the support of organizations, cultural associations and the sensitivity of local governments – are investing heavily in the theme of urban regeneration and re-cycling.

Renewed Sicilian Urban Landscapes.Transformation, Regeneration and Reuse of degraded areas

2020

The cities of the future must aim at improving the quality of living through processes of transformation and reuse of degraded, abandoned or underused urban areas. The cities of the future must generate renewed urban landscapes through recovery actions, creative reuse of abandonment, urban recycling, as new and powerful revitalizing forces in urban centers. The cities of the future must be more sustainable, more responsible but also more innovative capable of rethinking, reinventing, redesigning the forms of the settlement, mending relations with the environment and the landscape, reacting to scenarios "contaminated" by human hands and, from today, also from the covid-19 virus. The cities o…

Vivibilità e creatività delle periferie

2020

Consumare meno suolo significa riscoprire la vita in città, riqualificando ambiti degradati, consolidando le piccole centralità mediante spazi pubblici e funzioni aggreganti, sostenendo e incentivando la “ricucitura” di architetture dismesse e parti di città poco vivibili. La “memoria” identitaria e la dimensione ecologico-paesaggistica in chiave creativa delle città possono, e devono, divenire un volano per innescare vivibilità soprattutto nei contesti urbani difficili. Partendo dal concetto di milieu, un approccio creativo bottom up può costituire la base operativa per una vision che, ancor prima di avere una dimensione urbana, ne abbia una “umana”. Nell’obiettivo ultimo di affrontare tem…

Urban Collage

2018

Il contributo propone una riflessione progettuale, elaborata durante il workshop internazionale “Hong Kong – Palermo. Fluid cities”, sulla rigenerazione del waterfront centrale della città di Palermo, approfondendo l’area dell’antico quartiere della Kalsa. Come una membrana porosa, tramite osmosi, il progetto contaminerà la città generando nuovi cluster culturali: il ‘Cultural Hub’ (l’epicentro); il ‘Food Cultural District’ (la Vucciria); il ‘Living Lab/Residenza per artisti’ (l’attuale Palazzo delle Finanze).

I luoghi periferici in cui si abilita intelligenza collettiva

2019

Nelle periferie urbane in cui coesistono ampi margini alla modificazione, un surplus di spazi interstiziali e marginali, negli ultimi anni si sta dispiegando la proliferazione di esperienze che aprono il campo a un diverso modo di trasformare le città, in una sorta di resilienza locale alla crisi e al conseguente vuoto di welfare sociale. Uno sguardo alle pratiche in corso sembra indicare una tendenza a spostare l'asset di sviluppo dalla patrimonializzazione immobiliare ad una economia della conoscenza, in cui i beni dismessi si offrano come piattaforme abilitanti dell'azione collettiva, dispositivi spaziali in cui incanalare l'innovazione attraverso il riciclo. Se il Piano Periferie promos…

REVERSE ELECTRODIALYSIS HEAT ENGINE: Low-grade Waste Heat into Electricity

Our society is undergoing a progressive change about the life style and habits. The world population is continuously increasing with 7.6 billion of human beings in 2018, resulting in an increasingly demand of resources in terms of food, water and energy. The exploitation of the planet resources since the first Industrial Revolution, results today in an unsustainable condition, which requires fundamental changes. In particular, in the energy sector the adoption of fossil fuels as the main energy source for human beings’ activities resulted in a strong impact on our planet, leading to climate changes and environmental pollution. Nowadays these aspects have induced society to a substantial cha…

Art in the streets. Artification strategies for public space

2019

My essay focuses on the notion of artification, recently emerged in the philosophical and artistic debate. Some case studies show that “public wall paintings” work as an artifying strategy of public space both at a superficial and at a deep level. As regard to the first, a mere decorative effect is produced; while the second, by launching projects which require the coordination of several professional skills and social actors, produces a more radical transformation. The latter notion of artification is more significant than the former because it better expresses the educational value of art and its ability to produce improvement not only of urban areas – made aesthetically more enjoyable – …