Cristina Renzoni

Matrici culturali degli standard urbanistici: alcune piste di ricerca

Il contributo propone alcune piste di ricerca con l’intento di esplorare le radici degli standard urbanistici introdotti in Italia nel 1968. Vengono articolate quattro linee di indagine, dedicate rispettivamente al ruolo degli esperti dentro e intorno al Ministero dei Lavori pubblici; al precisarsi di alcuni modelli di intervento nella costruzione dei nuovi quartieri e della citta pubblica; alle esperienze di quantificazione legate alla manualistica e a una nuova stagione di piani regolatori; alle domande, infine, provenienti dalla societa civile. Nel loro complesso le analisi ruotano intorno a tre fuochi tematici (burocrazie tecniche, culture del progetto, innovazione sociale) da porre al centro di un dibattito urgente sul riuso e la messa in rete degli ‘standard’: un’eredita di luoghi, pratiche ed esperienze che possono giocare un ruolo fondamentale nel ripensare il futuro delle citta e dei territori contemporanei.

Water and asphalt: the project of isotropy

The book Water and Asphalt: The Project of Isotropy can be seen as a sort of ‘augmented anthology’ that collects and makes available for an international public a series of essays and explorations written over the last decade within the framework of a collective research coordinated by Paola Viganò and the late Bernardo Secchi, together with a team of colleagues and collaborators that includes the co-editor of the volume Lorenzo Fabian. The project ‘Water and Asphalt’ was first presented in 2006 in the section ‘Urban Research: the Metropolitan dimension of Venice’ at the Venice Architecture Biennale. For Secchi and Viganò, this exhibition marked the beginning of their study of the so-called città diffusa (dispersed city); they focused on the emergence of waterscapes and mobility networks in low-density European settlements. The expression città diffusa first came to prominence in Italian planning research in the late 1980s and describes the polycentric networks of small and medium-sized cities that characterize large parts of Italy. The term was not entirely new but acquired a new meaning within the Venice school of urban planning, which applied it to the context of North-Eastern Italy and particularly the Venice metropolitan region. These areas became a testing ground to carry out research on some specific characteristics of Italy’s urban sprawl. Research on the ‘dispersed city’ was, for example, published in the book Le forme del territorio italiano (The Shapes of the Italian Territory), a comprehensive work on the morphology of the Italian territory that dedicated great attention to the continuous urbanized settlements of regions such as Lombardy, Veneto, or the Adriatic coastline city. Secchi saw these territories as prototypical ‘new’ forms of contemporary urbanization. Earlier investigations on the città diffusa focused mostly on the organization of ‘economic districts’ and their link to the economic and social dimension of the region, as well as on the role of individual choices in shaping collective spaces. Secchi and Viganò’s ‘Water and Asphalt’ exhibition, in contrast, introduced a strong environmental and ecological perspective, paving the way for subsequent developments such as the notion of ‘horizontal metropolis’ recently championed by Paola Viganò or the project for the Grand Pari(s) competition proposed by Secchi, Viganò, and their collaborators in 2008. The book comprises 24 chapters, some of which had previously been published in languages other than English. They are organized into three main sections. The first one, ‘The project of isotropy’,

Negotiating the middle-class city. Housing and equipping post-war Turin, 1950-1980.

The article investigates the patchwork of fragmented collective spaces and public facilities shaped in the Italian cities between the 1950s and the 1970s, as the result of processes of negotiation between public institutions, private developers and stakeholders, in relation to the construction of residential buildings and large-scale housing complexes devoted to the middle-class. This contribution deals with medium and small-sized public spaces/facilities as the typical outcome of the building process that marked the construction of the Italian cities between the 1950s and 1970s. They were shaped and produced through a variety of different policies, as well as through the encounter between a plurality of actors and initiatives (private, public, semi-public…): from the scale of the playground – originated close to the condominium – to the medium-sized public park at the edge of the new residential sectors, from the neighborhood’s kindergartens and primary schools, to the community’s and sport centres. The article will focus on Turin and will briefly present four case studies showing two prevailing scales of intervention, where houses devoted to middle-class and new public facilities were negotiated, designed and built simultaneously. This paper brings to the light the result of two ongoing researches that investigate the residential architecture for the middle classes on the one hand, and the construction of public services and facilities in post-war Italy on the other: together, they aim, at contributing to the development of a more nuanced narrative of the forms and the phases of the urban growth in Italy since WWII.

Una città su misura. Servizi sociali e assetto urbano nella pubblicistica e nei congressi dell’Unione donne italiane (1960-64)

Since WWII women’s associations politically oriented played a fundamental role in shaping new forms of participation and new models of citizenship, where the gender demand represented the starting point for the request of civil rights for families, workers and individuals. The “women issue” overlapped in interesting ways with the “urban question”, mainly by the mean of the discourse on public services and urban facilities. This essay focuses on the Union of Italian women and on its dabates on the city within the years 1960-1964, dealing with several themes: housing and neighbourhoods, schools and leisure, public parks and planning standards.