Fabio Bianconi

Regenerating Urban Spaces: A Brief Commentary on Green Infrastructures for Landscape Conservation

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 strategy for aesthetic improvement of the city, the case study provides a representative example, how greening the city may promote together biodiversity conservation and urban regeneration.

Codesign, Social Contracts, Environmental Citizenship. The Case Study of Umbrian Region’s Atlas of Objectives and Lake Trasimeno Landscape Contract

The research aims to introduce the regional strategy of co-design applied for the integrated governance on the political and public sphere. The battle to save traditional values today starts from knowledge and participation. The methodology presented intends to promote some models for sustainable and democratic development of social contract connected to environmental citizenship and co-design approach. In this strategy of Public and Private Partnership (PPP), the academic research is fundamental for reaching the standardization of the approaches to investigation and intervention and the Atlas of Objectives produced represents a contemporary tool to bring out relationships and define “routes” in compliance with the European guidelines, which are applied in some regional strategies. This guideline can be applied in the Landscape Contract, in particular the one of Lake Trasimeno, an agreement between citizens and administrations aimed at territorial governance and cohesion policy. It starts from a well-structured cognitive framework and it is finalized to the active government of the territory. The main goal is the involvement of both citizens and economic entities in joining a strategy, which aims to increase the sense of belonging. In that regards, it promotes the necessary social and cultural changes and it makes more efficient the productivity in terms of sustainable development of a homogeneous territorial area.

The Identity Landscape in the Cataloging of Scattered Assets in the Area of Amelia

A landscape is a place with peculiar characteristics, the result between men and nature interaction, which connotes it, both from the physical point of view and from the cultural perspective. The Umbrian countryside is teeming with historical and artistic references, still intact in their cultural value. The visitor immediately grasps this identity, this ancient history, but still alive and present, testifying in the stones and in the earth the experience of a rural and simple society. In order to document the conservation of these rural assets, the research has considered the drafting of descriptions, with meaningful pictures of the buildings, highlighting their characteristics of features and/or degradation. The cataloging of historical resources stands as a fundamental instrument for their restoration; it is a good opportunity to give a logical order to the vision of a landscape, able to connect information and create a systematic network of comparisons between common heritages.

Generative Education: Thinking by Modeling/Modeling by Thinking

Generative models change our way to think of architecture. We have tried to show to our students this changing of digital tools’ conceptualization, not only as a simplex extension of hand but rather a complex link between aesthetic and technique. The presented experience is part of the academic courses of “Drawing” and “Techniques of representation” held in the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Perugia (Italy). The aim was to challenge traditional paradigms: we have proposed to analyze ordinary objects, or groups of similar elements, and think by using models, with an holistic approach. We wanted to teach that an architectural project isn’t a particular artifact, but rather an idea structured by complex relations between parts and by certain transformations of parameters. We believe that if a designer understands that a common reality is so organized, he’ll be able to design architecture with the same approach. One of the most important concepts is that a variation of a parameter doesn’t destroy the model but only changes its aspect. Moreover, our capacity of pre-vision by drawing usually can’t explain every possibility. But by thinking in a “modeling way”, as Gaspar Monge pointed out in his descriptive geometry books, it is possible to go from “known to unknown”. Therefore the generative modeling is useful to understand the form and its morphogenesis, and in such-a-created model is possible find a tool of creativity and a source of inspiration. In particular, through the use of a generative software like Grasshopper for Rhinoceros, the results were models able to create different types of flowers, pastas, cheeses, pencils, marshmallows and so on, each category corresponding to just one algorithm. Afterward, we have explained that certain concepts of descriptive geometry could also be explained by generative modeling, showing a unitary morphogenesis of complex shapes and its application in descriptive geometry theorems. So we asked to think of architecture in such a way, with the result of a new vision of the project, like dynamic transformations of the shape of buildings, bridges, pavilions and so on. Variations of certain parameters that generate a renewed capacity of the architectural model.