The widespread poor quality of living that characterizes many cities and urbanization today is often closely linked to what lies outside the domestic space. On the one hand, the lack of common spaces in the neighborhoods, often reduced to mere parking spaces for cars, is oftenoverabundant and lacking in overall design and quality, as well as the lack of care and ordinary maintenance of the same. On the other hand, the lack of efficient collective integrated mobility services and other commons, when present, are inaccessible and detached from the surroundings. These are common situations in many Italian contexts, which are intensifiedwhere conditions of fragility (social, economic, environmental) are concentrated, and where spatial inequality and environmental vulnerability converge. These conditions are declined in different territories and ways but often have at their center the complex space of the infrastructures: roads, streets, cycle and pedestrian paths, car parks, bus and train stations, open spaces, squares, and abandoned-waste spaces (Lanzani et al., 2021).
The session intends to investigate the infrastructure’s space as the main background of everyday life and as an integral part of a strategic vision for the regeneration of cityscape. By reinterpreting the road as a “pervasive” (Secchi, 1989) infrastructure that can shape the quality of the environment and living, the discussion want emphasizes the great potential of these spaces to experiment with an overall socio-ecological transition of the territories.
What new factors can we introduce today about the image of the infrastructure’s space, or better, “the vision of man in his ‘natural’ context: the dark grey parterre, background of action, but also crossing, journey, metaphor of knowledge” (Zardini, 2003), fil rouge of the most consistent metropolitan transformations since the late 19th century industrial city evolution? This is the first seminar question that will be explored in depth.
The mobility space in the late 19th century represented the most significant technological change in cityscape since the introduction of the locomotive (Eco, 2012; Nifosì, 2024), revolutioning the way we move within the territory, profoundly influencing its conformation. Although the infrastructure and mobility space have played a predominant role in the development of cities throughout their history, roads, car parks, railways and their related spaces have been subject to few innovations, which have tended to be technological rather than spatial. In some cities, the footprint of the mobility network covers more than a third of the land. Surprisingly, this omnipresent network has received minimal attention since the 1950s (Joseph, 2015). In fact, some famous interpretative efforts in the literature of urban geography and sociology and urban planning and design refer to these two main functions of the street.
The first is the street as “public space” for people in the city, to observe, or lose oneself (Gehl, 1987), a space for meeting. The second meaning attributed to the road coming from history is linked to “motion” that is recalled in Lynch’s “channels of movement”.
By exploring these two “historical” concepts, the aim is to interpret the space of mobility ascomplex ecology.
Bibliography
- Eco, U. (2012, Eds.). L’Ottocento. Storia della civiltà europea. Encyclo Media Publisher.
- Gehl, J. (1987). Life Between Buildings-Using Public Space. New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold.
- Nifosì C., De Angelis F., Messa F., Gorrini A., Choubassi R. (2024), Coastal roads. Reshaping daily infrastructures for coastline adaptation, in TeMA Special Issue 3/2024 97-11.
- Lanzani, A., Longo, A., Renzoni, C. & Zanfi, F. (2021). Strade, parcheggi e spazi di risulta: ridisegno del suolo e benessere ambientale nelle aree urbane fragili. In Ricomporre i divari. Politiche e progetti territoriali contro le disuguaglianze e per la transizione ecologica, 271-283. Lavis, Il Mulino.
- Secchi B. (1989). Lo spessore della strada, in Casabella n.553–554, Milano.
- Joseph, E. (2015). Rethinking a lot. Cambridge, MIT Press.
- Zardini, M. (2003, Eds.). (a): Asfalto: il carattere della città. Milano, Electa.
