Paraphrasing the thought of Allan B. Jacobs (1993), it is possible to say that the street is the framework that shapes urban experience and architecture. Indeed, streets have always played a primary role in architectural design since they both determine the form of a city and the urban life that takes place there. However, with the advent of the Modern Movement and the automobile, streets have been progressively reduced to mere technological infrastructure and designed following merely engineering and functional logic. Once places of social interaction, collective identity, and multifunctional spaces, they have gradually become only traffic corridors.
Today, due to the pressures of climate change and the rising demand for social spaces, the street once again stands out as the key site for implementing design actions in public space. In response to the needs for multifunctionality and regeneration (rather than expansion), shared spaces appear as particularly paradigmatic cases where the technical demands of mobility and the needs of places require particular forms of balance. In the shared spaces, the street is redesigned as a multidimensional and multifunctional place for which the landscape architecture is extremely crucial to proactively contribute to the rebalancing between the needs of mobility, sociality, and climate resilience.
Starting from these premises, the study aims to explore how ground design and design actions specific to landscape architecture can be used in the creation of shared spaces. The research uses cases of redesigning shared spaces, within existing urban environments, where the street is viewed as a connective and porous area, and as part of a dense system of spatial, ecological, and social relationships, rather than just a simple channel for movement.
Bibliography
- Capuano, A. (2020). Streetscape. Strade vitali, reti della mobilità sostenibile, vie verdi. Macerata: Quodlibet.
- Jacobs, A. B. (1993). Great streets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Alonzo, É. (2018). L’architecture de la voie: Histoire et théories. Marseille: Éditions Parenthèses.
