The objectives of the individual module help to define the set of objectives of the entire course.
The workshop proposes design experimentation starting from the confrontation with some of the issues that characterise urban design today: the question of space, destruction, density, the identification of the resources indispensable to change and the agents that can produce it. The workshop will transmit technical knowledge from the perspective of looking at places as a reinvention of what surrounds us, innovating the operational and cultural schemes that contribute to defining the posture of the town planning architect. Students will configure the design proposal by reasoning, during the different transitions that characterise our time, on the possible transformative actions and confronting the complex governance of the factors that build the city.
The workshop proposes design experimentation starting from the confrontation with some of the issues that characterise urban design today: the question of space, destruction, density, the identification of the resources indispensable to change and the agents that can produce it. The workshop will transmit technical knowledge from the perspective of looking at places as a reinvention of what surrounds us, innovating the operational and cultural schemes that contribute to defining the posture of the town planning architect. Students will configure the design proposal by reasoning, during the different transitions that characterise our time, on the possible transformative actions and confronting the complex governance of the factors that build the city.
teacher profile teaching materials
The course therefore proposes to explore a different approach to urban design, based on the recognition of the material and immaterial stratifications that characterize places. Drawing on theoretical references spanning phenomenology, contemporary urban studies, and debates on heritage and problematic legacies, students will be encouraged to reflect on the project not only as a device of transformation or replacement, but also as a practice of listening, interpretation, and recognition of the meanings already embedded within urban contexts.
Particular attention will be devoted to the theme of urban and territorial heritage, understood as the ensemble of infrastructures, spaces, artifacts, and dispositifs that continue to produce effects in the present, even when the historical conditions that generated them have entered into crisis. Within this framework, the studio approaches the contemporary city as a complex field of relationships and stratifications, in which the project is called upon to engage with complexity rather than reduce it.
The course develops through theoretical lectures, readings and interpretations of urban contexts, seminar discussions, and design exercises. Students will be asked to develop critical interpretations and design proposals capable of engaging with the theme of reinhabiting, understood as the construction of new relationships between space, community, and heritage in the contemporary city.
Programme
The course “Reinhabiting the Urban” explores urban design and planning through a critical reflection on the contemporary condition of the city and on the very meaning of project intervention. For a long time, urbanism operated within a paradigm grounded in a strong transformative intentionality: existing conditions were interpreted as insufficient, incomplete, or problematic, while the project assumed the task of leading toward a supposedly better future condition. Today, however, the context within which urban design operates appears profoundly transformed. The contemporary city can no longer be understood as an available surface or as a tabula rasa, but rather as an environment saturated with infrastructures, heritage, traces, conflicts, desires, and forms of life sedimented over time.The course therefore proposes to explore a different approach to urban design, based on the recognition of the material and immaterial stratifications that characterize places. Drawing on theoretical references spanning phenomenology, contemporary urban studies, and debates on heritage and problematic legacies, students will be encouraged to reflect on the project not only as a device of transformation or replacement, but also as a practice of listening, interpretation, and recognition of the meanings already embedded within urban contexts.
Particular attention will be devoted to the theme of urban and territorial heritage, understood as the ensemble of infrastructures, spaces, artifacts, and dispositifs that continue to produce effects in the present, even when the historical conditions that generated them have entered into crisis. Within this framework, the studio approaches the contemporary city as a complex field of relationships and stratifications, in which the project is called upon to engage with complexity rather than reduce it.
The course develops through theoretical lectures, readings and interpretations of urban contexts, seminar discussions, and design exercises. Students will be asked to develop critical interpretations and design proposals capable of engaging with the theme of reinhabiting, understood as the construction of new relationships between space, community, and heritage in the contemporary city.
Type of evaluation
Assessment consists of an individual oral discussion with each student on the course contents and on the design project developed during the course.