Luciano Pia, "25 Verde", Torino, 2007-2012. Image: www.lucianopia.it
Our towns are the portrayal of our ways
of life, habits, culture and social relations.
We live in urban , suburban, rural and
alpine environments that we built through history, as history passed
by, adapting the built-up areas to our needs and technological
development. We have adapted the environment to those different
visions of society we have conceived in the centuries; the way we
move, by cars, trains, ships or planes has deeply transformed the
landscape with roads, railways, harbours and airports.
Commerce has shifted from small shops
to big surfaces transforming the commercial network of our
towns by removing the nearby points of sale which were often
located not far from the place where products were made, in favour of
a more impersonal commerce, in areas at the edge of towns , in
order to satisfy the need for large parking lots for many people and
goods which are essential to shopping centres.
A change in the producing system and
the ways we manifacture and exchange goods, informations, knowledge
and culture has widely modified the image of our towns.
Towns and more in general all the built
environment do represent who we are, what we think, our values and
ambitions: they are the image we have about our present time.
If we analyze the different ways
of building towns through time and think at the
transformations they have undertaken, we see that they
follow the changing ways of thinking life and therefore they
adapt to new usages and customs: the major radical changes
( from handicraft to industry, for example) replaced and wiped out
the former dwellings.
When we are asked to develop a urban
project, we analyze the build-up areas to get information on our way
of life, dwelling models and economic development, there we live and
are part of it, so it is difficult to have both a general and total
vision, while a distance in time would certainly help.
The designers of contemporary
cities know that any planning choice at any scale has correlated
effects on all activities and functions that will occur eversince.
If we compare the old Medieval towns
which were entranced for reasons of defence and control to the
Renaissance towns open to arts, research and technical
developments, we can learn a lot about the ways of life that were
carried on because of totally different urban spaces . They
persecuted similar basic aims but both the urban systems
offered to their inhabitants different opportunities of development
and perception of the present and future.
If we compare a town with a density of
1 mq/mq, I am thinking to Renaissance towns, to a town with a
density of 10mq/mq like most of today's vertical towns, we know that
different conditions made it possible and the result is a way
of inhabiting towns which in its turn influences people's life.
Because of the complexity of our
present time, it is getting more and more difficult to project our
living space. Nevertheless, we feel the
responsability for trying to correct all those glaring mistakes
which are due to a lack of a forward -thinking planning, in
order to build up areas according to our expectations and future
needs.
For these reasons , when we draw a
masterplan indipendently from its extension and formulation, we are
carrying out a task that will deeply condition the future development
of the area. From the way of organizing functions depends everything
will grow in that context, for example services and their quality,
people’s interplay and life quality.
Our cultural models and the vision we
have of our society, interactions among people and among people and
Institutions is converted into an image of town, in its local and
volumetric organization that is what we expect from a plan of urban
development.
Since we know that the living space
affects thoughts and behaviors, then the masterplan is one of the
main elements in the development of our society and sets the
fundamentals of wellness and life quality.
The organization of built-up areas
shows our way of life and behaviours, leeds choices and limits
possibilities.
The masterplan gives a shape to towns
and a framework to people’s interactions, while the image we give
to our buildings acts as an intermediary between ourselves and the
others: the masterplan represents the image of society as a whole
but our image as individuals is given by the “skin” , once
called façade, of our buildings.
We understand other people mostly by
the way they present themselves and by their behaviours , similarly
the “skin”of the buildings tells about both the designers and
developers of those buildings and their users.
We immediatly associate a façade to a
specific use of the space which means to precise social and economic
circumstances, cultural attitudes and trends.
The arrangement of the façades
witnesses the sensitivity and attention to a sustainable development
or to speculative choices. Today we are all able to design efficient
buildings that contribute to a general improvement of our habitat,
but there are often heavy economic restrictions which endanger the
quality and performance of the buildings.
The built-up areas are a mix of
buildings which are often private and inscribing a private place
behind an external “skin” which marks the boundary between what
is private and what is public so the image of public places is
largely featured by the skin of private buildings.
The quality of our towns is made by the
total of the different ways of life of the people whose buildings
overlook public spaces such as squares, museums, libraries, parks……
Our communities are the sum of each
personality, similarly a urban environment is the sum of the images
of the ways its inhabitants live.
It is necessary to deploy all our
knowledge and planning skills to project urbanized places in
coherence to a sustainable development and able to meet those
requirements which depend on the values embodied in the society we
are aiming at.
Luciano Pia
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