Papers by antonella contin
The result of these years of unprecedented urban growth has been the Fragmented city, a phenomeno... more The result of these years of unprecedented urban growth has been the Fragmented city, a phenomenon we have dealt with for a long time in our university research laboratory. Through Ortiz’s metro-matrix concept, this experience has allowed us to define a model applied to the context and able to determine a continuity between the islands of the metropolitan archipelago by linking together the grey and green infrastructures. The harmonization between the two infrastructures develops an interchange point, geographically and historically defined by the metro-matrix model, which elevates the scale of the local context, placing the new urban functions. Close to the nodal point articulating the territory of the metropolis, the green and grey infrastructures obtain an urban and architectural geographical skin (Levy Strauss, 1955; Varela, 1991) which is the architecture of the metropolis inside the central mega block within its context (1mx1km) and new dimension. This new metropolitan morph-type becomes the skin of the infrastructure backbone of the metropolitan territory and the place of the continuous relations with the rest of the cosmos or metropolitan archipelago.
Metropolitan management methodologies confronting new challenges: shaping rapid growth in a conte... more Metropolitan management methodologies confronting new challenges: shaping rapid growth in a context of informality, scarcity and misgovernment. Metropolitan architecture methodologies facing the new urban paradigm of the non optimal city. The term post-optimal city is used to recall a post-functionalist dimension of the unfolding (new) size, scale and technology in the city.
Theme: the research involves the transformation of the settlements, which are at the fringed edge of the metropolis (Dar es Salaam in this case), constantly changing, due to the fact that a huge number of migrants come there from the countryside, and characterized by a variable degree of informality. The area project falls within a new typology of formal-informal interface that we want develop as a gradient of formality. We present a study of a way to regulate the growth: an evolution in scale. We applied the Reticular Matrix Model System that is a development model rather than a formal model. It’s a study of a design method that allows us to describe and design urban phenomena related to the change of scale, which determines the mutation of types of morphologies of urban spaces and landscapes.
The project promotes a multidisciplinary, cooperative and inclusive framework for the sustainable... more The project promotes a multidisciplinary, cooperative and inclusive framework for the sustainable urban development of Cabo Delgado region in Mozambique. The promotion of a smart growth for the coastal region between Pemba and Palma requires an interpretation of the expectations related to the energy sector development and the increase of the tourist sector. Moreover, the fragile environmental conditions need the definition of a global strategic framework and innovative planning - designing tools. The integration among the productive, transformative sectors and the delivery and exchange functions (agro-food and energy) into a new metropolitan system between Palma and Pemba compels to rethink the identity of the local physical space, the global inclusion between rural and urban economy, the reduction and reconversion of energy consumption. Starting from an in-depth analysis of the region at the metropolitan, urban and local scale, the project will provide a territorial vision for an energy self-sustenance linked to the conservation of a common cultural and historical identity.
We want to develop why and how Madrid 1996-2016 plan is a model for the projects that are related... more We want to develop why and how Madrid 1996-2016 plan is a model for the projects that are related to the metropolitan cities and their contemporary explosive growth. We need a kind of renewed Humanism in the study of the metropolitan organism. We need to consider Metropolitan Architecture as an integrated space-time system. We need to claim back all public spaces as public goods. Especially those that Portugali defines as pervaded by a sense of placelessness. The anonymous spaces of the “usual repeated gestures”, the abandoned and neglected ones, the space in between the infrastructures for which we have to re-conceptualize a meaning and a name (now we only define them: green spaces…). It is now undeniable that a more systemic perspective constitutes the basis for such a definition: the metropolitan landscape, the built environment and the cultural heritage as a true Green Infrastructure available to be used at different times.
The result of these years of unprecedented urban growth has been the Fragmented city, a phenomeno... more The result of these years of unprecedented urban growth has been the Fragmented city, a phenomenon we have dealt with for a long time in our university research laboratory. Through Ortiz’s metro-matrix concept, this experience has allowed us to define a model applied to the context and able to determine a continuity between the islands of the metropolitan archipelago by linking together the grey and green infrastructures. The harmonization between the two infrastructures develops an interchange point, geographically and historically defined by the metro-matrix model, which elevates the scale of the local context, placing the new urban functions. Close to the nodal point articulating the territory of the metropolis, the green and grey infrastructures obtain an urban and architectural geographical skin (Levy Strauss, 1955; Varela, 1991) which is the architecture of the metropolis inside the central mega block within its context (1mx1km) and new dimension. This new metropolitan morph-type becomes the skin of the infrastructure backbone of the metropolitan territory and the place of the continuous relations with the rest of the cosmos or metropolitan archipelago.
Citizens are now able to produce cultural localized knowledge; ICT technologies can integrate dat... more Citizens are now able to produce cultural localized knowledge; ICT technologies can integrate data-sharing platforms into the spatial dynamics of cities. This can promote a sustainable enhancement of local communities through cooperative activities setting culture as growth-driver. The M.U.S.I.C. (Mediterranean Urban Sounds Interactive Culture) project promoted by the University of Tunis and Politecnico di Milano-DAStU (International Cooperation Lab and Measures and Scales of the Contemporary City Lab) aims at reinforcing the awareness of a shared regional culture in the Southern Mediterranean Region. The project gives structure to the relation among digital media as catalyst tools and urban regeneration as spatial rooting device, setting an innovative exportable cooperative strategy. The action plan applies sounds analysis to geo-localized user-generated content to extract patterns of perception of urban and rural spaces. A visualization platform archives and diffuses these data, working for synergies between formal and informal economies. The project helps to improve the responsiveness of urban systems to the cultural requests of citizens and customers. It reinforces the need of new professional figures and more structured relations among them. The digital platform, as engine of spatial regeneration for built heritage, fosters economies of scale determining a spatial rooting in specific urban or rural spaces suitable to host permanent or temporary, profitable or non-profit activities. The gathering of actors around specific nodes will transform them in Mediterranean antennas transmitting the sound of places for a cultural and economical exchange among people and countries. The economical balance is reached through an equilibrated management of profit and no-profit initiatives setting relations among stakeholders at various scales. A cultural sustainability framework could make the music industry able to sustain local emerging realities and to promote education.
Such a Big Event as Expo 2015 could be a propeller for some innovative way to build a learning de... more Such a Big Event as Expo 2015 could be a propeller for some innovative way to build a learning development framework for the metropolitan city, through a new mapping project. Thanks to the design of a device, conservative inhabitants and futurist new nomadic citizens will learn from the city and will return information to the city at integrated scales: a new hypothesis of territory readings and uses. Innovative approach The relationship between space, memory, and representation in the digital age has undergone a severe increase due to the process of representation, that is rooted into everyday's cultural experience: that is why the topography for the city exploration requires the development of methods, experiments and especially tools for the recoding of the territory, which do not make use only of the latest technologies, but tools that are able also to bring into being the relationship between the nomadic person who is traveling and the geography of the metropolitan place. The mapping desiring, is the breaking of a consolidation of places obtained through a psycho-cognitive alteration of the deconstructed space. To achieve this, the question is: what will remain of the image that we have established in our mind when we talk about a Metropolis? The goal is to query the space, not in search for something predestined, but drifting from the playful-exploration discovery of the geographical environment, a dowsing technique that investigates and explores the components of the landscape, raising energy flows which fall on the understanding of the territory, which can be mapped to represent the movements stratified in the space / time of the exploration: the way of our being into the desakota space, which will change the anthropological elementary signs of the local space. In fact, Images of the human being construct the metropolitan maps; the body is a kind of territory because it is the product of an identity, relational/emotional skills and biometric properties that are now computable through wearable technology applications.
Our research focuses on how cities balance both macro/micro-economic factors and their spatial st... more Our research focuses on how cities balance both macro/micro-economic factors and their spatial structure according to cultural factors: the underlying form of residential/public areas and landscapes. It discusses the relation between new settlement, activity and space and it takes into account the way different cultures are and how their activities require diverse demands on movement, new settlement of formality, gradients and co-presence. Finally we have to determine both the way how patterns of infrastructure/space integration influence the location of different settlements, classes and social groups in the city and how is possible to solve the pathology of housing and public realm estates. The spatial form needs to be understood as a contributing factor in forming the patterns of sustainable urban metabolism, integration or segregation in the city. The starting point of this work comes out from the necessity of defining the contemporary city within its territory, through a clarification of a new scale of intervention. The framework of our research coincides with the formal and structural dimensioning of the city territory. The need for a cultural "jump" is necessary in order to identify a range of elements and relations in the urban context, rather then simply upgrade the instruments of intervention and investigation. This means a better definition of the structural pattern and spine of this reality, so as to show the discontinuity occurring in the urban development and in the cultural awareness of such phenomena.
Our research focus at the metropolitan scale: the Geography space is the common ground of the phy... more Our research focus at the metropolitan scale: the Geography space is the common ground of the physical, economic and social cities. We have to build a paradigmatic model that would be a vision and an idea of the structure that can give form to the metropolitan growth. In urban development all social activities leave spatial and symbolical traces in the form of recursive patterns: how can these relate to a geographical and historical context or to a physical and spatial context. Those patterns are essential expression of the moment of development, under the influence of quite different social circumstances as well as how they relate to some historical city paradigm (megalopolis, megacity, metacity) or a new idea of global cosmopolitism.
Study of the social-economic-political development, through experimentations on the urban system ... more Study of the social-economic-political development, through experimentations on the urban system in relationship with the space consumption -quality space issues-linked to the growth phenomena towards the definition of the Net City. It is analyzed and acted: at the scale of urban region territory (geography, ground morphology, infrastructure systems); of urban system (morphology, urban frame and its history); of architecture (layer machine, "morphotype", landmark) through a metabolic approach (operations of: maintenance, substitution, transformation) which analyzes, interprets and expresses the urban biography to the various dimensional "sizes" (small > medium>large>big) between tension to the global and local identity acknowledgment. The research evidences the necessity of a terminological review, the concept of city "scale", which cannot be used as number of inhabitants, but its character is traceable in the potential of space uses related with people's time: space/time measures of the body actions; movements and city fields involved in the man acting, following a multiscale vision. The obsolescence of the urban system and the exponential growth of the action density, determine its saturation and the consequent loss of attraction, which is a structural problem also in terms of accessibility, attainability and definition of potential aggregation, towards a sustainability of the metabolic growth. Some instruments for a measuring of this saturation are: _analyses of the time planning; _ analysis of the city grain; _ analysis of the ground consumption because the city increase. Therefore is necessary a relationship between the scenes introduced by the several international best practices, differentiated but correlated, within the continuous evolution of the city size and biography, and about the infrastructural operations towards the Net scale, to avoid its decline. These thematic are framed, verified and corresponded through a real city case study objects in different cities and to the different scales : London, Madrid, Valencia, Milano, Palermo, Bari, Istambul. Methodologies of search and/or of design experimentation, is a reading, interpretation and planning of the ways of city growth related with the landscape, at the various city scales and towards an integrated and multidisciplinary comparison. It has like output the planning of new maps, through the definition of pointers of metabolic sustainability, which are the new "characters of the design plan", oriented in a space dimension, represented in signs, intended like potential meanings of a territory development hypothesis: the problem of the attraction.
... Consulenti: Michele Sbacchi - Dipartimento di Storia e Progetto nell'Architettur... more ... Consulenti: Michele Sbacchi - Dipartimento di Storia e Progetto nell'Architettura. ... Page 4. Canicattì Campagne abitate - Paesaggi d'arte a cura di Antonella Contin - Michele Sbacchi 3 Page 5. Canicattì ei Canicattinesi devono prendere decisioni per la Città, guardando al futuro. ...
Conference Presentations by antonella contin
Our research focuses on how cities balance both macro/micro-economic factors and their spatial st... more Our research focuses on how cities balance both macro/micro-economic factors and their spatial structure according to cultural factors: the underlying form of residential/public areas and landscapes. It discusses the relation between new settlement, activity and space and it takes into account the way different cultures are and how their activities require diverse demands on movement, new settlement of formality, gradients and co-presence. Finally we have to determine both the way how patterns of infrastructure/space integration influence the location of different settlements, classes and social groups in the city and how is possible to solve the pathology of housing and public realm estates. The spatial form needs to be understood as a contributing factor in forming the patterns of sustainable urban metabolism, integration or segregation in the city. The starting point of this work comes out from the necessity of defining the contemporary city within its territory, through a clarification of a new scale of intervention. The framework of our research coincides with the formal and structural dimensioning of the city territory. The need for a cultural "jump" is necessary in order to identify a range of elements and relations in the urban context, rather then simply upgrade the instruments of intervention and investigation. This means a better definition of the structural pattern and spine of this reality, so as to show the discontinuity occurring in the urban development and in the cultural awareness of such phenomena.
Our research focus at the metropolitan scale: the Geography space is the common ground of the phy... more Our research focus at the metropolitan scale: the Geography space is the common ground of the physical, economic and social cities. We have to build a paradigmatic model that would be a vision and an idea of the structure that can give form to the metropolitan growth. In urban development all social activities leave spatial and symbolical traces in the form of recursive patterns: how can these relate to a geographical and historical context or to a physical and spatial context. Those patterns are essential expression of the moment of development, under the influence of quite different social circumstances as well as how they relate to some historical city paradigm (megalopolis, megacity, metacity) or a new idea of global cosmopolitism.
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Papers by antonella contin
Theme: the research involves the transformation of the settlements, which are at the fringed edge of the metropolis (Dar es Salaam in this case), constantly changing, due to the fact that a huge number of migrants come there from the countryside, and characterized by a variable degree of informality. The area project falls within a new typology of formal-informal interface that we want develop as a gradient of formality. We present a study of a way to regulate the growth: an evolution in scale. We applied the Reticular Matrix Model System that is a development model rather than a formal model. It’s a study of a design method that allows us to describe and design urban phenomena related to the change of scale, which determines the mutation of types of morphologies of urban spaces and landscapes.
Conference Presentations by antonella contin
Theme: the research involves the transformation of the settlements, which are at the fringed edge of the metropolis (Dar es Salaam in this case), constantly changing, due to the fact that a huge number of migrants come there from the countryside, and characterized by a variable degree of informality. The area project falls within a new typology of formal-informal interface that we want develop as a gradient of formality. We present a study of a way to regulate the growth: an evolution in scale. We applied the Reticular Matrix Model System that is a development model rather than a formal model. It’s a study of a design method that allows us to describe and design urban phenomena related to the change of scale, which determines the mutation of types of morphologies of urban spaces and landscapes.