Healthy Corridors for Inclusive Urban Regeneration

Urban Studies, 1994

The correlation between the quality of open spaces and quality of life in high-rise housing neighborhoods in contemporary urban-architectural and social frameworks has been confirmed by a series of multidisciplinary researches. Modern research indicates that in the process of revitalization, it is necessary to look at various aspects of the quality of open spaces in order to provide a more efficient degree of improvement. Creating adequate spatial conditions for the different types of activities of the daily spare time of tenants and the exercise of physical activity in the direction of improving psycho-physical health, achieving spatial-ambient values, as well as for encouraging good neighborly relations, communion, territoriality and sense of belonging, which are all determinants of the quality of life, can be managed by providing a certain level of quality open spaces. Bearing in mind that there are no unique criteria for the quality of open spaces in high -rise residential neighborhoods, the aim of this paper is to indicate the desirable characteristics of these spaces in accordance with the contemporary principles of urban design and practice in the process of their revitalization. Therefore, residential neighborhood Poptahof has been selected as a research platform that represents the good practice example of the revitalization of open spaces in line with identified criteria and quality aspects. These criteria can serve as a basis for further research of the modes of urban revitalization of open spaces, with the aim of improving the quality of life.

The review of policies, programs and funding systems of the European urban agenda evidences a global concern about the multidimensional problems and the dynamics of degradation suffered by many of the mono-functional social housing areas of the first urban peripheries and its serious effects on the rest of the city. There is a political and institutional interest to reduce social, economic and environmental conflicts of these areas in crisis. However, except on rare occasions when behind the Operation are vested interests, these rehabilitation projects are not planned within the framework of global strategies aimed to transform the entire city. As a result, cities are changing quickly blurring its limits, while renewed neighborhoods remain as isolated islands, urban and socially disconnected within the general scene of the city. In this context, it is appropriate evaluate new strategies to restore these degraded areas and seek formulas to cope with the challenge of integrating the revitalizing processes into the dynamics of the city. This paper is a reflection on the regeneration processes based on the Remodeling Neighborhoods Operation launched in the periphery of Madrid in order to identify strengths and weaknesses of the actuations led by local government, as a starting point to discuss about useful alternatives for similar experiences and mechanisms that seek successful outcomes for both quarters and cities. Overall, the neighborhoods selected to be remodeled were built hastily to accommodate the flood of people moving to the city with low quality standards and also concentrating social conflictive population, that drives to a starting critical situation ineffective treated by institutions. Therefore, these neighborhoods are subject of continuous degradation dynamics. The new infrastructure and urban development of Madrid have changed the position of these deprived areas that originally were located at outlying areas with accessibility and isolation problems, and now are well-connected neighborhoods but socially stigmatized. A neighbor of Fuencarral settlement describes this change just like this: "We were displaced outside the city and now we are standing over gold." The institutional action in these areas comes as a response to social tensions and protests of the organized citizens at the end of the dictatorship regime. As a result, the State sets up the Remodeling Operation and the necessary structures and legal basis to act in 28 slums. The Remodeling Operation began in the late 70's and concludes in the late 80's. Subsequently, other areas in similar conditions also require the same treatment, and the Remodeling was extended to other 8 suburbs, though some of them have at the moment no sign of remodeling activity. In these decades, the Operation has undergone several phases in which different problems have been detected, mainly due to execution times of each experience, housing tenure system and different interests between communities and institutions. Though in the first projects the communities engagement was great, in the current experiences the communities are less organized and have lost pressure capability. In this situation, the revitalization of these areas in a participatory manner and its integration with the rest of the city taking into account the identity of each neighborhood may be an interesting opportunity. For these communities is the chance to achieve quality levels of urban life, improve energy efficiency and connect with the dynamics of the city. Whilst for the cities means recovering the activities of bonded areas located at strategic points, reducing energy consumption and fostering sustainable urban development. Furthermore, this is a necessary debate in the current European scene, in which we can observe an increase in number of participatory community development experiences that have to cope with difficulties due to lack of interests and mechanisms to integrate them in the city strategies.

There is in post 1990 Romania an increased and uncontrolled growth of urban expansions. This growth appears as a phenomena that can no longer be denied and it seems that it got out of the administration's control. As phenomena observed during the 25 years from the fall of the Communist regime, we can summarize the following: the increased number of residential areas in the periurban areas of the cities, that got out of the local administration's control, heterogeneous in terms of morphology, that lack a structure that could have been offered by a master plan (sprawling areas); the phenomena of gentrification, observed in the residential areas of the historical centers, in the protection areas of the city centers or even in the neighborhoods built during Communism; the defunctionalisation and thus the devitalization of the historical centers with the apparition of the great commercial poles (the mall-isation phenomena); the phenomena of taking over any green space or urban interstices left in the existing master plans. The work of a group of doctoral researchers from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism from Cluj-Napoca is focusing on this problems: the definition of Eastern European sprawl in relation with the definitions already well known and accepted; the development of specific analytic research tools that would help understand " Romanian sprawl " , the way in which design principles like New Urbanism can help intervening on the Romanian Sprawl, the way public realm can be used as a tool in restructuring this newly developed areas or the way the image of local sprawl can become a binder of regional character. The conclusions of the research will suggest possible solutions for these areas in order to fulfil urbanity standards, functional hybridization (respecting the regulations), the (re)vitalization of community space trough performative or relational architecture etc.

Back to the Sense of the City: International Monograph Book

Once they adopted the sedentary lifestyle, humans set to building settlements which were to protect groups of families and give them the sense of belonging to a material and social community. The settlement unit which could be called a housing complex goes back thousands of years BC. The scale of problems related to housing environment grew considerably with the emergence and development of cities, yet truly distinctive quantitative and qualitative changes occurred in the early 20th century. Implementation of the programmatic assumptions of the Athens Charter resulted in the emergence of spatial and functional structures based on hierarchic dependence of components. The initial projects reflected the pursuit of a human-scale environment and the structural division into neighbourhood units. Undoubtedly, the second part of the 20th century brought about a change in the trends of development in cities. Large housing estates were abandoned in favour of a much greater diversity of housin...

2012

The aim of this paper is to define an approach to a methodological assessment of existing urban patterns that allows us to verify, from an analytical, comparative and critical scope, the return to the consolidated city as a necessary way of developing new urban fabric. After reconsidering the history of large-scale urban projects in Madrid, the design of the obsolete collective housing in the consolidated city has revealed the existing residential areas as an infrastructure potentially capable of absorbing the complexity of the unpredictable future. The solution does not fall on the design of a specific project for each building, but in defining a general project for the city that we inherited and for the city that we will bequeath. This approach is supported by an original methodology developed by GIVCO (Research Group in Collective Housing-Polytechnic University of Madrid). The research process goes from the typological to the urban scale, digging into the impact of expansion areas and reconstructing the urban process as a continuum, predicting its main layouts for the near future.

Procedia Engineering, 2016

Nowadays, one of the main concerns in the urban agenda of the European Union and Member States is how to adopt an integrated approach to urban challenges and needs of the consolidated city, in particular, to address the complex condition of multideprived neighbourhoods. Beyond the strategic integrated approaches based on economic interests perceived within the European Union, the disadvantage condition of multi-deprived areas requires an active and consistent implication of the diversity of urban players, including the affected communities themselves. This paper pursues to contribute to this urban challenge with a reflection about the social implications of massive remodelling or re-development operations of deprived localities in comparison with rehabilitation projects eluding the whole demolition-reconstruction processes. For this purpose, the social housing estates A, B and C of Fuencarral in Madrid are taken as reference case studies that represent an important lesson of the recent history of the City and the Remodelling Operation of neighbourhoods in Madrid. Fuencarral A and B units, built as temporal settlements in the late 60s, have undergone a massive remodelling intervention that has lasted more than expected; in fact, some residents complain that it is not yet concluded after more than two decades. While Fuencarral C, with somewhat higher standards, is a protected area on the General Urban Development Plan 1997 and declared as an Integrated Rehabilitation Zone (ZRI) in 2008.

2017

Between the years 2002 and 2012, the Department Architecture of the University of Ferrara has coordinated and participated in research field both in Europe than in the national context regarding the suburban regeneration. In specific, the Action COST C16 “Improving the quality of urban building envelopes” (20032007) the Action TU0701 “Improving the quality of Suburban Building stock” (2008-2012) and the national research project PRIN “Renovation, regeneration and valorization of social housing settlements built in the suburban areas in the second half of last century” are described. The scope of the reserches is to investigate, compare and disseminate common knowledge concerning methods, procedures and technologies for the renovation and revitalization of suburban housing settlements, the increasing of their value and the improvement of the safety and the quality of life of inhabitants. Improvement of suburban building performance includes the need for maintenance and proposals for ...

With the purpose of giving a useful contribution to the next webinar's discussion, and having also in mind several shared considerations, expressed in various forums in this last period, I tried to summarize here the personal reflections, developed in recent years and further focused. The pandemic impacts are accelerating a change of the existing urban scenarios, including those related to gentrification and densification. Gentrification Among the most important aspects of the exponential urbanization of recent years, especially the great metropolis, but not only, is the progressive gentrification process that means entire neighborhoods, that were once popular, are getting inhabited by a middle-upper class, with a consequent change of their original features. It is a complex physical, social, economic and cultural phenomenon for which a city district, generally a central area, once settled by working and low-income social classes , turns into a residential area for a richest category. So zones, that first housed traditional inhabitants and urban immigrants, are getting occupied by new residents or tourists, and the previous residents are driven to city's peripheral districts, often degraded.

We define the concept of urban rehabilitation, as well as the importance of the images in the knowledge of reality, in behavior and in the formation of the concept of town. Relates the development with human needs, the local power and the local planning. Describes the key aspects of a method for planning the rehabilitation of urban areas, and its fondaments, general phases and the objectives, content, method of implementation, the agents and the results for each phase.

A+BE TUDelft, 2021

This publication presents the study of urban transformation and opportunities for urban upgrading through the rehabilitation and recycling of neighbourhoods, exploring the past and present of the housing estates of the main Galician industrial cities in order to discover, on different scales, how the public housing projects built in the second half of the twentieth century were formed, how their urban integration process has taken shape, what the open spaces associated with public housing are like, and if they have served as a bridge between the public, the collective and the private, to end with recommendations that can help in participative processes of integral urban regeneration for better articulation, integration and urban cohesion of the open spaces included in the public project. The research proposes an alternative to urban development that avoids the need for new growth, the demographic abandonment of existing neighbourhoods, and their social and physical degradation. Housing estates with obsolete structures offer the greatest opportunities to rehabilitate and recycle open spaces and buildings based on the value of their intrinsic qualities, allowing for the introduction of new and efficient typologies in the city core. On a social level, the recycling and adaptive reuse of housing estates would improve the quality of the urban environment, the consolidation of civic networks and the strengthening of social cohesion. At the environmental level, this would reduce land use for real estate development, infrastructure construction and mobility needs, as well as waste production and energy consumption.