Symbiotic architecture in suburbs

2021

The urban growth, its continuous use of land and the associated problem of soil sealing force urban expansions to search for a sustainable densification. The paper attempts to explore and compare the urban conditions' growth on the fringes of two cities in Asia and Europe-Shenzhen and Vienna-as two opposite realities defining different strategies to control the urban expansion: while Shenzhen use the verticality to create new space, Vienna works on the horizontality and the regeneration, generating a neighbor's contiguity in the urban areas. The paper discusses and illustrates the two possibilities for dense built environments-horizontality and verticality in the metropolitan form-, as opposite yet possible strategies to achieve dense built environments qualifying urban spaces, infrastructures, buildings. To this aim Hong Kong, and Vienna are compared, to understand differences and attempt at responding to the central research question: Is it possible to identify an optimal urban form? Buildings' and neighborhood's typologies have been observed to aim at this understanding. Even though general conclusions cannot be drawn from specific case studies, is the authors' considered opinion that urban textures in the built environments are very much connected with and their successful evolution depends on the strict relation with humans and their activities (working, living, entertaining and dwelling). In this context, appropriate strategies for urban densification, in their different forms, might represent an effective path to meet the new conflicting challenges of sustainability and rapid urban growth.

Citeseer

The suburban development patterns of the last decades are the results of explosive growth governed by a virtually unquestioning application of rationalist codes and conventions. Each suburb has been created as a single unit, usually unrelated not just to others at its borders but particularly to the larger urban structure and its morphological rules. The result is a uniform architecture used in any context, searching for original expression only on the facades, if at all. The idea of public spaces as the basic element of the urban fabric, exactly the opposite of traditional town planning and civic values, has been lost. In this paper, after a brief assessment of the relation between urban planning and architecture, which appears to have been neglected not just in down-to-earth urban development but even in the works of the international stars of architecture, we have attempted to outline the principal themes of urban regeneration. We then elaborate some possible strategies for a renewed relationship between architecture and urban planning in the suburbs.

Proceedings of REHAB 2015 - 2nd International Conference on Preservation, Maintenance and Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings and Structures, 2015

Processes of increase in urban population have always been characterized by an alternation of phases in which densification of existing urban fabric prevailed, with other in which the prevalent phenomenon was urban expansion. Phases of density increase are related to physical constraints or economic-political issues. Expansion prevails in periods in which constraints disappear. In recent decades, the housing bubble has fostered the so-called urban sprawl, which irreversibly subtracts room for agriculture and natural environment. The goal of sustainability imposes to hold down land consumption. Nevertheless, evolution of needs and changes in activities require adequate spaces. This paper proposes the use of symbiotic architecture to requalify and rationally densify urban fabric: the possibility to create new built volumes in already-urbanized areas prevents the creation of new infrastructure, allowing to allocate resources to the redevelopment of existing ones; the increase of building density consent neighbourhoods to reach a critical mass of inhabitants allowing the establishment of new services. Proposed solutions cannot be regulated by general rules; they should be governed by specific urban plans based on the study of the anthropic load on existing infrastructures and on the protection of already saturated areas from property speculation.

The main trouble for a big city - as a megalopolis - is the disintegration of the traditional Forma Urbis idea and of the urban identity. Even if in the US metropolis is characterized by exasperated serial iteration, made in this way in just 3 centuries, is still possible to recognize the necessary relationship between different territory parts and it’s still clear the dialectic between buildings and countryside, between downtown and periphery, between housing and production area. While in new realities everything is uncontrolled and often reduced to shapeless heap of built up. The concentration of millions of inhabitants, as a result of an extreme process of urbanization producing an amplified confusion of urban spaces, is causing a new and unexpected level of use the area and the downfall of every social equilibrium. This kind of places are ruled by the indifference of the whole hierarchy built and lack an order well-balanced between housing, Tertiary’s sector areas, commercial areas, production areas in all urban space scales possible, as is made in the best tradition of the city (in metropolis too). This space is assuming the paradoxical “a priori shape” aspect and seems in lot of its parts equivalent and homogeneous. New icons of representation, the so-called “containers”, are accidentally put into the city, as effort to ri-polarize it. These are complex urban situations and architectures that seem to evocate today the fast dynamism condition, typical in the new millennium, showing ephemeral dimension and communicate the idea of transparency, lightly and movement. The courses “Typological and Morphological Characters of Architecture ” and “Architectural Design”, in the Department dICAR, Polytechnic in Bari, left to the writer, are focused on the research on the evolutionary process that recalls, generally, the urban complexity and also to spread the necessary knowledge to understanding urban development. Moreover the ways that urban organism shows itself, with its contradictions, considered in a conceptual "shape", are the beginning of the planning thinking. This attitude, especially reported to the complex urban situations, express our capacity of being able to be active in our epoch, through a critical and not parasitic exercise breaking with the past but in continuity with what has been historically transmitted and inherited.

Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography, 2011

Our paper suggests that changes of the inner urban built form could be explained as a result of a process of self-organized criticality. Similar to the general behaviour of such kind of a system, urban built form grows discretely up to a point in which new additions could occur both in the boundaries and in inner areas. Once reached this critical point, the urban system stays around it, combining outer and inner growth. While outer growth is quantitative and does not modify the system s structure, inner growth is qualitative as well as quantitative and can transform urban centrality. Replacement of old structures by new ones always occurs with extraordinary capital concentration, developing new polarization inside the urban fabric. The hypothesis is tested through the comparative evolution of different land, built form and location values within a period of continuous urban growth. Comparative indicator values are obtained by simplified simulation Cet article explore la possibilité d'expliquer les changements de forme construite urbaine comme le résultat d'un processus d auto-organisation critique (AOC). Pour le comportement observé dans ce type de systèmes, la croissance urbaine se fait par addition successive discrète de nouvelles formes construites sur les bords, à un point où de nouveaux bâtiments peuvent se produire aussi bien au bord comme à l'intérieur. En ayant atteint ce point, les nouvelles additions se produisent de façon combinée à la périphérie et à l'intérieur du tissu urbain. Alors que la croissance dans la périphérie est de nature quantitative et ne modifie pas la structure du système, la croissance interne est qualitative et peut modifier la centralité urbaine. Des remplacements de vieilles par de nouvelles structures se produisent toujours avec une concentration extraordinaire de capital, en développant une nouvelle polarisation dans la ville. Ces changements structurels seraient comparables à des changements catastrophiques caractéristiques des Systèmes d AOC. L hypothèse est testée à travers l évolution comparative des valeurs de la terre et des zones urbaines dans le cadre de la croissance urbaine. Le suivi du processus se fait par des indicateurs comparatifs extraits par simulation de la dynamique socio-spatiale.

2016

Today, it is necessary to be thrifty for its planet, on one hand the space being a rare, non-renewable resource, and on the other hand the ecological, economic and social cost of the urban sprawl. It is commonly asserted that the promotion of a more compact and dense city has a positive effect in terms of public costs of investment, functioning and costs for the citizens and the users of the city. It is clear that the modes of urban development management have to evolve profoundly, in particular towards a densification favorable to the raising of the urban quality through an ideal urban density on the scale of the individual housing estate. The lot as an individual housing estate was adopted as an alternative development model to the collective housing, thought in an anthropocentric perspective to emerge as a quality model where the density plays an important role, by being included in operations of a global coherence, in an optimal organization without forgetting the main importanc...

The Sustainable City VII, 2012

The suburbs of modern cities have become key elements in the scenarios of ever changing cities: once considered problem areas, they are now defined as important components for a general urban redevelopment in planning projects. The issue of suburbs is today ever present in the processes of strategic urban planning: they are considered as areas of integrated transformation, ranging from the landscape and cultural heritage enhancement to buildings retrofitting interventions, up to an economical uplift and to an improvement of the infrastructural systems. The most important Italian case studies and the conditions of the suburban areas in modern cities (in disrepair, or interested by upgrading processes) have identified some of the prevailing critical aspects of urban planning carried out to date. This paper proposes the analysis of one case study, the Pilastro neighborhood, a significant example of a social housing high density settlement, located in the outskirts of Bologna (IT). This district is an imposing housing estate, chosen for its representation of the social housing heritage in Italy. This paper highlights the technical, functional and social factors the level of quality of the settlement depends on, as well as the phenomena of social unease it resulted in. It also highlights some elements that may be considered as an obstacle against improvement measures. Architectural and social quality are the two elements to be aimed for, for a correct strategy of redevelopment and regeneration of the Pilastro neighborhood.

WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment, 2015

The last century's urban-development objective is no longer pertinent. Yet our cities must continue to grow, but, above all, the quality of life of its inhabitants must be improved by reducing the ecological footprint, which in many cases is unsustainable. In the ongoing search for guidelines and strategic intervention, the need for the re-densification and the restoration/completion of a degraded urban fabric has emerged at various levels. The restoration of existing heritage and the building densification are fundamental actions for urban enhancement and requalification whose raison d'être is the reduction in land consumption. An INA Casa residential district built in 1958 in Trento comprising a series of buildings, with a variety of floor areas, has been analysed from this standpoint. It has emerged that, notwithstanding design proposals that would have made the district fully functional, some indispensible infrastructures were never built. The analysis of the district has produced a qualitative cognitive map that addresses areas of intervention (from the technological and structural to environmental design).

2015

The fundamental differences between the suburbs and the city centre that I would like to point out concern the pace of life and the intensity of urban development. Certainly, these differ‐ ences are not absolute but are rather relative, as they are defined in relation to the surrounding neighbourhood that serves as a reference for self ‐determination. A suburb has some small‐ ‐town traits, but its close location to the city prevents it from becoming a local centre. The same concerns the architecture whose intensity is, after all, a consequence of the increasing intensity in other aspects of life, the differentiation of sources of people’s income, the demand for services, trade contacts, etc. Its incompleteness, imperfection, slower pace and focus on an unattained and unattainable ideal can make one see in the suburb as a theoretically extremely promising area. Indeed, its promise lies in this aspect of failure, incompleteness and fragmen‐ tation — which is long lasting and relativel...