Downtime City Beauty

Project

267961

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Submitted

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NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS RISING STARS : concepts or ideas submitted by young talents (aged 30 or less)

Project title

Downtime City Beauty

Full concept/idea title

Description

Man-made spaces regeneration must result from complex processes. Thanks to specific ecological solutions, which arise between bureaucratic waiting times and the dynamics of construction site management, it is possible to create spaces where urban development coexists with natural processes. We propose a new solution for the creation of ecosystems in unresolved spaces in cities, which improves the quality of the areas, setting an example for the management of transformation of construction sites.

Where is your concept/idea being developed or intended to be implemented in the EU?

Please provide a summary of your concept/ idea

The word ‘sustainability’ evokes a set of simplistic ideas about recycling, renewable energy and nature, which is reductive given the complexity of the term. The subject is often trivialised, despite the fact that it is a major issue for the future. Environmental protection has a privileged place in political and social debate. However, interventions cannot be limited to the preservation of natural ecosystems, but require effective regeneration of man-made spaces. This regeneration must be the result of slow processes and complex work, in which every aspect of natural and human interaction is considered. The ideal places for these design experiments are those unresolved spaces in cities, rich in their potential. In these "non-places" it is evident how natural elements are able to quickly regain possession of spaces that were once man-made. Nature in these cases must be efficiently encouraged to regain those places that are now in a state of expectation. We refer to those as Islands. An island is an excluded lot, enclosed by walls and still in its time. The different temporalities that play a role in the city processes, allow those islands to come into being. An island is a space where nature and human activities are stationary: the “waiting” spaces that had a stop of time passing, because of political, economic or bureaucratic reasons. In this concept we propose an intelligent solution for the creation of ecosystems, which not only improves the quality of the intervention areas, but also sets an example for the management of transformation or construction areas. Through new construction site management and the integration of landscape and construction processes, significant results can be achieved in improving soil quality, environment valuation and pollutant absorption. By creating a model that can be repeated at several scales, there will be the victory of ecological design for a more sustainable, liveable and natural future.

Please give information about the key objectives of your concept/idea in terms of sustainability and how these would be met

The idea of sustainability that is being conveyed today is only a palliative towards an apparently more ethical development. Waving slogans about caring for the biosphere and protecting future generations will not solve the problem of compatibility between development and sustainability. What is missing is a dialectical agreement between the human living environment and ecosystems, especially in the cities. Now more than ever, we really need to understand that without negotiation with the environment, we are destined to defeat. Today, the destructive capacity of anthropisation is so damaging to the ecosystem that it is on a par with a catastrophic natural phenomenon. The need for a change of trend, towards a more positive model, is essential, and any hypothesis on a change of attitude in the future must be realistic and feasible in the short term. The creation of a system that functions by adapting itself to both the constant flows of time and the unpredictability of decisions subject to the 'whims' of an unstable economy and the frequent changes in municipal decisions offers answers not only to environmental dilemmas, but also to the serious problem of the unfinished. This system must combine the need for comfortable spaces suitable for development to a design with nature. The project today is seen as a form of domination, of lines, borders, tracks, movements and designed spaces; cities grow and live on these paradigms, deteriorating the world with their aggressive strides against the wild. Our proposal to reuse and renovate disused spaces aims to create new parameters for shaping the modern city. Integrating natural processes into the creation of areas in the urban context brings back the 'naturalness' necessary for the sustainability of the man-made environment in the systems of the World. The synergy of the human and the natural temporalities is imperative to define how this symbiotic relationship should develop to define a better urban environment.

Please give information about the key objectives of your concept/idea in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience beyond functionality and how these would be met

"Beauty will save the world" said Dostoevsky, because it is able to inspire the best, to connect us to each other, to arouse positive aspirations for the good and the true. Beauty is moral, it is capable of transmitting values, so it is necessary and important that it should be included in the ecological agenda, assuming the same importance as the three axioms of sustainability: ecology, equity, economy. The tragic situation in which the world finds itself today forces us to consider the future carefully. Environmental ethics will have to weigh up in concrete terms what is morally acceptable to do or not to do with the environment, so the discussion will have to reach every individual, regardless of background and culture. It is only through the sharing of sustainable beauty that this concept can develop. The beauty we are talking about is what allows us to expand our knowledge through experience. The attitude of respect for the environment can be stimulated through aesthetics. New knowledge about nature has enabled us to understand that Man is nothing more than an evolved animal, part of the biotic community. This understanding allows an effective change in the preferences of individuals. A profound behavioural change, not one dictated by some sort of intellectual entertainment or passing fashion. Beauty is a powerful means of communication; education in beauty can, more than many other interventions, shake the collective conscience. The question that arises after this reflection is whether the experience of landscape can actually interfere with the collective desire to experience new urban realities, new configurations of a design nature. If this approach does not turn out to be just a fantasy, but actually brings about changes in social living, then the importance of landscape architects would become clear, as would the need to broaden the very concept of aesthetics in professionals, transforming the ideals of formal composition into a new ethical-aesthetic.

Please give information about the key objectives of your concept/idea in terms of inclusion and how these would be been met

Natural processes are refractory to human presence. In our case, the isolated space allows an extremely specific consideration of how to restart useful ecological transformations. We seek the isolated place, precisely in awareness of the fact that nature needs distance from man in order to proliferate. However, such detachment seems seemingly impossible in the dynamism of cities. It is unreal to think that human activity will cease. The economic process needs every available metre of the urban. Renaturalisation is only acceptable as long as it does not unduly affect daily life. The reality is that we are only to a certain extent prepared to accept wilderness as such, as an actual presence in our daily lives. So how do we resolve this impasse? The unfinished building sites, the unfinished, the residues, are the spaces we must necessarily turn to in this "near-distance" synergy. They are the non-places for tomorrow, integrated but detached, stationary but moving, temporal and spatial paradoxes in which to act far away but close to the community. Whether for political, bureaucratic or economic reasons, residual spaces are born and die every day, they are part of the flow of human time, but they are still detached from it. They allow for the creation of an incredible variety of heterotopias, connected and separate at the same time; an archipelago of experiments in which to try to bring back to life dead soils, unhealthy environments, strips of landscape left at the mercy of time. The natural process must be encouraged, so that by the time these heterotopias rejoin the productive processes of the city, none of that still time will have been wasted. Every second will be offered to re-enrich the soil, to give love back to the earth, to compensate for some of the damage that has been done so far. With a view to their ecological reuse, the residues will be transformed from decaying spaces into emeralds, set among the intricate patterns of streets and buildings.

Please explain the innovative character of your concept/ idea

The impenetrable places, temporarily unsuitable for living in, even though they are within the city that gives rise to all stories, are the canvas on which to create this new picture. Only in these places do the two temporalities have the possibility of combining in a mutualism capable of representing this relationship in the concrete. The foundation expressed by this project is based on this concept. The building site time of which we speak is crucial, in which there is the possibility of inserting new natural processes. Soil, water and air need time to regenerate, time away from human dynamics. Soil restoration will take place through targeted plant cycles, which are possible as long as the construction site remains hidden from the world. We propose a conceptual inversion of the simple set-up of the construction site. The different scanning of the construction phases will allow something exceptional to take place: the re-blooming of the soil instead of the usual drying out of it caused by construction. The nature we have been talking about obviously requires monitoring, causing an additional expense to project execution. However, this represents a minimal loss, when balanced against the benefits obtained from the proposed programming. It is absurd to think that many of today's projects that are classified as ecological, are in fact, more impactful and costly than many traditional building systems. Think for example of the disproportionate displacement of soil, agricultural expropriations, which are almost ecologically useless or the 'green' interventions to mitigate the impact of the widespread use of concrete. What happens before and after the finished product is absolutely central in defining how sustainable an object really is. We therefore find it foolish to exclude from the preliminary design all those elements necessary for the result to be truly ecologically useful. What is needed for this process is simply the use of time that has not been used so far.

Please detail the plans you have for the further development, promotion and/or implementation of your concept/idea, with a particular attention to the initiatives to be taken before May 2022

The 'Downtime City Beauty' project is a conceptually simple, intuitive proposal, an achievable utopia for a realistically more sustainable metropolis. Regeneration and renewal of the residues of cities is possible thanks to a judicious organisation of ‘downtime’. The encounter between ecological processes and urban evolution flourishes among the waiting moments of the cities, where the state of neglect crystallises the changes of the metropolis, giving precious moments to a spontaneous renaturalisation. The process will adapt to the places, which regardless of the initial premises will benefit from such an intervention. In the case of an already started intervention, this process will fit into the construction site timeframe, allowing an improvement of the environmental quality and a possible intelligent integration of the design related to the future creation of a green area. Landscape issues that are normally put on the back burner in the project design will be seamlessly blended into the construction and design phases. The technical criteria will be established on a case-by-case basis, but the strategic intervention phases will follow specific guidelines, which firstly foresee preliminary actions of soil restoration for a correct start of the natural processes (removal of asphalt areas, ploughing, etc.), a second phase of planting and seeding (the invasion of pioneer species is not suggested here, but the well-considered integration of useful species), followed by careful maintenance and monitoring of the areas, until the final project is reached, with a final re-use of the area. The project presented in this paper thus lays the foundations for broader research that goes beyond the limits of regional and national borders. It advocates a model that strongly proposes the power of a priori natural regeneration processes in forgotten places in our society. The victory of ecological design for a more sustainable, liveable and natural future.

By ticking this box, you declare that all the information provided in this form is factually correct, that the proposed concept/idea has not been proposed for the New European Bauhaus Rising Stars Awards more than once in the same category.