Postcards from productive territories: factory cities

#4 Turin

Torino è considerata la company town più importante in Italia. Una città in cui l’attività produttiva di una sola impresa ha trainato una crescita vertiginosa della popolazione: da 700.000 a oltre un milione di abitanti nel decennio 70-80, con conseguente ipersaturazione del suolo e rapidissime urbanizzazioni. Oggi Torino si confronta con il lascito imponente della città fordista e con la necessità di emanciparsi da quel modello.

Postcards from productive territories: productive platforms

Instead of getting stuck in European shocking crisis, contemporary forms of production rather redefine the role of territory. The hypothesis carried out here is that an acute gaze at contemporary spaces of production could describe the territories of a different Europe. A selection of images and considerations (likewise postcards) from nine case-studies is a first step of an ongoing research on territory and economy.

Le case che siamo

Today the issue of the house presents itself as an open question, it provides the impression of been known for its effective proximity and for all the studies undertaken in the past about forms and ways of living and for the importance that it has had within the modern tradition of architecture.

Feminism yet? Not only

Paul Ginsborg and Sergio Labate propose a classical view to read the crisis of politics. A view with the passions at the center. We could say that is the feminist literature’s  legacy of the last decades of the twentieth century. But is not limited to this. It is useful to rethink not only the political crisis, but also the territories one and its project.

European Territories

Below some schematic notes for the construction of a research project on European territories. The notes were discussed in an internal seminar, at Politecnico di Torino, on July 19.

Exclusion in Turin. Dwelling as social inclusion condition

“Poverty, feminine noun, singular. Errata corrige. Poverty, feminine noun, plural.” The 2015 Caritas Report about poverty in Italy starts like this. In recent years a dramatic increase of Italian and foreign workers has been measured, who have used up any type of social safety net, including the family network. That is totally new for Italy. The State, forced by the European spending review, cuts the social services and delegates to the family, which, at the mercy of the crisis and unsupported, is no longer able to support the weakest links within it.

Urban Age “Shaping Cities” conference. The most authoritative interdisciplinary conference on global urbanism. Maybe

“Over 40 speakers from 25 cities and 5 countries gathered at the URBAN AGE ‘Shaping Cities’ conference hosted by La Biennale di Venezia to debate one of the most pressing problems of the 21st century: How are cities shaped? By whom and for whom?  How are the conflicts of our increasingly urban age – inequality, climate change, urban growth and expansion, informality, democratic representation and urban stewardship – experienced and lived by the majority of urban dwellers? And, what can we do to make cities more tolerant, adaptable and sustainable?”

Never getting rid of it

At the end of the ‘50s a social attempt of “etudier la banlieu” made by Italian Catholics. Much before Ilses, American counterculture influences and Leftist politics. Periphery considered as an experimental ground. Seventy years later: peripheries, again. Still a ground, still experimentation, still the place of public actions. Never rid of it. Unless at least a new conceptualization, if possible.

Recognition Urbanism

The Floating Piers by Christo at Iseo Lake and Parasite2.0 installation in Rome for Yap MAXXI are inadvertently two projects for public space which put into question the abused and overhyped issue of what designing in peripheric territories means. From one side the three-kilometres runway clad in bright yellow fabric is a form of “Anticipatory Architecture”, in the sense of Price magnets. From the other side Parasite2.0 installation defines a “Recognition Urbanism” which aims to understand urban fractures and discontinuities as the real front to report from.

Traverser la ville fragile #2

The Urban Design Atelier of the Architecture Bachelor third year reflected on Turin investigating seven traversées throughout the project. The results of such an exercise are sintetically presented here with a short description and selected images of the case studied which evoke some crucial issues. At the foundation of this work is a manifesto which is here summed.