1. Quadro teorico e storico
1.1. La crisi urbana e l'utopia modernista
1.2. Il mito del fallimento del modernismo
1.3. Decostruire il mito del fallimento del modernismo
1.4. La varietà e complessità dell'edilizia pubblica modernista
1.5. L'eredità dell'edilizia pubblica modernista
2. La vita quotidiana nei quartieri del modernismo: analisi empirica
3. Rilanciare i quartieri del modernismo: un'agenda integrata di policy
4. Politiche spaziali: lo sviluppo di un masterplan
Prima lezione - La crisi urbana e l'utopia del modernismo
Riferimenti
Fishman R., Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, MIT Press, 1982, pp. 3-22, pp. 160-242.
Le Corbusier, ‘Mass Production of Houses’, in Towards a New Architecture. New York: Dover, 1986, pp. 225-265.
Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973.
Video
The City. Directed by Ralph Steiner, Willard van Dyke. 1939. Naxos, 2009. DVD.
Seconda lezione - Jane Jacobs, Oscar Newman e il mito del fallimento del modernismo
Riferimenti
Jacobs J., The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage, 1961, pp. 3-25; 143-151.
Jencks C., The Language of Postmodern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli International, 1972, pp. 7-37.
Newman O., Defensible Space. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. New York: MacMillan, pp. 22-50.
Newman O., Creating Defensible Space. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1996, pp. 9-30.
Venturi R., Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.
Video
The Shock of the New. Trouble in Utopia. Directed by Robert Hughes. BBC and Time Life Films, 1980.
Terza lezione – Decostruire il mito del fallimento del modernismo
Riferimenti
Bristol K., 1991. “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”. Journal of Architectural Education 44.3 (March), pp. 163-171.
Dagen Bloom N., Umbach F., Vale L.J., Public Housing Myths. Perception, reality, and Social Policy. Ithaca (NY): Cornell UP, 2015, pp. 1-118.
Video
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. Directed by Chad Friedrichs. Columbia, MO: Unicorn Stencil Documentary Films, 2011
Quarta lezione – La varietà e complessità dell'edilizia pubblica del modernismo: un confronto trans-nazionale
Riferimenti
Farina M., Spazi e figure dell’abitare. Il progetto della residenza contemporanea in Olanda. Macerata: Quolibet, 2012.
Guillot X. et al. Habiter la modernité : Acte du colloque «Vivre au 3e millénaire dans un immeuble emblématique de la modernité». Saint-Etienne: PU Saint-Etienne, 2006.
Jacob B. and Schäche W., 40 Jahre Märkisches Viertel: Geschichte und Gegenwart einer Großsiedlung. Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2004.
Kapeller V., Plattenbausiedlungen. Erneuerung des baukulturellen Erbes in Wien und Bratislava. Stuttgart: Frauenhofer IRB Verlag, 2009.
Viganò P., Comment vivre ensemble: prototypes of idiorythmical conglomerates and shared spaces. Roma: Officina, 2006.
Quinta lezione – L'eredità dell'edilizia pubblica del modernismo
Riferimenti
Dagen Bloom N., Public Housing That Worked. New York in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia (PA):University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, pp. 7-114.
Druot F., Lacaton A., and Vassal J.F., Plus. La vivienda colectiva, Teritorio de exceptión. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2007.
Part 2. La vita quotidiana nell'edilizia pubblica del modernismo
Sesta lezione – Come studiare la vita sociale
Riferimenti
Gehl J. and Svarre B., How to Study Public Life. Washington (DC): Island Press, 2013, pp. 1-35.
Whyte W.H., The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. New York: Project for Public Spaces, 1980, pp. 10-59.
Video
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Directed by William H. Whyte. Los Angeles (CA): Direct Cinema Ltd, 1979.
Attività
Lavoro sul campo
Settima lezione – Antropologia dell'edilizia pubblica del modernismo
Riferimenti
Augoyard J.F. Step by Step. Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project. Minneapolis (MN): University of Minnesota Press, 2007, pp. 7-114.
Bruscaglioni L., Cellini E., Saracino B., “Nuove e vecchie periferie popolari: una ricerca etnografica in due aree di edilizia residentiale pubblica”. Cambio 3.6 (December), pp. 27-400
Jouenne, N. La vie collective des habitants du Corbusier. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005.
Jouenne, N. Dans l'ombre du Corbusier: Ethnologie d'un habitat collectif ordinaire. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012.
Kahl A., Erlebnis Plattenbau: Eine Langzeitstudie. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 2003.
Keller C., Leben im Plattenbau. Zur Dynamik sozialer Ausgrenzung. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005.
Stumpe A., Paradise lost? Auf der Suche nach dem Paradies im Plattenbau. Leipzig: Pro Leipzig, 2011.
Attività
Lavoro sul campo
Ottava lezione – Antropologia di tre quartieri di edilizia pubblica del modernismo nella periferia di Firenze
Attività
Presentazione del lavoro sul campo (rapporto)
Part 3. Rebranding dell'edilizia pubblica modernista: un'agenda integrata di policy
Nona lezione – Introduzione alla pianificazione strategica
Riferimenti
Dühr S., The Visual Language of Spatial Planning. Exploring cartographic representations for spatial planning in Europe. London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 1-75.
Healey P. et al., eds., Making Strategic Spatial Plans: Innovation in Europe. London: UCL Press, 1997, pp. 3-35, 57-74, 238-250.
Giovannoni G., Governare il territorio. Milano: Franco Angeli, pp. 22-45, 67-68, 83-99.
Attività
Decision making game
Decima lezione – Verso un'agenda di policy
Attività
Decision making game collettivo
Undicesima lezione
Attività
Presentazione dei piani strategici elaborati dagli studenti.
Part 4. Migliorare l'ediliza pubblica modernista attraverso politiche spaziali: lo sviluppo di un masterplan
Lezioni conclusive
Le ultime lezioni avranno luogo nella modalità di un workshop collettivo. Sarà effettuato un intenso lavoro di revisione fino alla consegna del masterplan finale.
Obiettivi Formativi
Il modulo di Urban Design ha quattro principali obiettivi:
1) fornire un quadro teorico che permetta di cogliere la complessità della progettazione urbana e la difficoltà di prevedere i modi in cui lo spazio progettato è vissuto. Il dibattito sull'architettura del modernismo si presta ottimamente alo scopo. All'inizio del XX secolo i maestri dell'architettura modernista attribuivano alla pianificazione urbana il compito di riformare la società. I critici dell'architettura modernista, invero, si limitavano a proporre soluzioni spaziali alternative. Entrambi si basavano sull'assunto che l'architettura ha il potere di governare il funzionamento della società. Un'attenta analisi storica delle complesse cause che hanno determinato il fallimento di alcuni dei quartieri di edilizia pubblica del modernismo ci conduce a rivedere tale assunto. La ricerca antropologica sulla vita quotidiana in alcuni di questi quartieri, inoltre, evidenzia i modo infiniti in cui lo spazio è percepito e appropriato da diversi abitanti. Ogni generalizzazione è impossibile e ciascun insiediamento deve essere compreso nella sua unicità storica, geografica e sociale. Questa consapevolezza apre alla necessità di fondare la progettazione urbana su un'accurata conoscenza socio-antropologica del modo in cui ciascun insediamento è vissuto e appropriato dai diversi gruppi sociali.
2) Introdurre gli studenti alla ricerca socio-antropologica sui quartieri di edilizia pubblica del modernismo attraverso lo studio della letteratura e il lavoro sul campo.
3) Sviluppare un piano strategico e un'agenda integrata di policy per le aree di studio con l'ausilio di un gioco decisionale.
4) Sviluppare un masterplan per le aree di studio
Prerequisiti
Laurea di primo livello in Architettura
Metodi Didattici
Lezioni frontali
Discussione in aula di letture assegnate
Esercitazioni in aula
Revisione in aula del lavoro di progetto
Altre Informazioni
Durante il corso verranno fornite specifiche istruzioni volte allo sviluppo delle esercitazioni e del tema progettuale proposto. Le revisioni dell'esercitazione progettuale avverranno in aula durante le ore didattiche dedicate al laboratorio.
Modalità di verifica apprendimento
Ciascuno studente dovrà: partecipare alla discussione delle letture su base settimanale; preparare un certo numero di presentazioni durante il corso su casi concordati con il docente; sviluppare un lavoro di analisi sul campo; partecipare attraverso la discussione in aula alla definizione di un'agenda urbana; elaborare un masterplan.
Programma del corso
1. Historical and Theoretical Framework
1.1. The urban crisis and the birth of the modernist utopia
In the early Twentieth Century western cities were facing a major crisis. This was due to several factors including industrialization, an unprecedented process of mass urbanization, and the advent of the car. Cities were congested, polluted, and often devoid of any social and hygienic infrastructure: plenty of people lived in authentic slums. Different urban utopias were developed at this time to address the urban crisis.
The modernist utopia should be understood within the cultural and historical context of the early XXth Century. At that time modernist mass housing neighborhoods generally determined an incredible improvement of existing living conditions. The goal of this section of the course is to ‘rediscover’ Modernist Movement’s original ideas placing them historically and examining some of its major written and architectural documents.
1.2. Jane Jacobs, Oscar Newman and the modernist failure myth
The myth of the Radiant City lasted only a few decades. Jane Jacobs, with her seminal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, initiated a wave of radical critique of modernist architecture. In the words of the author the book was ‘an attack on current city planning and rebuilding’. Her target were all architectural movements which in fact had an anti-urban stance. She contended that all them didn’t consider how cities actually work, and that streets and sidewalks, so biased by Corbu and by the ‘Decentrists’, are essential to urban life. Jane Jacobs’ book was breathtaking and remarkable. It was based on a deep and insightful use of observation, and it unquestionably demonstrated the enormous gap existing at that time between the 'science' of urban planning - and more generally of architecture - and everyday life.
Jane Jacobs’ work opened the way to further research aimed at investigating the correlation between safety and urban form. Oscar Newman developed Jacobs’ intuition that ‘eyes on the street’ are essential to urban security and that the demise of the street strongly contributed to crime. He investigated through statistical analysis a large sample of New York public housing estates concluding that in modernist neighborhoods space could not be appropriated by residents, and that the absence of control determined higher crime rates. Newman’s theory was used to explain the failure of Pruitt-Igoe, the large housing project developed in Saint Louis in the 1950s and cleared out only twenty years later because of its decay, abandonment, and crime. What Newman and other scholars neglected is that Saint Louis, as well as other American cities, was undergoing a dramatic social and economic change. Although the whole city was becoming deserted and dangerous, modernist architects were deemed responsible for the failure of the neighborhood. The ‘modernist failure myth’ -that is the myth that all modernist planning necessarily doesn’t work- was in fact established. In 1978 Charles Jenks, in his book The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977) said the last word, announcing the death of Modern Architecture.
The assumption ‘modern architecture’ = ‘failure’ became in fact an accepted dogma. It was repeated in a number of books and articles, without considering the social and economic context that determined the failure of some neighborhoods. Although a correlation between safety and urban form probably exists, the majority of public housing developments still works and is far away from collapsing, both in the US and in Europe. Research on modernist housing is also very incomplete. One the one hand it basically ignores their actual social life, since no careful socio-anthropological analysis was made – with the exception of a handful of studies, basically confined to French and German settlements. It is exactly the observational method so dear to Jane Jacobs that should have been but was not applied. On the other hand comparative cross-national analysis was very scarce. Such analysis would allow us to invert the perspective and to appreciate the factors determining not the failure but the success of many existing modernist neighborhoods.
This section of the course will review the debate on the failure of modernist architecture as it developed from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, highlighting its limits and its shortcomings.
1.3. Deconstructing the modernist failure myth
Although the ‘modernist failure myth’ is still widely accepted, its deconstruction has been going on for some years now. Initially this was limited to the case of Pruitt-Igoe, the main symbol of the alleged failure. In 1991 Katharine Bristol contended that narratives on Pruitt-Igoe had in fact created a myth. By placing the responsibility for the failure of public housing on designers, the myth shifted attention from the institutional or structural sources of public housing problems. Simultaneously, it legitimated the architecture profession by implying that deeply embedded social problems are caused, and therefore solved, by architectural design. Another twenty years later the research documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Urban History (2011), directed by Chad Freidrichs, pushed further the deconstruction of narratives on Pruitt-Igoe. On the one hand it told lived stories of former Pruitt-Igoe residents, unveiling many unexpected positive memories. And on the other hand it showed the real causes if its decay. At that time Saint Louis was experiencing a terrible mix of deindustrialization, declining population, falling housing prices, suburbanization, fall of tax revenue, and administrative rigidity that made of Pruitt-Igoe an authentic ghetto made of largely vacant unmaintained buildings inhabited by a largely unemployed population. Such research showed that in such a socio-economic context any neighborhood would have failed, and that design factors, if they played any role, played only a minor role.
On the basis of this research assumptions on public mass hosing are now being questioned. The recent book Public Housing Myths, edited by Dagen Bloom, Umbach, and Vale (2015), revises of a whole set of prejudices surrounding public housing. These include the assumptions that modernist architecture failed public housing, and that public housing breeds crime. From our standpoint the work of urban anthropologists plays a major role in revision of these assumptions. In fact it unveils the infinite ways in which space is used and appropriated by residents. Although anthropological research on public housing neighborhoods is not particularly extended, its findings are very significant and will be reviewed in this section of the course.
1.4. The variety and complexity of modernist mass-housing: a cross-national comparison
Because of their extension, neighborhoods designed according to the principles of modernist architecture are very diverse in age, dimension, social composition, urban form, and in terms of availability of public transport facilities and of social facilities. In the US and in Western European countries these kinds of developments were developed between the end of WWII and the late 1960s, with just a few cases being realized after that time. In Eastern European countries, where modernist architecture responded to the egalitarian ideals of the ruling classes, modernist districts were developed until the late 1980s. In Asia they still represent today the main way towards urbanization and modernization. A major difference between countries also exists in terms of social composition and of social segregation. Whereas a number of US neighborhoods experienced serious problems of racial segregation and became authentic ghettos, this problem affected only a small part of Western European neighborhoods, and is almost absent in Eastern European countries, where the social composition is generally very mixed. Their scale is also very diverse, ranging from small neighborhood units to authentic new towns (as in the case of the modernist villes neuves developed in the outskirts of many France cities). Finally the urban morphology ranges from the honeycomb patterns of the Amsterdam’s Bijlmer, to the isolated slabs of the Corbusians unité d’habitation.
The goal of this section is that of appreciating the complexity and diversity of modernist public housing and to predispose students to understanding the historical, social, dimensional, and morphological uniqueness of the neighborhoods which will be investigated in the second section of the course. A cross-national comparison will be done ranging from the US to Western Europe to Eastern Europe.
1.5. The legacy of modernist mass housing
Although the stock of public housing which was designed according to modernist principles changes across countries, it is very significant both in the US and in all European countries. This stock was inherited from the past and needs to be repaired and maintained. Towers and slabs, the typical modernist typologies, also led the way towards urbanization and modernization in many other parts of the world, starting from Chinese cities. In western countries the whole discourse on modernism – what we called the ‘modernist failure myth’ – was a major cultural impediment to adopting appropriate spatial policies for places where very large populations, often belonging to lower social classes, actually live.
The clearance of public housing is almost never the best solution. On the one hand it has a dramatic social impact, disrupting existing communities and uprooting large populations from their living environments. On the other hand it is too expensive and economically unsustainable. According to calculation by architects Lacaton & Vassal (2007) demolishing and redeveloping a public housing unit costs as much as the sum of developing a new unit of the same area and of transforming an existing one into a luxurious apartment of double surface and provided with ample and brand new balconies and terraces. These considerations can be regarded as an updated version of what Jane Jacobs observed about the renewal of alleged slums such as Boston’s Little Italy in 1960s American cities. Although the modernist failure myth largely prevented us from developing appropriate strategies to the renewal of modernist mass housing neighborhoods, great examples of renewal projects exist, mainly in Europe.
The goal of this section of the course is to discuss the legacy of modernist mass housing and to review a number of cases of successful rehabilitation programs which were run in Europe in the last decades.
2. Everyday life in modernist mass housing: socio-anthropological analysis of three neighborhoods in the Florence suburbs
Although the modernist failure myth largely descends from Jane Jacobs’ work, many of its advocates abandoned the observational method on which the American author grounded her work. Not only generalizations about the alleged failure of modernist architecture ignored non-environmental factors and disregarded the aforementioned differences which characterize these settlements (see §2.2), but also they were unable of getting direct knowledge of how real life works in them. If we assume that each modernist public housing neighborhood is unique and different from all the others, as it is certainly the case, then we need to get first-hand knowledge of how it works. Starting from the review of anthropological research on modernist mass-housing this section of the course will introduce students to socio-anthropological analysis on the field. Direct and easy-to-use methods will be presented, aimed at answering questions such as: which are the main publics (in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, etc.) using public spaces? How is the neighborhood perceived by its inhabitants? Are there conflicts in the use of public spaces? How does public life change across time both on a weekly basis and on a daily basis? Are there publics which are prevented from the use of public spaces? How does the perception of ‘problems’ change across different social groups? An observational schedule will be worked out, and a range of methods will be applied, from counting to tracing to surveying to tracking. Both a report and some panels synthesizing the main findings of the fieldwork will be produced for this section of the course.
3. Re-branding modernist mass housing: an integrated policy agenda
In the third part of the course the class will collectively work on an integrated policy agenda for the three neighborhoods. By integrated policy agenda we mean a set of urban policies ranging from spatial and infrastructural policies to social policies. In the last decades such approaches have been widely applied in Europe to the renewal of public housing neighborhoods. Starting from the early 1990s in Italy specific ‘Programmi complessi’ (complex plans) were conceived by the national government in order to rehabilitate this kind of neighborhoods. Similar programs were developed in basically all the other European countries. Their main feature is the integration of actors (public actors, private actors, groups of residents) and of actions (infrastructural actions, provision of public facilities, provision of private facilities, interventions on buildings). The distinction between government and governance has been introduced in literature to distinguish top-down approaches, basically leaded by a single public actor (government), from horizontal and bottom-up approaches in which decisions are taken through a much more open and interactive process. The strategic plan which will be worked out by the class will adopt a typical governance approach. A decision making game will be run in order to simulate a real decision making arena. Some major cases of strategic planning developed around the world will be reviewed, from Barcelona to Lyon to Florence to Turin. Since public housing neighborhoods usually have a negative imaginary, the first goal of this section will be that of ‘rebranding’ the three neighborhoods under investigation, trying to re-create a positive imaginary. A general ‘mission’ will be defined and more specific goals and actions will be identified.
4. Improving modernist mass housing through spatial policies: the development of a master plan.
In the last section of the course each student will develop a master plan proposal for one of the three neighborhoods which will have been previously investigated. Depending on the context and on analyses’ outcomes, the scale of intervention can span from small-scale improvements of everyday existing situations to major infrastructural and spatial transformations. The level of detail of the design investigations will be in inverse proportion to the size of the area involved.