• Call for Papers | Italian version
URBANISM FOR A DIFFERENT KIND OF GROWTH.
CONFLICTS IN DEVELOPMENT, OVERCOMING THE RECESSION
AND CONTEMPORARY LAND-USE PLANNING
Naples, 9th-10th May 2013
During the deepest and most painful economic and social crises, the human and physical landscape and changes in its use have assumed a central role in the development process, from the Keynesian policies to rekindle the US economy after the great depression of 1929 to the reconstruction and growth of the urban districts that have been a cornerstone of Italy’s post‐war economic boom. These phenomena have often led to unbalanced growth. In many cases, it has been at the expense of the territory and its values, producing effects that have sometimes proved difficult to reverse, driven by economic and political interests, monopolies and power relationships that have impoverished the territory. At the same time, town planners have been unable to integrate resources in a meaningful way.
History confirms the central importance of the built environment as a driver of growth, wealth‐creation and new opportunity. But the problem today is the need to support forms of local development through plans and projects that are sensitive to the interdependence between economic growth, environmental sustainability and social equity: in other words, between the economy, space and society.
Our task now is to understand what growth means for the contemporary territory, and how it should be pursued within a development framework that is not necessarily linked to the production‐consumption cycle and that is not viewed solely in quantitative and economic terms. It is a challenge that requires a multidisciplinary approach. This must involve restructuring the urban and social fabric, embracing different lifestyles and forms of settlement and production, with sensitivity and consideration to theoretical and practical perspectives geared to “prosperity without growth”.
With the current global economic crisis, the subject of different types of growth is back on the agenda. This calls for a keen awareness of the need for sustainability and fairness. Local development becomes a potential source of employment and a way to kick‐start the economy, provided that common values are safeguarded – in particular, cultural and environmental heritage, scarce or non‐reproducible resources, and shared values enshrined in the policies for developing the built environment.
Town planning must rediscover a central, authoritative role in public decision‐making processes for developments. It must be able to innovate and to shape policy programmes for land‐use management, in the knowledge that building ideas for the future must not be a mere slogan but must represent a deliberate, competent approach for a wise and balanced use of environmental resources and buildings.
Now, more than ever, growth is not about quantitative processes but rather improving the quality of the residential built environment without consuming new ground, by recycling decayed or disused buildings, areas and landscapes, by strengthening green approaches, and by basing development processes on the principle of safeguarding values and resources to hand down to future generations. These values become a stimulus for people to get involved. They are also the way to create active cooperation between the public administrations and economic actors from the private sector through new forms of governance.
Agriculture, cultural heritage, care for the landscape and the residential built environment, sustainable production, logistics and integrated infrastructure represent some of the opportunities for stakeholders and resources to come together to drive a new and different kind of growth for local communities.
These processes can inform a territorial plan where town‐planning expertise can establish and use ideas, tools and practices to recreate an open, reassuring dialogue with society and to build a new future.
CONFERENCE ORGANISATION
The conference will be based on plenary sessions and workshops.
• Plenary sessions | These are discussion forums to which researchers from various disciplines are invited.
• Workshops | These are discussion sessions organised in parallel streams. A coordinator and a discussant review the issues arising from the participants’ contributions, raising questions, noting issues, and facilitating the discussion. The programme content may be supplemented or refined according to proposals from attendees. These proposals will be considered by the SIU committee and the workshop coordinators.
• WORKSHOP 1 | Upkeep of the territory as a form of development
Coordinator: Roberto Bobbio
Reducing risk, restoring self‐sustainable environmental balance, and recovering decayed landscapes – can such initiatives create jobs, stimulate enterprise, restore value to marginal areas, and in general create new development? Submissions are invited of successful case studies and good practices, with a view to identifying credible, reproducible models and projects based on plans and policies to optimise benefits and systematise methods.
• WORKSHOP 2 | Reduce, Re‐use, Recycle: new paradigms for urban design?
Coordinator: Massimo Angrilli
The benefits of the “3Rs” rule, adopted in environmental policies primarily for the waste cycle, seem to have spread to town planning. The recent designs for the Olympic Park in London, the German pavilion at the 13th Venice Biennale, the Recycle exhibition at the MAXXI museum, and increasingly often the research in our discipline have sought to explore the possibilities of these new and unconventional urban‐development practices. Working from the status quo and often based on self‐organisation and DIY approaches, 3Rs inspired projects are tailored to the situation that they address. They solve problems without allowing the solution to become a mere vehicle for applying standard models. Instead, they continually reinvent the raw material from the context, creating fresh, imaginative possibilities born of cross‐fertilisation. This workshop will use case studies and proposals to explore and investigate the potential for urban design and the opportunities for development (economic and otherwise) in reducing waste and in re‐using and recycling parts of the urban fabric.
• WORKSHOP 3 | Protecting, managing and enhancing public real estate
Coordinator: Luca Gaeta
The state and the local authorities are owners of a broad and diversified real estate portfolio. This national asset often attracts little attention except in extreme cases of neglect (such as Pompeii) and sell‐offs (the beaches). Nevertheless, these are macroscopic effects of the historical lack of a clear management strategy through spatial planning and other means, such as other countries have used for some time. The problem is not so much a lack of legal instruments and technical skill but the perception of the public heritage as an economic, environmental and cultural asset of unfulfilled potential. Hasty sell‐offs to make money clearly show the lack of interest in any kind of efficient, profitable and sensitive management.
• WORKSHOP 4 | Towards a different kind of urban design: practices, projects and strategies for developing and maintaining the territorial capital
Coordinator: Elena Marchigiani
The public and private finance crisis demands a reappraisal of the effectiveness of public‐ private partnership models. Major urban projects (including those supported by project financing) have seen private resources supplemented by a significant outlay of public money. Such schemes have often not had successful outcomes or have even floundered altogether. Furthermore, it seems increasingly opportune to complement the concept of urban design with an approach that can bring together minor interventions to enhance the habitability of the spaces in our towns and cities in shorter and more reliable timescales. This means regular and major maintenance work, projects to improve road space, equipment, green and public spaces, and social‐housing developments. This workshop will pursue a critical analysis of the new frontiers both in the relationship between the public and private sectors in urban‐ redevelopment projects (with a special focus on the latest plans issued by the Italian government, such as the national plan for cities) and in “ordinary” public action that, even through small steps, can boost the economies associated with the renewal and maintenance of our cities as a way to overcome the drastic cuts in public funding.
• WORKSHOP 5 | Towards a new role for male and female town planners: innovation in practice through new social demands and international experiences
Coordinator: Daniela De Leo
This workshop gathers contributions on conventional and informal practices and innovative initiatives that Italian town planners are pursuing in a climate of uncertainty as to the paradigms and by thinking creatively around the available alternative development approaches. The focus is on the incipient changes in practices and competencies regarding:
‐issues of social harmony, the quality of the residential built environment, welfare, exclusion, and multicultural and ethnic integration;
‐the arenas where female town planners are increasingly more prominent than their male colleagues, as they help to reappraise practices and expertise that are useful in coping ‘positively’ with the current situation;
‐the lessons learned from international projects and research, to establish the potential contribution from Italian planners, through discussion and sharing ideas.
• WORKSHOP 6 | Urban bioregion: self‐sustainability, local community, and economic solidarity
Coordinator: Daniela Poli
An economic crisis is a crisis of the oikos. The indiscriminate use of resources, consumption of land, and developments that are not landscape‐sensitive have led to high management costs, unregulated development, and a continual expansion of suburbs, metropolises and urban sprawl. From a town‐planning perspective, overcoming the crisis means redesigning settlements as urban bioregions with a network of centres, where local communities are increasingly involved in completing the local cycle of resources and in finding new ecosystemic balances with the surrounding territory (valleys, mountains, hills and coastal hinterlands). More integrated action is needed, including:
‐ an ecological network that can stimulate the development of new, high‐energy‐performance urban forms in balance with the hydrogeomorphological system;
‐a clear definition of the city limits with action to re‐plan the urban fringe, identifying new agro‐urban hubs;
‐strengthening ecosystem services and the short supply chain for food (with local food and farming agreements, urban farming, periurban allotments, and public procurement);
‐encouraging cooperative and community economies. The workshop will pursue a wide‐ranging discussion of this subject, with illustrations of research projects and case studies from Italy and abroad.
• WORKSHOP 7 | The challenges and new forms of urban design: experiencing the dimension and scale of the post‐metropolis
Coordinator: Francesco Domenico Moccia
The ongoing urbanisation processes worldwide differ profoundly from those that have been studied and that have informed the theoretical debate in urban studies in the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, these processes produce territories and spaces that contrast, by form and function, with those studied as regards the concepts of city and then of metropolis. For example, density and proximity combine to create an ever‐finer mesh of relationships at a distance and thus new social and spatial configurations. The challenge of climate change requires that sustainable models of metropolitan organisation be developed. It leads to new reorganisation trends as kinds of environmentally sustainable development processes. Town planning must be able to meet the new demands that emerge as the link between territory, authority and planning disappears.
• WORKSHOP 8 | Town planning and mobility: sustainability and integration
Coordinator: Maurizio Tira
Integrating town planning and mobility is a well‐known requirement that, in the past, has been fulfilled in various ways and, theoretically, is still on the political agenda. Town planners still need to study it further and to explore its practical applications. At urban level and on a large scale, the urgent requirement – in terms of meeting the environmental challenges – is for sustainable transport. At local level, there are the additional problems from the new development scenario, which demands further work on how major transport infrastructure projects are planned. Hence the urgent need to rediscover or establish a new approach to handling these issues, in remodelling the existing cities and managing the territory. This workshop aims to explore the many theoretical approaches and to present case studies on both urban and territorial scales.
• WORKSHOP 9 | Public spaces/common landscapes: an approach to urban regeneration
Coordinator: Michelangelo Russo
In the most advanced applications in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, the production and design of public spaces – to be open and accessible, attractive and multifunctional – has a central and inevitable role in creating a new concept of quality for contemporary living environments and in boosting the appeal of land‐use developments. Public spaces become a stable reference point in development processes aimed at regenerating derelict, decayed and marginal areas, in building new infrastructure, in planning housing, in environmental renewal and in enhancing the landscape. Public spaces increasingly mean urban farmland areas, renewing edgeland zones, and releasing the potential of constricted open spaces, waste ground, uncultivated land, drosscapes, brownfields and parts of waterfronts. These places have high or latent landscape value, and in perspective, they enable new common landscapes to be constructed, understood as social and inclusive spaces, where transport networks and spaces meet, where a balance between urban centres and functions is restored. In other words, they are a strategic component of the urban‐ regeneration agenda.
• WORKSHOP 10 | The sustainable city and a new demand for resilience
Coordinator: Maria Federica Palestino
The current economic and financial crisis requires alternative models of habitability based on principles of adaptation, resistance and resilience, as a bridge between the natural and social sciences. Environmental sustainability and the judicious use of resources are aims that have inspired action such as:
‐developing new eco‐districts;
‐reclaiming open spaces and making them resilient;
‐devising strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change;
‐looking after the land;
‐preventing the effects of unforeseen natural disasters.
Environmental renewal; planning eco‐compatible infrastructure, smart cities and new intelligent networks; projects to enhance key common assets such as water or energy: these all require a strategic focus to manage the distribution of social benefits and costs, by setting priorities and ensuring fairness.
This workshop aims to stimulate thinking on the tools, plans and strategies to implement in order to encourage the development of a sustainable city for everyone. There will also be a focus on the language and the planning approaches to use in order to share visions of the future, to foster debate about the practices of social production of public space, and to strengthen material and immaterial cultures that would otherwise be at risk of disappearing.
PARTICIPATION IN THE CONFERENCE
Abstracts must not be longer than 3,000 characters (inclusive of spaces) and they must contain
the following information:
(I) title, authors, the relative workshop, key words (three);
(II) the thesis presented;
(III) field in which the thesis is discussed;
(IV) work prospects.
Failure to follow this format will constitute grounds for exclusion.
IMPORTANT DEADLINES
• February 11th, 2013
Abstracts must be received at the following email address by February 11th, 2013 for prior approval: siu.conferenza2013@gmail.com
• February 28 th, 2013
The academic committee of the SIU will inform those concerned if their proposals have been accepted.
• April 10th, 2013
Final papers, not longer than 20,000 characters (inclusive of spaces), in addition to figures and tables, must be received at the above email address.
CONFERENCE FEES
Conference participation only
Senior 100,00 € / Junior 60,00 €
Conference participation only for SIU members
Senior 60,00 € / Junior 40,00 €
SIU membership cost for 2013 (facultative)
Senior 100,00 € / Junior 60,00€
Conference participation + SIU membership cost for 2013
Senior 140,00 € / Junior 80,00 €
(Please note: are considered to be “Senior”, the academic staff and public administration officers as well as participants over the age of 40)
PAYMENT DETAILS
to: SOCIETÀ ITALIANA DEGLI URBANISTI
Via Bonardi 3, 20133 Milano
bank account:
Banca Popolare di Sondrio
IBAN IT29 J056 9601 6200 0001 0007 X37
BIC ‐ SWIFT P0S0IT22
reason for payment: CONFERENZA NAPOLI
INFOS AND CONTACTS
• Call for Papers XVI Conferenza Nazionale SIU
• E-mail: siu.conferenza2013@gmail.com
• SIU Website, home page