Festival dell'architettura

Hafen City, Hamburg 2012: reuse of the dismantled dockland area Photo: Luca Reale

Talking today about the compact city does still make sense or takes us back to a needless and overcame debate? If we refer to the European context, the modern thinking that has prevailed in terms of architecture and technology, becoming a common language in some areas (from urban to IKEA furniture), has substantially failed in planning practice. The free plan, which has had so much success to the architectural scale did not work at the urban scale.
Urban design in Italy lacks adequate regulation, while the urban planning still has the illusion of being able to focus substantially on expansion, continuing to consider almost a contradiction the containment of land consumption.

On the regulatory side would be enough to copy the law of some of the most advanced countries (England, Germany, Netherlands), on the cultural side, now is beginning to be seen as important even in our country. The long and complex revitalization process in the periphery of big cities - which will involve a lot of energy of European architects in the coming years - gives evidence of the problems of adaptation and transformability, in a word, the inability of evolution, of the functionalist city. Designed as a model, the modern city has freezed the space in its efficient and balanced structure in which functions and human actions were separated. The relations between the parties were entrusted to an open space whose apparent intrinsic quality should ensure a connective role. Curiously a plenty of space completely public, but not sufficiently structured, has instead triggered a process of decline and abandonment determined by the absence of responsibility (belongs to everyone, so doesn't belong to anyone), to this problem is added the almost complete economic and social uniformity of the inhabitants and the excessive repetition of the popular housing stock.

The alternative model of the garden city, with its structure and its rules of growth, has quickly expanded into a confused and indistinct sprawl, denouncing its ideologically anti-urban matrix, as well as its inherent fragility - "a diagram only", it's the warning that prudently Ebenezer Howard put at the bottom of the drawings illustrating his Garden City. Widely spread globally, sprawl is not really an internal model of our disciplines but taken from social and economic subjects, well-summarized in the oxymoron of our città diffusa. If the modernist city, despite its flaws may be present an opportunity for rebirth of some important parts of the city - thanks to a plenty of open space, the presence of public facilities and a clear structure - in this second model the tyranny of individual transport by road has generated social and cultural alienation, and it's very difficult to imagine a way of urban integration for these large areas of land.

It seems on the contrary clear that today such factors as a proper density, a mix of functions and a coexistence of different social classes within the same urban area are not sufficient conditions, but absolutely necessary in order to speak of a model of a sustainable city. Between the historicized urban configurations we just have to go back to reflect on the idea of the European compact city, not so much a model as a necessity, a precondition for reasoning about the contemporary city. At a sufficient distance in time from revivals and postmodernism, the compact city seems to be one of the few examples of permanence in our urban landscape, certainly not in the picturesque mediaeval Krier's way or the most historicist propositions of New Urbanism. The culture of European cities, complex and layered, found in the rhythm of space in blocks marked not only a form of life and identity, but also an antidote to uneconomic and unsustainable urban sprawl as the generic and alienating modernist periphery. The reinterpretation of the block city over the last fifteen years and its hybridization with the modern city, especially in the residential field, is one of the most interesting examples of architectural and urban experimentation. If the modernist city was based on the mere repetition of the building optimal (for ventilation, sunshine, size and distribution of housing) and urban quality was entrusted to the free composition of the plan rather than the quality and architectural differentiation of individual buildings, European compact city in his recent experiences, greatly simplifies the urban scheme set on a grid more or less simple, while the morphology of the block includes exceptions and variations: the block so it becomes open to the landscape, passing by the user and traversable also by non-residents, deformed in relation to the context, dilated to form a sort of neighborhood unit. The urban permeability and the morphological porosity become two central aspects in the design of urban block that is not simply derived from the rules of settlement, but very often its quality centers on the relationship between indoor and outdoor open spaces, bringing to the fore the issue of continuity between architectural and urban design and focusing on the scaling between spaces, the intermediate steps from public to private. But most of all the contemporary urban block adopts all the "achievements" of the modern, defined at the time, just in contrast to the nineteenth century's block . The housing needs in terms of environmental comfort (cross ventilation, daylight in the living area, interior visual, successful deployment and flexibility of accommodation) become priority over urban issues and the relationship with the context. Hybridization is carried out, the block is now designed "from the inside", just as the modernist building, the logic of the nineteenth-century city that is formed by blocks starting from the design of streets, squares, urban space is completely inverted, but not more ideologically denied.
Designing the block means, ultimately working on re-use, processing or complete replacement of fabrics or parts of the city. The recycling of urban land can also become an opportunity for architects to regain credibility to society through innovative ideas than with sophisticated formal solutions. The densification and the addition of new fragments in the existing, the recompactation the more unstructured suburbs, the inclusion of diversified activities in the tissues weaker and homogeneous, are operations able to score a clear reaction to the insane consumpion of land the last twenty year; the European city turn back mainly to grow on itself, re-using its own forms, reinventing spaces and use of its facilities.

Luca Reale is a Researcher in Architectural and Urban Composition at the Sapienza Faculty of Architecture in Rome