The studio proposes a formative path rooted in the experience of landscape design, with a focus on the relationship between landscape, infrastructures, settlments criteria and water management . The project is here considered as a tool to comprehend, interpret and transform the region under observation. The project is, thus, concurrently a knowledge tool and a guide to transformation.

Training the ability to elaborate interpretation and to propose solutions at different design scales is one of the major aims of design exercise. Contrasting an approach which unpack complexity through a reading from the general to the particular, we will help student’s attention to focus on the interdependency of design scales in interpreting complex and stratified processes of transformation.

Constellations: an urban territory made of villages and small towns.


Challenging polarized visions
European territory has recently been the subject of relevant and interdependent transformations. Increasing urbanization in major metropolitan regions, and concurrently the development of large infrastructural networks are fostering the image of a strong polarization within the European territory between large metropolitan areas and peripheral and marginal territories, urbanized countryside systematically passed over by the infrastructural network and thus overlooked by change.
Contrasting this image, we propose to interpret contemporary urban territory as a network of diverse landscapes, strongly interlinked and interdependent.
“Parts” characterized by their internal logic, by diverse levels of urbanization density and infrastructure endowment, concurrently form a unique space, which is ultimately the support of our daily existence. As a premise we can start considering that the shift between metropolitan regions, small city centres with their peripheries and urbanized countryside it is not so easy to asses.
Villages and small towns, sometime despite their country roots, produce the same built mass, building typologies, ordinary spaces, then metropolitan peripheries and they are subject to the same processes of city construction.
We are challenging the clear-cut, but largely artificial, distinction between metropolitan regions and peripheral landscape, pairing it with a more complex and stratified description: critically confronting the multiple relations between infrastructure and urbanization, between environmental resources and settlements criteria, between emerging activities (with a specific focus on tourism) and social and economic development.

Constellations
Small towns and even villages represented in recent years a relevant field of innovation in defining urban patterns. Here, more than elsewhere, the relationship between urban transformations and social models of interaction, between individual action and landscape transformation and, ultimately, between architecture and urbanism, has been stressed and requires reconsideration.
However, we recently faced a return of interest on these specific contexts, mainly due to a certain reconsideration of the urban-rural relation.
Describing the region that we can find, for example, at the centre of the Po plain, we must recognize that most of the conceptual categories that we use to define urban space are not sufficient. Images and concepts, such as polycentric city, città diffusa, generic city, etc., denoting general patterns of urbanization or specific contexts, seems to have worn out their heuristic value while focusing on relevant challenges that urban planning had to face in the last decades. Consequently, they sometimes seem like a straight jacket forced over reluctant urban phenomena which are not so easy to decode.
Challenging these categories is inevitable if we take a look to regions characterized by the coexistence of urban transformations belonging to different conceptual categories.
The constellation of villages and small towns, in the Po plain, frequently rooted in the agricultural past represent a case study that can possibly enable us to enlarge the interpretative and design vocabulary, to define urban forms in Europe.
We can observe the region starting from two main considerations:
On one side, here, we witness the reproduction, on a smaller scale, of the same dynamics and processes characterizing larger and denser urbanized territories. We can perceive this process in the same built mass, generic building typologies, and ordinary settlement criteria, indefinitely repeated without any scale difference, both in residential settlement and in industrial sites.
However, this also means that a similar offer in basic services and infrastructure is spread along a larger territory, making these lands compatible with the search for higher standard of living and preventing depopulation.
On the opposite side we can consider the environmental costs which derive from the overwhelming priority given to the individual, both in the residential and in the mobility pattern. The region is, thus, the background of specific urban lifestyles that appear strongly demanding in terms of energy consumption and waste production.
As a result, the challenge is here to understand how to provide strategies for a radical change, grounded both in the recovering of the existing built heritage and in a more sustainable use of the landscape resource. The issue of mobility and the pervasive presence of infrastructure, can in this context become crucial.
What is relevant here is questioning the spatial configuration that can accommodate contemporary lifestyle while valuing at best the resources of the existing context.



Into the plain
The proposed case study is focused on a section of the Po plain contained between the river Chiese and Oglio and stretching from the first relief of the Pre-Alpi in the north, to the relief of the Appennini in the South. More specifically we will focus on the central part of this section, between the Southern edge of the Garda Lake and the Oglio River.
Municipalities within this region are diverse. We can observe the presence of small towns like Castiglione delle Stiviere or Desenzano with a larger population, but the region, as a complex, is characterized by low density of inhabitants per square kilometre.
All along the XX century, the region has witnessed the settlement of some relevant industrial activities. At the same time tourism was developing as a major economic sector characterized by contrasting and conflictual hypothesis about the future of tourism: on one side, the complex machines of the theme park and on the opposite, the development of rural tourism linked to high-standard agricultural production. At the meantime, the offer for cultural tourism has been continually growing, casting a new light on apparently forgotten places.
Looking at this land today we can probably perceive the contrast between the ancient form of the territory and the current development of society. On one side, a stratified geography, well rooted in the agricultural past, and highly visible in the presence of small historical centres and in the artefacts regulating the countryside (as for example the canals composing the water system and the vegetation along canals and secondary road).
On the opposite side the spreading of generic building typologies and settlement criteria, as an outcome of contemporary processes of land restructuring. The conflict is not just a matter of cultural models: hydrological disruption is causing immense environmental costs; while the small city centres anchored to their well-defined morphology, are not able any more to represent a crucial element in the structuring of contemporary social life.

The case study region thus represents a good opportunity to focus on the relation between the form of the territory and the project strategical tools.
The complex stratification of man-made and natural transformations in the past, as well as the recent processes of change, re-use or abandonment will foster a critical understanding of the site.
Students will be introduced to the necessity of an analytical comprehension of territorial phenomena and a synthetic reconstruction of design problems and perspectives through design practice and experience.
Finally, the design of the actual and concrete space of the city and territory is considered in this studio as major instrument which urban design and planning hold to confront with society aims and desires. Through the prefiguration of actual space, urbanism has the possibility to foster a discussion about the future of our living environment. Social, economic and process aspects of transformations will be dealt with, as an integral part of design process.

The studio didactic structure is composed by lessons, seminar and workshop.
The workshop activity is divided in three phases: in the first phase students will get acquainted with study area, in the second phase students will propose their design strategy which will be implemented and better defined in the third phase. At the end of each phase, students will be asked to present their work in public sessions.

No entry requirements

The exam consist in the final work presentation. Students, working in small groups, are expected to present their proposal with a slideshow,  they will also produce a restricted number of A1 panels and an A4 booklet.

Evaluation is individual. Students will be evaluated according to the following criteria. (list order is non hierarchical)
- students’ capacity to discuss their design objectives and choices and to critically address issues related to the transformation of contemporary urban environment.
- students' ability to communicate their work in a clear and appropriate way. Drawing and linguistic accuracy in all design process will be especially evaluated.
- engagement in the workshop activities including lectures, seminars and group discussions.
learning skills in terms of autonomy and self-organization ability.
- appropriate knowledge of the assigned bibliography and individual ability of critical elaboration.
The exam will be public.