LAndsCAPEs of WATER Paola Viganò The projects I will discuss are related to several research and design experiences concerning water infrastructure. Led in different contexts, they have been the occasion to bring together ideas, positions, topics, key issues, and design approaches that slowly construct a common experience of Europe’s physical landscape as a research field. This first statement seems banal but it requires taking a step back to reconsider the actual condition of the European city and territory.
A second common idea is that we, architects, urbanists, and landscape architects, have to respond to changes with pragmatic and operable solutions. This research takes some risks in considering the existence of Europe’s landscape over time, which is crucial in reading and working at the scale of the territory and also crucial when reflecting on the deep mutations of its basic infrastructural support. The effort shows that time is not working against design activity but is one of its most important components, and that we cannot think of actualizing such transformations without broadening not only our spatial but also our temporal horizon.
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A third quite diffused idea, related to the former one, is that to provide solutions is an activity that does not require an elaborate theoretical approach and that design operations in particular are only the application of knowledge formulated and established in other contexts. The design approach reveals to what extent, when working on the water theme, we are confronted with concepts, ideas, and scientific and technical paradigms, and finally with ideologies, political projects that are historically and culturally based. To confront them, we need to take a critical distance and reread them from a new, contemporary theoretical perspective, with the understanding that changes in paradigms are occurring in other disciplines: hydraulic and environmental engineers, for example, are today thinking
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PROPOSAL CU 63
One common idea is that European urban and territorial fabrics are almost concluded, after a long story of progressive densification and networking. These projects explore, on the contrary, the great changes that will affect European territory in the future, starting with problems related to water management, agricultural reduction, and structural evolution. The themes are not any easier to handle in the Italian state of Veneto than they are in Holland or in other parts of Europe, and many researchers are currently observing them from different points of view. What is sure is that Europe’s landscape is drastically changing and is in need of new concepts and visions.
2006 Brisbane
INTENSIFIED INFRASTRUCTURE Christina Tung + Rodrigo Prieto product, and goods must be ultimately delivered safely and on time). This project proposes an urban strategy that ties together the dependent synergies of various global industries into a single water network. By having one industry’s waste output become another industry’s productive input, we challenged the traditional water paradigm through a stratification of water purity and an intensification of infrastructure.
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In determining a site, the proximity of the port and airport were considered for their existing infrastructures. In response to the decreasing amounts of rainfall on Brisbane, we considered future cloud-seeding locations that could work in conjunction with the airport. Where the optimal heights and velocities of planes took place around the site, we calculated the major forces of the wind in the area. Because much of Brisbane’s park and preserved land has been taken over by industry, we focused on the borders between industry and recreation to determine how our proposal could change the urban morphology at the local and urban scales. Our site was a constant negotiation between park, water, industry, topology, and climate. At the thresholds, we hoped to discover a place for an opportunity for change. We envision bringing to Brisbane’s harbor everything from a semiconductor chip manufacturing plant, pharmaceutical, synthetic gas, food and beverage, and metals finishing, to a single site where water types are sorted, shared among opportunistically driven partners and integrated back into the urban fabric, sharing waters with adjacent commercial, agricultural, and public spaces. The impact of our design in the face of today’s water scarcity and driving technologies will gradually emerge a new modality of metropolitan order.
1 Air Traffic Patterns 2 Wind Patterns 3 Program 4 Sections 5 Experience 2
and acting differently than in the past, and a new alliance is possible. About Dispersion The projects presented here deal with the theme of requalification of a part of the Veneto Region —diffused, fragmented, and contaminated—starting with the complex system of its water resources. The territory of Veneto, like many contemporary locations, is a place of paratactic combinations of a great number of paradoxes. It is a mutating territory, like many European territories of dispersion, where significant causes of crisis come to light that are modifying the character traits of the diffused city. I am referring to the specific mix of housing and industry in an extended territory, usually involving people living in a single detached house and working in a small enterprise. This model of diffusion and of “development without fractures” (Fuà, Zacchia, 1983) has been described in Italy both by economists, sociologists, geographers, and urbanists starting from the end of the 1970s and especially during the last 20 years (Indovina, 1990, Secchi, 1991 and 2005).
PROPOSAL CU 65
The different paradoxes and elements of crisis are deeply linked to the distinctive features of settlement dispersion, a long-term phenomenon that has invested a great part of the Veneto territory, within which specific infrastructural configurations were defined: for instance, the diffused networks of waterways and roads. Isotropy is among the most intriguing feature: an almost utopian, egalitarian condition that is at the same time individualist, in which resources and opportunities are uniformly and regularly distributed. Nevertheless, the isotropic territory reveals unsuspected rigidity, with themes of hierarchy and difference. The same functional mix of small productive complexes and housing, which is typical of the incremental growth of the widely dispersed micro-industries in Veneto, enters into crisis when new mobility infrastructures must be inserted: There the conflict with the waters and the lower “sponge” of roads and built fragments explodes.
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A paradox of void spaces also emerges in this territory, particularly the paradox of the still vast agricultural lands, which, except for a few instances, remain marginal from an economic viewpoint. Differently from other areas of settlement dispersion like Flanders, where the built areas reach percentages close to 60%, the Veneto plains cover important agricultural extensions that still represent the largest part of the territory. Despite this, and with the exception of some strongly specialized agricultural areas like those for chicory crops or vineyards, the functional and symbolic role of the agricultural landscape remains limited.
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2006 dubai + Gold Coast
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DUBAI IN EVERY CITY: The Waterfront + Speculative Real Estate Aimee Chang Homogenization of place is occurring globally at the expense of local context. Dubai is selling itself as the 21stcentury prototype global city, founded on excessive consumption of mass tourism and speculative construction. Dubai is presented by its architecture as “consumable, replaceable, disposable, and short-lived.” And architects are propagating this unsustainable, exploitative, and repressive phenomenon in cities worldwide!
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Is this all that architecture has to offer society today? Gold Coast is Australia’s fastest-growing city in terms of population growth and construction. 42km of natural coastline has been expanded by a factor of 10 along manmade canals to construct the most expensive real estate in the state. The morphology of the seascape and landscape is so fabricated that you cannot distinguish between the natural and constructed. The type of waterfront real estate development taking place in Dubai can be found in other emerging cities around the world. There is a Dubai in every developing city!
1 Dubai: Prototype 21st Century? 2 1960s Creek: Dubai 3 1990s - 1990s Expansion: Dubai 4 Projected Development of Waterfront: Dubai 5 Fabricated Iconic Landscape: Dubai 6 Lot Selection: Dubia 7 Dubai in Every City: Gold Coast Australia 8 Queensland Australia Coastline: Gold Coast 9 Surfer’s Paradise Coastline: Gold Coast 10 Canal Estates Coastline: Gold Coast 11 Fabricated Iconic Landscape: Gold Coast 12 Lot Selection: Gold Coast
The marginal, even if extended, void requires a new conceptualization that could invest more sense and meaning to the possible forms of public space related to the different practices of the territory. The changing geographies of centrality relegate the traditional forms of public spaces to tourist attractions, or as peripheral and insignificant. My hypothesis is that today the relations between the fundamental elements of territorial support and its uses are in a state of crisis, often deprived of any effective meaning whatsoever, as if a hiatus had been introduced between the land’s infrastructure and its society. Not only is there the crisis of what many perceived as a model of territorial, social, and economic organization, which obliges us to rethink the existing relations between society and territory, but the reasons for this crisis are also enrooted in the here and now.
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The idea of territory as infrastructure solidifies and becomes concrete in the fundamental elements of its support: the natural and artificial water regime and road systems. Through these elements, we can read many of the processes of rationalization that were realized in the course of time, the various ideologies that inspired them, the various images of modernization that were pursued, and the crisis that affects them, and see a growing distance between a support constituted over a long period and society with its contemporary needs and desires. In what ways is water a shared or a fought-over resource in the dispersed territory of Veneto? How can it participate in the construction of a new landscape for living? About Water Rationalizations In this context it is important to recognize the various processes during which different forms of rationalities have been posited in the form of concrete infrastructure and objects. Today, this transformation and modernization process appears extraordinarily accelerated and requires the development of new hypotheses. “Water” includes natural and artificial flows, reclamation and irrigation devices, and draining systems. Water may not always be visible but is the underlying reason for the construction of the territory around Venice. The institutional representation of the metropolitan area itself nearly coincides with the drainage basin of the lagoon, the territory whose superficial waters enter the lagoon of Venice or have been deviated from it in the period of the Venetian Republic. The empty space of today’s lagoon remains at the center of the territory around, as it was when 16th-century hydraulic sciences were born in Venice. “Rational” here is used in the sense that society decided in a specific historical moment that a certain type of territorial modification
was useful and started a process of improvement. Different layers are stacked upon one another, often reversing the point of view and the idea of what had to be considered rational: large or incremental investments, as in the Roman aggeratio or in its pervasive and continuous modification over centuries; exercises of collective and individual power to reach collective or individual scopes, as in the transformations of the industrial and agricultural models; and the expression of changing ideologies.
In the 16th century, the second big attempt to rationalize the waters, the great diversion of rivers entering the lagoon, was started by the Venetian Republic in order to avoid filling the protective water surface with sand and gravel brought from the northern mountains. Rivers were displaced to the east and west of the lagoon and new canals were built in an incredible effort that is at the origin of the new science of hydrology. This moment also marks the entry of Venice into a new phase of globalization, more interested in land and agriculture than in sea commerce. The outcome of the long debate opposing “the reasons of the land” to “the reasons of the sea” came out in a new phase of rationalization. In the 1930s, the third moment of rationalization, during the Fascist period, big works of reclamation invested the low wet areas around the lagoon with procedures of polderization not unlike the Dutch ones. The works were strong enough to change completely the physical and ecological character of the land, using complex systems of dikes, ditches, and pumping stations, to create new areas for industrial agriculture.
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If in the middle wet plain the problem is to expel the water, in the dry plain it is to bring it in to provide irrigation, avoiding its immediate infiltration into the water table. In a beautiful map by Anton Von Zach, made at the beginning of the 19th century, a system of canals was represented as an interconnected mesh. During the 1930s, the continuous mesh was transformed into a network of concrete canals, a tree structure in which the relation between vegetation and water was lost, and the accessibility to the cultivated fields was limited. This transformation was also the consequence of a wider project of industrialization: a new alliance between big industry, which needed electricity and power to develop the new petrochemical pole of Porto Marghera, and the farmers of the dry plain. Big dams were built in the mountains that needed important engineering works, and part of the water was given to new industrial agriculture developed out of a “desert of gravel” in the dry plain, depriving the Piave River of almost all its water. The landscape changed: The earth canal with trees on both sides disappeared or remained only as a fragment, and the new network of concrete reduced the agricultural richness and biodiversity of the area with a strong simplification of traditional associations. The comparison of the two structures, the mesh and the tree structure, on a contemporary map, shows the conflict between the two different ideas of rational use of water. Onsite, the contrast is even more striking: One discovers the conflicting relation between them and the difficulty in making them work together. About Centrality and Public Space Starting from the complex system of waters and from the need of a safer territory, our design research explores the possibility of giving more space to the water, both for stocking it and to prevent flooding. It envisages the integration of low-lying, cultivated land along a river, or abandoned gravel pits turned into water reservoirs and canals in a new system of open spaces for public and collective practices. How does centrality match with the idea of a dispersed territory? In an isotropic territory, is a dispersed system of water storage more rational then one big basin?
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The roughly 700 hectares called Prà dei Gai are a natural depression that can have an important role in guided flooding operations on the Livenza river. Its tributary, the Meduna (an alpine river, different from the Livenza, which is a quiet river that originates from a spring), has very dangerous floods, and when it reaches the main river the force of its waters obstructs the flowing of the Liv-
Each rationalization created its own landscape: The aggeratio attaches a drainage system to a network of roads, rows of trees, and cultivated fields divided by minor draining lines. More recently, in the last four decades, it has also organized a landscape of houses and industries along the roads, and its pres-
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CASE STUDY CU 67
In a very short and simplified overview, one can recognize three main moments of rationalization in strict relation with the geological, topographical, and hydrogeological features, following which we can divide the plain into three strips from north to south: the dry plain of gravel crossed by alpine rivers; the middle wet plain below the spring line; the lower wet plain up to the lagoon. The first important rationalization was the Roman centuriatio: Starting from the 2nd century B.C., it developed simultaneously as a drainage system, plot subdivision, and road infrastructure. Along the middle wet plain, the centuriatio turns at different angles to accommodate slopes that allow water to flow away from the impermeable ground.
ence helps to reveal the conditions in which a new economy of small and medium enterprises are initiated along the grid.
WATER AS COMMODITY FOR TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS Aimee Chang
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In the capitalist market, the ability to operate at all scales within world cycles and networks has been taken advantage of by transnational corporations. Global localization is a neoFordist strategy of downsizing to exploit peripheral economies within the world system. International institutions like the World Health Organization are filtering world territory into archipelagoes of constructed criteria—here, by urban populations with access to safe drinking water. This archipelago is further defined by developing nations and has become a strategic territory for occupation by Nestlé Corporation. Nestlé created a multisite concept to “answer the needs of emergent countries’ people waiting for healthy water” by manufacturing and distributing water locally in those nations. The first 12 sites of production have vastly different infrastructural landscapes, yet the same blueprint factory was dropped in all those locations to produce a bottled water with the exact same mineral composition and taste.
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Capable of global deployment, Pure Life bottled water achieves autonomy at the expense of local homogenization.
1 16th C Mercantilism: functional pattern of pointless flows MARITIME RoUTES MARITIME CITIES HANSEATIC ToWNS
2 20th C Global Capitalization: networked 3 Development Doppler EMAAR NAKHEEl SUNlAND DEvEloPER HEADQUARTERS lINK SECoNDARy PRoPERTIES
4 Access to safe drinking water 5 Urban populations with access to safe drinking water 100% 75 - 99% 50 - 74% 25 - 49% 0 - 24%
6 Transnational corporate territory 7 Nestle pure life territory 4
enza, which then goes back, inundating the plain. The depression, immediately north of the confluence, could play a role in reducing the risk of flooding, but Prà dei Gai is also a vast grass surface along the river around which are located small centers, linear settlements, dispersed industrial activities, agriculture, and old Venetian villas transformed into four-star hotels. Existing dikes and paths are the frontier between this large and almost empty area, today flooded one or two times a year, and the rest of the territory. The hydraulic project will transform this depression in an anti-flooding basin for which it is necessary to separate the basin (the depression) from the river by way of a new dike and a new canal. This means that the Livenza river will split into two parts with different speeds, which can create interesting conditions for new ecosystems. The construction of canals and dikes (a strip about 60 meters long) can reach a ground balance.
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What If? What would happen if the effort to retrofit the natural depressions became the beginning of a contemporary park? What If? What would happen if Prà dei Gai were considered the center of this territory instead of a marginal site?
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The new canal, the new dikes, the bridges and paths, and the humid areas have been the starting point to design the relations between Prà dei Gai and its surrounding territory. Two main hypotheses come in to play: The first accepts the new dikes’ configuration and explores the patterns of interaction between the interior and the exterior of the new flooded area; the second reverses the engineering concept and proposes to use the new dikes to frame the built areas instead of the river and the flooding basin. The water can find new spaces between the built areas protected by new dikes, which can also become places to live and work. A process of phyto-depuration of white and grey water can be integrated along the dikes to solve the lack of a proper sewage system in some parts of the area. Although the second approach enlarges the concern of flooding to a wider territory, it is important to note that both environmental and hydraulic engineers agree about its rationality. From the spatial point of view, the two concepts define alternative configurations of extraordinary interest, in both cases based on the design of border and cross devices that mediate the relation between the living areas and the flooded ones. In both cases the grassland of Prà dei Gai, crossed by the Livenza river
CASE STUDY CU 69
Starting with these scenarios, we can see ideas developing for a space that integrates and reinterprets the engineering transformations.
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dubai + Gold Coast DUBAI IN EVERY CITY Aimee Chang 2006
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We live in a world of bipolarity: of the global village and the peripheral node; of total domination and pluralizing anthropology; of the traditional and the contemporary; of the constructed and the natural; of designing an icon for a city at the desk of an architect in another country. Dubai is one outcome of this bipolarity, where the poles remain at their extremes. There exists, however, the potential for crossbreeding in architecture to produce something new. Global systems are not taken at face value, but eaten, digested, and reproduced as something alternate to and capable of feeding back on the system. Might an architect critically appropriate a dominant culture through stealth occupation of existing market modals? 1 Tower typology 2 Generic Suburban Sprawl: Dubai 3 Generic Suburban Sprawl: Gold Coast 4 Dream Home Selection Matrix: Choose a plan + elevation 5 Q1 Typical Floor Plan 6 Q1 Jewel Floor Plan 7 Climate Zone: passive heating + cooling 8 Local labor and materials: red cedar + rosewood 9 A jewel in the jewl box: The Palm Deira and The Palm Trump 10 Unit Selection Matrix: Choose a barcode, Standard Marketing Graphic, unique architectural unit 11 Entry 12 Bedroom
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and the Rasego humid area, can be today interpreted as the empty center of a wider diffused area, where a rural society used to meet for village fĂŞtes and animal fairs. The second research project, above the spring line, concerns the dry plain, where the need to prevent flooding goes together with the necessity to irrigate the cultivated fields profiting from the presence of hundreds of gravel pits.
Ultimately, within this scenario, the question and the proposal for the reuse of the abandoned gravel pits translate into an extraordinary opportunity to rethink the territory, its landscape, its construction modalities, and the activities that today directly involve it. The pits, the canals that connect them to waterways, the pathways that would run their
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PROPOSAL CU 71
What If? What would happen if all the gravel pits in the Treviso province were to be utilized as basins for flood prevention for excess fluvial flood waters and as reservoirs? The quantities that come into question are relevant. Almost 80 million cubic meters of water could be collected within the new basins— representing about half the capacity that the Vajont dam held (150 million cubic meters). After the terrible tragedy of the Vajont dambreak in 1963, the utilization of the Piave river’s water (for electric energy and agriculture irrigation) went on, as if the available quantities had not changed, and the diminishing of a river that was increasingly lacking water continued, especially in the summer months. Today the water deficit of the Piave river, which comes out of the balance between use and resources, including vital minimum runoff, is 50 million to 60 million cubic meters. The holding capacity of the existing gravel pits could instead be sufficient for guaranteeing the necessary water for agriculture in periods of drought, significantly reducing the drawing of river waters in the more delicate periods of the fluvial ecosystem. This would also avoid the drawing of waters from the mountain basins during the summer months, when they are frequented by many for recreational and sports activities.
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Morton Bay TRANSBOUNDARY WATERS Clara Abecassis 2006 A regional map indicates the areas that have been investigated as part of the SEQRWSS. While consideration is being given to the specific areas covered by the Council of Mayors (SEQ) member councils, where relevant, a number of significant cross-boundary connections have been taken into account with adjacent local governments. Principal Reasons for Sand Extraction Commercial: Ongoing commercial extraction for use mainly in concrete and concrete products 2
Development: Large-scale extraction for development of capital projects, including fill requirements for the expansion of the Brisbane Airport Shipping and Port Access: Navigational channel maintenance works and capital dredging undertaken by the Port of Brisbane Corporation to maintain designated minimum channel depths and to provide safety for navigation Water Filtration: For use in rapid sand water filtration to provide further freshwater sourcing for Brisbane and its surrounding communities 1 Combined distribution of primary river basins 2 Wind flows into Morton Bay 3 River flows into Morton Bay 4 Sand Extraction from Morton Bay 5 Site Plan 6 Site 7 Completion of the 4.6 km seawall extension at the Brisbane Port, Aug 2004 3
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length, the tree-lined strips, the enhanced embankments, rest points, wooded areas, sports and recreation facilities—all these could comprise the layout for a networked park area that could innovate public spaces within an extended territory. There are of course certain precise conditions to consider: the problem of hydraulic security, the changes in irrigation techniques, the abundance of the gravel pits, factors that presently constitute the possibility for a collective and effective territorial project.
The consequences of abandonment are that the gravel pit is today an extremely attractive setting, which the project maintains while working for its partial transformation. For example: The central woods and the grassy escarpment need not be completely modified while, conversely, the pit can be transformed into a veritable ecological testing ground as well as a place for recreation to be inserted within a more ample context. The idea advanced here is for a reservoir basin that draws off effusions from the irrigation canal, south of the gravel pit, and from the northern new canal during the Meschio flood periods, while the woodlands at its heart are to be maintained. Pathways, jetties, and waterside rest stops can all enhance the area and make the vicinity comfortable, in passing down through the different elevations towards the low woods where part of the grassy es-
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PROPOSAL CU 73
The Merotto gravel pit recuperation project is therefore interesting in a number of ways. Its planning resulted in three important objectives. First, to help ensure the availability of water for agriculture during the summer and periods of drought, as shown in the previous scenario; second, to mitigate against the flooding of the river Meschio; third, to test the possibility of enriching the phreatic stratum (direct improvement of the reservoir bed). Its introduction here, into an ex–gravel pit that is already in a very advanced state of renaturalization and constitutes “an extremely interesting biotype from a naturalistic point of view” (CBSP, 2003), is even more intriguing. The water table flows from northwest to southeast; it is located between nine and ten meters below surface level, and different types of habitat have developed within the gravel pit, including wet woodlands of white willow (Salix alba) and black poplar (Populus nigra), reeds, and wetland habitation, which constitute a rare element of biodiversity in the higher dry plain, together with mesophytic grasses over large edge areas. Among other considerations, geological surveys around the gravel pit show that the trees manage to grow in an area of “notable adaptation to the under-soil” where building rubble, concrete chunks, and even plastic material can be found to a depth of approximately 1.8 meters.
2006 Morton Bay TRANSBOUNDARY WATERS Clara Abecassis
carpment creates a “natural� arena. The various design hypotheses for the new canal resulted from a broad debate between hydraulic engineers and designers that confronted the issues concerning floodwater management and territorial redevelopment. Progress was made from a complete separation of the two aspects (the hydraulic workings ensured by a flood-overflow pipeline and a surface trench that superficially resembles a traditional water network) towards the idea of a canal connecting the river to the gravel pit with variable and articulated cross-sections, more coherent both to the scope of maintaining open-air water and to the actual situation of settlement dispersal. The variable sections allow the canal to adapt to different situations, taking advantage of its capacity for expansion and only having to reduce itself to a pipeline in the stretches deemed necessary. The new feature introduced into the countryside landscape clarifies the connection between the gravel pit and the river via the creation of linear parklands with hedges and clearings: a new (territorial) scale for public space.
PROPOSAL CU 75
As I have already written, the paradox of public spaces in the territories of dispersion is clear, revealing at the same time the crisis of traditional urbanity, of the modern concept of public space and the limits of a strongly individualized way of life. A weak structure of small squares, roadside churches, and modern facilities, often in marginal and disconnected areas, is dispersed throughout the territory. In recent years, much investment has been made to requalify public spaces within a traditional urban framework, often inventing them where they had never existed and in competition with new places of consumption. The modern welfare city, highly standardized and isotropic, has found it difficult to represent the peculiar mix of rurality and urbanity of the Venetian territory, and has remained a predominantly functional space. Public space is something larger. It is an infrastructural space that individuals cannot afford on their own. Yet it is a social space that we consider our own. It is related not only to urbanity or to the modern idea of welfare but also to larger symbolic representations. In a metropolitan region such as Venice, where more than 70 percent of the land is still cultivated (producing only 2.8% of GDP), the ideal can be neither Times Square nor a village community space. In the European dispersed territories, along the isotropic network of water and asphalt, minimal and large-scale projects can produce denser environments. Flooding areas, former gravel pits, new forests, irrigation devices, canals and public transport nodes are materials and places with which and in which to reformulate the concept of public and public space. They
2006 Bangladesh RURBAN AGGLOMERATIONS fatou Kine dieye Much like blood, water’s hydrologic cycle ensures the health of man and the growth of civilizations around the world. Throughout history, large cities have always relied on water as a pivotal element in their development. Water is not only an essential resource for human development but also often considered a primary factor for economic prosperity and a guiding force in determining the rituals of everyday life. Due to climate change, population growth, and increasing urbanization, our most important resource is now being threatened.
are dispersed elements that could support today’s different activities connected to an extended use of the territory, to new forms of collective representation and free time. They are not related to an idea of center and periphery but to the construction of a field of horizontal conditions for contemporary practices and ecology. About isotropy and modernity: some provisional conclusions The projects described above are part of wider research that observes the Veneto region and its emerging paradoxes starting from its main infrastructural layers: water and asphalt. They define isotropic conditions inside the territory. The hypothesis is that the hydraulic regime and the road system must be invested with new relationships and meanings: The great image of isotropy is here considered a fundamental element for the design of a contemporary territorial support. Although the territory is not perfectly isotropic, and certainly not homogeneous, isotropy remains a reference, an extreme and ideal goal.
The first element supporting the hypothesis of a new Modernity comes out of the territory itself: Some of the transformations we read through deep insights and descriptions innovate the vocabulary of space and coexistence; they show original paths to modernization that are not a banal reproduction of traditional ones (Viganò, 2001, 2004). Often these situations elaborate, as has been the case in many territories of dispersion in Europe, specific conditions of development, in contradiction with the project of Modern Urbanism, mixing what had to be separated; dispersing where things had to be concentrated; using heterogeneity as an absorbing tool, instead of homogeneity; being incremental instead of planned. Especially in the beginning, at least in the Italian case, this new territory has been the condition and the support for a soft and diffused economic growth; social and economic mo-
CASE STUDY CU 77
Our main research question is threefold: What remains contemporary in the past process of rationalization? Is isotropy a figure of contemporary and future rationality (in other words, is isotropy a useful condition inside a process of modernization)? Which new conditions have emerged to make it possible to conceive a new project of isotropy? I am conscious of the emphasis put on loaded terms as rationality or modernization and the need to clarify them: The project of isotropy is, at the same time, the acknowledgement of territorial specificity (the Venice metropolitan area); a scenario to be investigated in its manifold consequences; and a design hypothesis that can be concretely elaborated: It puts forward a new possibility of being Modern.
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RURBAN AGGLOMERATIONS fatou Kine dieye The idea behind the project is to think of water-resource management as the determining factor in urban and community development, viewing water as a cultural symbol and a primary force in human development. This proposal introduces a new type of urbanism, one in which resource management and social networks are the driving force behind economic prosperity. Using the model developed by Muhammad Yunus for Grameen Bank, the proposal relies on a microfinance structure as a means of organizing new type of “rurban” development. 1 It takes a village... 2 Sample superstructure 3 Arial view of Bangladesh’s largest cities 4 Flow 5 Cost of Water Filters and Pumps 6 Ganges Delta
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bility have been high, much higher than in traditional urban conditions. An entire territory has changed, superposing a new layer on the old structure that is not contradictory to it but more intense. Where dispersion was a phenomenon of long duration the dispersion simply became more evident and society changed radically. A second element of my hypothesis of a new Modernity is related to the important infrastructural changes we are now facing: The rethinking of the water system in the cases presented above is only one of the possible events. In the recent past, with very few exceptions, the realization of hard infrastructures has always been divided into separated fields (civil engineering and hydraulic engineering, for example), following a full set of distinct paradigms and often invoking the supposed neutrality of technique. A new alliance is today urgent among different fields of knowledge and technology; the change in paradigms is crumbling the modern plaster and designing new possibilities of sharing images and visions of the future. The micro histories of the redesign of PrĂ dei Gai and of the Merotto gravel pit are one of the possible results.
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PROPOSAL CU 79
The third and final element, related to the previous one—the important infrastructural transition we are passing through—concerns the need of a new and collective project in which a change in paradigms and concepts can be used to reach a shared vision. In the case of the dispersed territories of the Veneto region, the paradox of isotropy can be reversed into a new project starting from the water support: investing in infrastructures both on the local and the general level, starting from the complex water system and reconnecting it to the rest of the territory, to the contemporary practices. 5
New forms of modernity, inspired by a shift in paradigms, by new conceptualizations, and by a different form of rationality (Dryzek, 1987) are one possible consequence of the deep modernization processes occurring in our epoch.
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