Urban Bricolage: Governance, Planning and Project Tools for Promotion and Accompaniment of Post-War Modernist Housing Renewal

Urban Bricolage: Governance, Planning and Project Tools for Promotion and Accompaniment of Post-War Modernist Housing Renewal

Fabio Lepratto, Politecnico di Milano (Italia). Paolo Mazzoleni, Comune di Torino (Italia).

A great responsibility and a double challenge engage all players in charge of envisioning, planning, and governing the transformation of a contemporary city. They must fulfil the need to plan long-term strategies and, at the same time, govern on a daily basis, seizing opportunities and adapting to social and economic changes. This complex task requires scalar planning and governing instruments, that are defined by fixed principles furnished with flexible rules and implementing tools. The post-industrial change in the urban development paradigm, with the epochal transition from cities growing on green-fields, always conquering new territories, to those developing on brown-fields, utilizing the pre-existing fabric, has further raised this level of complexity, introducing terms such as reuse, recovery, redevelopment, and regeneration – often adopted with elusive meanings. In this scenario, after playing a relevant role in the expansion phase after World War II modernist residential districts continue to be crucial in the current rethinking phase, given the need to answer well-known criticalities that emerged over time.

One peculiar characteristic stands out in this type of renovation: these areas are intensely inhabited and will continue to be such, hopefully in a better way. Under these circumstances, planning urban regeneration probably assumes its most relevant meaning: taking care of spaces together with the aspirations of the residents and considering their social, cultural, and economic implications. The centrality reached by this matter goes along with urgent need to update precise planning and governance themes, methodologies, goals, and tools. This update is long overdue but still ongoing, at least in most Italian cities. Indeed, innovative tools are necessary to systematically address urban regeneration of these specific contexts within the planning and government codes and instruments, overcoming the occasional approach used so far that brought the sub-par results. A challenge that the City of Torino is taking on in the revision of its territorial planning and governance tools. The need to rethink – not just maintain – this inherited housing stock requires the ability to work through fragments, abandoning any ambition of total planning or total design. Pieces of buildings or entire parts of a city can be rethought and reconstructed by seeking alternative balances in addressing the dualism between modernity and contemporaneity. Renovation demands to be treated by decision-makers as a creative process. Permanence, subtractions, partial replacements, and new additions correspond to an aptitude for real re-thinking of uses, spaces, and shapes. In this sense, as a methodology, it seems inspiring and valuable to recall Claude Lévi-Strauss’ thoughts. In The Savage Mind (1962), the French anthropologist uses the word bricolage to describe the characteristic patterns of mythological thought. The bricoleur, defined as a “savage mind,” embodies the skill of creating something new by recombining pre-existing things together. He gives new meanings and functions to old discarded pieces, constantly adapting his outputs to the available materials. Opposite to the engineer’s “scientific mind,” the bricoleur only cares about getting a particular job done, without aiming to build stable systems out of the ruins or caring about the definition of a new canter or an unequivocal truth. Governance, planning, and design of tools for promoting and accompaniment the regeneration of post-war modernist residential districts can learn from this approach.

Techniques of assemblage, bricolage, and various other additive processes become the designer’s composition tools to hybridize different schemes and models in a pluralistic perspective, enhancing the value of complexity and overlapping. Many interventions have been carried out in Europe over the last two decades, proposing a series of generalizable options for constructing an operative “toolbox” that collects a set of design tactics, strongly oriented to possible future projects. This collection synthesizes and codifies recurring mutations providing devices that go beyond the “case by case” approach.

By analysing them, it was possible to identify several key issues concerning the improvement of spatial quality. The most common architectural and urban mutations were subsequently generalized and catalogued in an open, extensible abacus, superseding the complexity of specific individual cases. The outcome defines a set of tools to feed the imagination while guiding possible future projects in favour of the creative manipulation of the existing. The operations have been broken down by point of application: (1) the ground level, involved in rethinking the interface between buildings and exteriors, (2) the roof level, called to retrieve a lost opportunity of exploiting this extraordinary portion of the building, (3) the thickness of the façade, used to enlarge the domestic sphere, (4) the typological articulation, reconsidered to tackle the emergence of new needs and lifestyles, (5) the building morphology, varied to recalibrate building density and scale, (6) the urban morphology, changed to redistributing volumes according to new spatial principles and open space hierarchy, (7) the networks and infrastructures, reinforced to strengthen social, economic spatial and environmental connections.

What is the role of planning and regulations in this game? This creative attitude needs to be supported – and not opposed – by the government. It should be eligible for exceptions to current regulations and encouraged by incentives. We firmly believe that a specific anti-fragile urban code has to be designed, a set of planning tools and regulations capable of learning, recursively, from design practice, bringing back the spatial, settlement, morphological, and landscape aspects to the centre of urban transformation projects, including the case of modernist residential estates.

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Lepratto, Fabio. 2018. Housing Bricolage: Tools for Manipulating Post-War Collective Housing. DASH Delft Architectural Studies on Housing [online]. 2018. Vol. 14, p. 14–31. DOI 10.7480/dash.14

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon

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Ground Level

GL.01 Enclosing units

GL.05 Addition of an exterior buffer zone GL.02 Insertion of special typologies

GL.06 Shaping the ground level GL.03 Extension of the plinth

GL.07 Opening of a passage

Figure 1. Open Abacus: Ground Level. (Diagrams: Lepratto 2018)

GL.04 Multiplication of entrances

GL.08 Enhancing hallways

Roof Level

RF.01.A Subtraction

RF.03A Mimetic superimposition RF.01.B Subtraction

RF.03.B Explicit superimposition RF.02 Appropriation

RF.04.C Explicit superimposition

Facade

F.01A Specific insertion F.01B Specific insertion F.02 Replacing the infill walls

Figure 2. Open Abacus: Roof Level and Façade. (Diagrams: Lepratto 2018)

F.03.A Thickening of the facade F.06.B Thickening of the facade F.04 Redesign of the side facade

Typological Articulation Building Morphology

TA.01 Home Space adjustment TA.02 Multiplication of typologies TA.03 Distribution spaces adjustment BM.01 Removal of volume BM.01 A Assembling new volumes BM.02 B Assembling new volumes BM.03 Incorporation

Figure 3. Open Abacus: Typological Articulation and Building Morphology. (Diagrams: Lepratto 2018)

Urban Morphology

UM.01A Return to the city block UM.01B Return to the city block UM.02.A Compose hybrid buildings UM.02.B Compose hybrid buildings UM.03.A Insertion of a fine urban pattern UM.03.B Insertion of a fine urban pattern

Networks

N.01 Dematerialising boundaries N.02 Introducing a central route N.03 Introducing public transport N.03 Strenghthening networks Figure 4. Open Abacus: Urban Morphology and Networks (Diagrams: Lepratto 2018) Urban Bricolage: Governance, Planning and Project Tools for Promotion and Accompaniment of Post-War Modernist Housing Renewal