B Urban Parameters
UNDER STANDING S IT UATI ON S
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A sustainable approach to urban design cannot be purely technical, normative, green, systemic, economic or social; it has to be all these things combined in a new way. Architecture and urban developments involve contradictory issues: density vs. access to natural light, compactness vs. generosity of spaces and landscapes, energy efficiency vs. construction costs, etc. Sustainable urban design cannot mean the same thing everywhere but must relate to the specific conditions of each different place. Sustainability encompasses the ecologic, the economic and the social, parameters that vary entirely according to the geographic, climatic, economic and cultural conditions of each region or city. In his Manuals, published in 1975, Yona Friedman illustrates the condition of the inhabited territories representing ‘territories where people live’ as ‘islands’, each island creating is own specific condition: geographic, physical, social, economic and cultural.2 Territories must be considered with regard to the combinations of multiple specific characters. These urban parameters have to be analysed according to a multi-scalar approach to apprehend systems at multiple scales simultaneously. To understand and respond to the 1×1 km project sites, a series of fifteen urban layers is set to analyse the condition of each site according to different parameters.
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