Ricerc@Sapienza

Seoul, the sprawling capital of the Republic of Korea, is a vibrant megacity with a metropolitan area exceeding a population of 25 million inhabitants, among the largest of the world. It is not only South Korea’s prime urban center: it has also evolved to become a global hub, with thriving culture and economy, multinational companies and top-ranked universities.

This book intends to give a contribution to an urgent issue, that concerns the presence of the past in the actual contemporary China, involved in a rapid development that risks to erase the traces of its millenary urban history. The town of Anhai, in Quanzhou city metropolitan area, presents a wide and various urban heritage, typical of Fujian: extensive fabric of traditional, red brick courtyard houses goes together with the presence of some important monuments, among which the ancient Anping bridge is the most relevant.

The experience recounted in this text is that of an international design Workshop held in the autumn of 2015 between Rome and Nanjing, and that involved instructors, PhD candidates, and students from three different faculties: Sapienza University of Rome, Southeast University in Nanjing, Tianjin University in Tianjing.

Italy and China are two countries that conserve many parts of territory that are essentially agricultural, with the populations strongly rooted to the idea of belonging to the place. This sense of identity descends in both cases from the small scale of the individual inhabited settlements, and this is in spite of the enormous scale of China’s urban settlements.

Cities of layered history and the new neighborhoods replacing or expanding
the traditional urban fabric are the major interests of Daniel Solomon during his lifelong
career as architect and scholar. His early interest in the European and Italian
culture of cities is grounded in UC Berkeley academic environment and in the living
urban lesson of the city of San Francisco.

È difficile trovare un saggio pubblicato negli ultimi cinque anni che tratti di politiche urbane, di welfare e di città che non contenga un riferimento, ancorché sommario, al tema “città e salute” e alla sua attuale interpretazione nei contesti accademici o nelle agende politiche. Ciò è particolarmente evidente nei lavori che si occupano degli Stati Uniti d’America, dove i temi dell’environmentalism, analizzati in dossier e studi, hanno una tradizione di lungo corso, non priva di contraddizioni 1.

The road safety of vulnerable users is a current issue; in densely populated areas, the use of alternative and light mobility vehicles is growing in popularity, and their users conflict with vehicles having larger dimensions and masses. This study focuses on the risk analysis of collision between bicyclists and motorized vehicles in urban intersections. Twenty-five urban four-leg intersections, with and without bike paths, were considered in order to identify the conflict points, calculate their hazardousness, and assess the risk of collision using a probabilistic approach.

The paper focuses on the problem of the "informal" city, consisting of large nuclei of houses built in peri-urban areas, for private initiative and without planning, in often fragile territories from the environmental and social point of view. The absence of a recognizable and identifiable form in contemporary urban development leads to theoretical reflections, highlighting the crisis of "architecture without architects" and the spontaneous growth of cities.

In Italy many of Lynch's writings have had great influence. However, if The Image of the City enjoyed a prolonged success, other texts suffered from faster obsolescence. The reasons for this fluctuating interest refer to the debate on urban analysis and design, marked – especially in some periods – by a strong criticism to functionalist, organicist and morphological theories applied to the project.

Women have always been strongly involved in creating environment and living spaces, even without initially being designers because the university was accessible to them very late. They were strong involved in creating a modern environment, and contributing to welfare state, where health and social equipment was a gender response to a modern life. Anyway, the history of architecture remains dominated by Masters and the female presence is almost invisible, even though women's studies have made a large contribution to investigate lives, stories, and professional works.