Ricerc@Sapienza

Abstract

The text that is proposed for the conference will focus on the primary role played by Giovannoni in defining an original strategy for the protection and enhancement of ur- ban heritage in Italy in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is in the projects of the ten years of 1910 that he outlined the theory of thinning. This theory is offered as an alternative to the aesthetic and radical reclamation of the historic city, an urban policy still widespread in the early twentieth century.

The metropolitanisation process that affects the contemporany city, climate change, the depletion of ecological and energy sources all demand a unified, integrated and interscalar public government strategy that makes urban regeneration and the restoration of territorial balance its priorities. Such a strategy has been the benchmark for drafting the 12 priority themes of the Urban Agenda for the EU and policies that aim to promote the smart sustainability and efficiency of cities.

As part of the research and experimentation activities by the Department of Planning, Design and Technology, Sapienza University of Rome, the contribution is set in the context of the Research project “Mediterranean Europe. Strategies of urban and metropolitan rebalancing”, taking as its central theme the essential role of green infrastructures (GI) within planning processes aimed at urban and metropolitan rebalancing, and the implementation of urban and territorial regeneration strategies.

The reflection focuses on the role of historical-cultural permanences within the processes of urban regeneration, starting from the experience of the PRG ‘08 of the Municipality of Rome, which, in particular, introduces a new perspective assuming, among its priority options, the role of history for high-quality transformation and recalling, on one hand, the need for an interpretative description of the historical and cultural structure of the territory in all its expressions and specificities and, on the other, the need to reaffirm the centrality of the design dimension for the protection a

The metropolisation processes that, in recent decades, have determined deep territorial transformation, together with the identity features and the intrinsic characteristics of fragility of the contemporary city, recall the need for a unitary, integrated and interscalar public government strategy aimed at urban regeneration.

The new conception of History of the current PRG of the City of Rome reaffirms the centrality of the design dimension of the protection and enhancement of the Historic city within the regeneration strategies of the contemporary city.

Il contributo, riassumendo gli esiti della ricerca Infrastrutture Verdi e Capitali Europee, riporta una riflessione sulla qualità delle città e sulle strategie complesse da perseguire, sia in termini di scale d’intervento (strutturale e di processo) che di ambiti d’azione (economico, ambientale, sociale), da attuare con continuità nel tempo e nel rispetto delle specificità dei contesti.

The construction of public city, intended as the set of public components related to public spaces, green areas, equipment, mobility, social residences, invents the structural objective to be placed at the base of any planning strategy, as well as regeneration of the city. Hence the need for new cognitive and design strategies, as well as a rethinking of the reference models, typical of the traditional urban society, starting from an integrated, intercalary approach that recovers significant relationships between theory, practice, physical dimensions, economic and social change.

The debate about urban regeneration is coping with the spreading of public-private interactions and new geographies of powers. Thanks to a lexical shift from Public-Private Partnership to Public-Private Collaboration (PPC), the research aims to investigate these approaches to urban transformations and, analyzing the features of French best practices, outlines innovation’s potential of such experiences. Four cases were studied as an advanced form of PPC for city-making, with widely recognized high-quality outcomes.