UIC School of Architecture, Urban Planning, Construction Engineering
Urban Planning and Policy Design

URBAN PLANS STUDIO – 099701
Academic year 2016 – 2017
First semester

URBAN PLANNING – 099702
8CFU
Marco Facchinetti

marco.facchinetti@polimi.it

www.marcofacchinetti.com

The aim of the course is to learn urban planning theories and techniques, and the focus of the course are recent and most contemporary urban transformations in Italy and in the western world (Europe and US).
Urban transformations became, since decades, a way of reinterpreting the existing cities, focusing on the unique value of living within the city and its boundaries. In recent years, after a first wave of changes that followed the end of extensive industrialization in western world cities, and not mentioning the early attempts to re invent cities through urban renewal programs (and simultaneously not considering how they failed in many cases), urban transformations became one of the tools that urban planning has to re invent cities. By themselves, they reinterpret the concept of scale, they create a different balance between interior and exterior of urbanized areas and they become new occasions of ‘urbanity’ even where relations and distances are not at an urban scale.
But during recent years, cities have changed, erasing differences and barriers between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, expanding the compactness of traditional centers towards more sprawled regions. Above all, a strong, recognizable shift from being part of a city to acting within a region occurred.
The most interesting aspect of recent transformations is just this: they try to add ‘urbanity’ to places with different speeds, not necessarily compact or concentrated, not contiguous to other places, not historically characterized by compactness and urbanity. Many transformations are still in the cities centers, maybe because some areas missed the occasion of transformation’s first generation, but the majority is occurring in other places, not close to the city center, and able to re invent the relations within urban regions. These transformations are creating episodes of urbanity all around the regions, re connecting disconnected areas, presenting themselves as points to be reached by major transportation facilities and showing their ability to create urban atmosphere.
The new urban feeling, the invention of a model where being ‘urban’ is cooler than before, the western culture of young, hipster, cultured and well-dressed men and women find a perfect place in recent and contemporary transformations: urbanity, centrality, connectivity and sustainability are four of the paradigms that transformations bring with them and on which the course will focus on.
Transformations occur every time there is an under used area or a use that should/want to be changed. They used to be long term, in decision-taking and constructions, due to the size that former industrial areas had, but they tend to be faster, smaller and more oriented in changing some places of the metropolitan area being able to insert, at a metropolitan level, a new presence. The speed of urban transformations and the size of the areas involved has shifted from large, very central areas to smaller, sometimes not necessarily central areas able to infuse urban life to more suburban places.

URBAN PLANS STUDIO – 095990
Academic year 2015 – 2016
Second semester

URBAN PLANS
8CFU
Marco Facchinetti