UPLanD - Journal of Urban Planning, Landscape & environmental Design
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Superscribing Sustainability: The Production of China’s Urban Waterscapes
Full text linkThis paper analyzes the linkages between urban waterscapes, nature aesthetics, and sustainability by delineating the re-emergence of shan-shui, translatable as ‘mountain-water,’ or ‘landscape,’ within contemporary urban China. I show how this aesthetic concept, originally emerging in third century Chinese landscape poetry, is used to reconfigure and reimagine sustainability and contemporary China’s urban landscapes. I draw on original mixed methods fieldwork, including interviews over a two-year period, digital archiving, historical texts and discourse analysis. Through these methods, I detail the emergence of shan-shui aesthetics then draw on the concept of superscription, the historical process of layering symbolic meanings, to understand the contemporary superscription of shan-shui with urban sustainability through the writings of prominent Chinese scientists and urban planning experts. Their productive work generated a new imaginary of teleological urban modernity that superscribes shan-shui with urban sustainability as the “shan-shui city.” Through two primary case studies, Tangshan Nanhu Eco-city and Meixi Lake, I show how the production of new sustainable urban waterscapes is linked with place making practices, territorial processes, and localized entrepreneurialism. Finally, I point to the limits of superscription, by highlighting the significant disconnect between the state framing of urban space and the lived experiences of urban residents, which I conceptualize as the osculation of the state. The paper, thus, intervenes in literatures regarding the historical transformations of cultural symbols, aesthetics, urban political ecology, and the political economy of place-making in China
The sustainability of the urban system from a hydrological point of view: a practice planning proposal
Full text linkEnvironmental protection issues are often considered as a toll to be paid and not as a proactive development engine in urban planning. The issue of green areas needs to be re-interpreted as a real infrastructure, which is able to provide tangible benefits to the health and safety of citizens. These aspects represent fundamental issues of the applied research, which should explore methods and techniques able to provide the ecological concerns with the ability to operate efficiently. This paper aims to provide an answer to these questions focusing the attention on the greenery in the city and on one of its most important ecosystem services, which is mitigation of flooding events. The experimentation was carried out in an urban area, verifying, in quantitative terms, the role of the green, engineered with some SUDS, to mitigate the hydrological alteration that the urban development involves. Finally, two proposals have been presented to move from traditional planning based on normative standards to a more flexible, site-specific performance-based planning
Green for the regeneration in sustainable urban planning
No full textThis work proposes a method for urban planning aimed at pursuing the sustainable regeneration of the central neighborhoods of the city through the reorganization of settlement patterns and the protection of its environmental heritage and biological resources. The design approach uses green spaces in all their various forms, increasing soil permeability, with a connecting system of the public spaces and institutions, increasing the energy efficiency of buildings and renewable sources in order to transform the city into a complex productive, livable and sensitive ecosystem. The application of the method focuses on the famous Barrios Pueblos of Güemes and Observatorio which are threatened by a flawed urban legislation that allows for the exclusive vertical development of residential buildings, thus affecting the urban equilibrium of these areas of significant historical value. The planning support methodology focuses on all the aspects related to the wider use of green materials within the city
The suitability of sustainable retrofitting means for shopping malls, in an environmental and urban background. A resume of the methodology
No full textThe current paper shows the resume of a methodology of application, developed in the paper´s author PHD thesis, showing an overview of the methodology structure, being also included the first results of the case study. The research was focused on the analysis of different means of sustainable retrofitting applied to shopping malls buildings, considering both features of urban background and building conditions (eco efficiency of building, nature and environment capabilities, uses, and current state of the urban surroundings towards urban eco efficiency). Eight cases of study were chosen, placed in different areas in the cities of Sao Paulo, Madrid, and suburban USA. According to the methodology established, the results achieved show that the means of retrofitting for the shopping malls studied, must be aimed to insert green regenerative elements in the background of the dense and complex urban areas of Sao Paulo and Madrid. As contrast to this, in the Suburban USA, retrofitting operations must be focused on the densification and insertion of uses complexity within the urban surroundings
The Living Archive and the Sublime Nature of the Anthropocene
Full text linkAt the 2015 UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris France, 195 nations reached a decision to commit to decrease the severe effects of climate change on the planet. As we embark what some call the Anthropocene Era, we bare witness to how civilization has impacted the Earth’s ecosystem, diminishing its resources and threatening its biodiversity. With this shift in our ecosystem, a new pedagogical model for a graduate architecture studio responded to the Anthropocene through a technologically sublime intervention: The Living Archive, a new architectural type capturing the magnitude of Earth’s inevitable transformation. This archive is conceived as the anti-thesis to sustainability and optimization that consumes much of our built world. The ‘living archive’ program is not meant to be a stable, secure vessel but uses technological invention to bracket what is being invaded by human existence. Through the invention of an ‘archiving machine’, the studio used technological speculation to question what nature can or will become. The aim was to use ‘living archive’ as a physical commentary or critique on our current relationship to the environment. The paper describes three projects that speculate on the inevitable future of various biomes. Through environmental analysis, technological research, and formal aspirations, each project embodies a potential reality and potential future of the Anthropocene
Terraced Landscapes. The “Penisola Sorrentino – Amalfitana” Case
Full text link“Terraced landscapes are all over the world. They are the tangible evidence of how human life can express itself in the steepest slopes of mountain and coastal areas of the world.Despite the multi-disciplinary values that terraced landscapes represent throughout the world were scarcely appreciated in the past decades, indeed the interest in their wise management and broader understanding has been constantly growing since the end of the past century. Some of the terraced landscapes have been recognised at international level for their importance (terraces of Ifugao in Philippines, Yuanyang terraces in Yunnan – China, Bali in Indonesia, the Italian Cinque Terre and Costiera Amalfitana included in the UNESCO World Heritage List)” (3rd World Meeting on Terraced Landscape - http://www.terracedlandscapes2016.it/en)For this and many other reasons we will mention later, calling just upon “preservation and safeguard” of these landscapes and these products – without approaching the situation with more complex strategies, tightly connected to every other touristic attraction of these areas – turns out to be a mere desire, difficult to achieve
Community Engagement in an Urban Daylighting Project: A Case Study of a Salt Lake City Creek
Full text linkDuring the industrialization era in the U.S., most waterways in urban areas were buried underground. Daylighting, the process of resurfacing and restoring buried aquatic systems, has grown as a planning practice. This practice can bring to communities environmental, economic, and social benefits—making cities more sustainable and livable. City Creek in Salt Lake City will be used as a case study of a future daylighting project in Euclid, a minority and low income neighborhood. In particular, this paper will highlight planning and locally-driven efforts to raise awareness among residents on the importance of conserving and restoring stream ecosystems. The article will discuss what community members involved in a visioning process would like to see in the development of a much-needed recreational trail and why it matters that City Creek becomes a vital community asset. Ultimately, this paper seeks to empower communities to plan and implement daylighting projects at the local level
Adaptive cities. Incremental processes for a contemporary urban and territorial regeneration strategy
Full text linkToday, the intensive territory and resources consumption, the subversion of the ecological conditions of the planet, and the damage caused by climate change, have led to an imbalance and a decline in the sustainable model. So, the water and the system of its superficial and deep networks have become the main risk factor due to less and less casual or extraordinary events, as well as a pollution vehicle resulting from poor disposal of urban and industrial wastewater.What emerges in the urban and territorial analysis is not only a critical condition in which it is necessary to rethink the functioning of the city structure, but above all the need to trigger new “recycling” mechanisms (Bocchi, 2016) and new “resilient” strategies which presuppose the recognition of the potential regenerative value of drosscapes (Berger, 2006) as a new renewable and sustainable resource for the contemporary city project.This contribution aims to provide a moment of reflection, also through some project explorations, on how the rethinking of environmental infrastructures can play a key and structuring role in urban regeneration practices and more comprehensively can be the occasion for a process of re-urbanization of the contemporary city, precisely because of their ability to intercept also fast and slow mobility networks, energy and digital networks, a multitude of marginal spaces and degraded artifacts
Toward resilient public places on the waterfornt
Full text linkThe contemporary city waterfront areas could gather a strategic and multifunctional role, as a public place to the people wellness, as well as a resilient management of floods caused by climate changes. The international scenario presents many re-appropriation processes of urban waterfront that have been realized by reconversion of decommissioned port areas: the New York waterfront plan has a great relevance, such as Brooklyn Bridge Park, which represents a paradigm of the new concept of urban public place.The design of the park aims to face the urban situations in order to mitigate their conflicts as well to find a sustainable aesthetic where the process of re-appropriation and awareness of the relationship with water is intended as an element to carry again nature in the city. The park should be much more performing compared to those of the past, not anymore an aesthetical improvement or an escape from the context but an escape into the city, including in it the urban fragments whose surrounds it
GREEN: sustainability, well-being, eco-efficiency
Full text linkUPLanD intend to promote an interdisciplinary approach to town and regional planning, landscape and environmental design as an effective form of the governance - sustainable and eco-efficient - of processes for the protection, enhancement and development of urban contexts. The first issue of UPlanD Volume 2017, entitled GREEN, intended to bring attention to the topic of ecological sustainability in built and natural environment. Today, being beyond the limit where a merely containment approach could be effective, by avoiding or mitigating the new impacts, it becomes necessary to adopt a new perspective that acting both on new settlements and on consolidated fabrics, leads to the re-establishment of a lost balance, implementing functions, processes and transformations with a positive ecological outcome. Meanwhile, adaptation policies are essential to survive the transition toward new models of human settlements able of sustaining the 10 billion city dwellers expected in 2050