3,174 research outputs found

    Oltre il muro : elogio della contraddizione. I muri che dividono il mondo

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    Muri costruiti per difendere i confini, altri realizzati per argi- nare flussi migratori. Barriere artificiali di ogni tipo, reticolati, cemento, campi minati, pietre in- valicabili, ferocemente sorveglia- te lungo centinaia di chilometri. Rappresentano la concretezza della chiusura, divengono limite ostile, ostacolo irriducibile e sim- bolo di rivendicate e artificiose diversità. Ogni muro possiede una propria storia e ogni giorno esso inter- seca, divide, respinge miglia- ia di storie, ininterrottamente dal Vallo di Adriano al muro del Messico. Emblema contemporaneo delle contraddizioni umane, il muro è pure luogo di violenza, così come disperata esperienza di permea- bilità e incontenibili attraversa- menti. In questo volume Silvia Dalzero, nel passarne in ras- segna la mappatura mondia- le, esamina le vicende - geo- grafiche, economiche, politiche e sociali - che hanno portato alla loro erezione, svelandone ante- fatti, ragioni e intendimenti di ieri e di oggi, mentre altri muri si stanno aggiungendo al nostro domani

    Rejected Landscapes/Recycled Landscapes: Waste Disposal and Recycling Sites

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    This article wants to show the landscape changes in the presence of waste, some touchable reality that invades the territory in many different ways in terms of time and space. Firstly, the issue of garbage is faced following its inevitable accumulation that designs our new and unexpected landscapes. secondly, the focus will be on how waste can be turned into a place. So, how through a list of projects for more or less controlled recovery altered areas, the present territorial dimension is inexorably besieged by garbage and consequently how it is exposed to a substantial environmental, cultural, economic and political alteration. Consequently a sort of ‘indicative atlas’ - where some interesting and reference recovery plans are illustrated - will be shaped. This perspective shows the present conditions and the effective distribution of plants for waste disposal and collection on the European territory in general, and more particularly in Italy: here the study becomes more detailed and a territorial section in Italy, Lombardy, is going to be analyzed. The territorial morphology and the inevitable environmental transformations are also taken into consideration. So, through a study of the present territorial conceptual status, indicative and synthetic models shape up from possible and potential scenarios of areas that are or will be altered in the future. The study of these areas make up a unique path to observe and evaluate the modern urban structure, where presently it is necessary to have a correct, definite location, leading to territorial changes in different ways. Furthermore, this research can contribute to give the right measure of what is at stake, that is different territorial status and other perspectives

    Remains, debris and ruins of the war setting from decontamination issues and disposal to the configuration of new landscapes-

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    This study is structured on the analysis of the definition of ruins and rubbles and then shows the real present state, through cartographic, historical, urban and territorial surveys of different stories of cities destroyed by acts of war (since the Second World War until the most recent conflicts: the Balkans with the siege of Sarajevo and the war in Lebanon with the 'destruction' of Beirut). The study was divided in parts relating to the material dimension of the destroyed city and the intrinsic spatial conformation, as results of acts of war such as: hills of rubble and modifying coastal lines as a result of piles of inert materials and also general waste. So the city gained a renewed post-war image, a different spatial identity and another orography that, now, asks to be revealed. Following the war, in effect, what remains is nothing more that a collection of urban materials often without any value that, in their physical state, occupy space and reveal other, unexpected urban and territorial pictures. However, 'rubble' take a meaning in ‘urban design’, take an active role in ‘geographical plane’ and show an alternative means to describe the overlapping and solidification of historical signs

    Not in My Back Yard (But it's ok in theirs) an Analysis of Environmental Racism

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    We are surrounded. We find waste everywhere: along the city streets, the highways, the railways; in the industrial areas as well as in residential neighbourhoods; at the mountain peaks and in the woods; in space; in the fields and on the beaches; floating on the surface of the seas, of the lakes and settling on the bottom. It is not possible to overcome dense smog stretches of asphalt and cement, streams of cars, slurry, smelly swamps and much more separates us from uncontaminated lands. To go back to nature we have to look at this destruction even through a network of interests and investments involving which weights upon our lives no less than cement and steel. So, a mountain of waste which we have to absolutely get rid of hangs over our head. But how? Are we supposed to occupy all the space available? Concerning domestic waste the solution is quite easy because once we have moved the waste away from our houses, there is a pick up system, whether efficient or not, which has the official task of “taking the garbage away” and “recycling”. The solutions adopted for the disposal of waste are, however, tricks to escape our senses especially: from our sight and from our sense of smell. Therefore, waste is “buried” in landfill sites; it’s melted down in meteoric waters and in water courses going into the sea; it’s abandoned in external landfills; consigned to the catharsis of fire and by this sent to the sky or just simply left to external landfills to be taken care of by atmospheric agents and by this sent to the sky or just simply left to external landfills to be taken care of by atmospheric agents and when it comes to electronic waste, well the story is even more complex. In the near future every community will have to deal with the issue of waste more and more and at the same time communities will be less and less willing to become the garbage disposal of other people’s products leading to the Nimby syndrome (not in my backyard) and in parallel with the removal of waste, legal and often illegal, increasingly distant from the origin. But the problem of waste is not only relative to its disposal. Managing waste means the necessity of a funding plan and plant location. Actually the issue does not come from the lack of finances, not the lack of plants, not even by people opposing its location, however, mostly by the fact that waste is produced; too much waste is produced, even when it could be relatively easy to avoid doing it; plant disposals are planned as well as the site but the solution to the reduction of waste or easy recycling is not. The fact is that disposal plants or waste treatments continue to be necessary and locating it somewhere will be necessary. The question now remains, how and where? In principle, through a plan with the purpose of sharing in the fairest way possible, the polluting loads and so to distribute small plants on the territory uniformly by introducing financial and environmental compensations for the most-struck populations. In 1992, Fast wrote: “The problem of waste basically comes from its material nature. Waste occupies space, it has volume and so it suffocates people besieging from close up. The first image that comes to mind by the concept of garbage is an incumbent mountain that continues to grow and that maybe the better even on the environment of the people”. Let’s try to climb this mountain! We need space: an “empty” space, whether land, water or sky, in order to deposit everything we no longer want to see. According to Heidegger describing emptiness: “The essence of the containing emptiness is collected when offered”. So, will we fill every empty space with our waste? Is this the path to follow

    The Power of Limit

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    This project analyses the field of current geographic political partitions offering an interdisciplinary evaluation able to describe the space in the borders as ‘narrative beginning’, as ‘contact infrastructure’ that crosses territories where inhabitants are neither citizens nor refugees but only ‘border people’. At the end, cognitive horizons able to breach the Wall, going beyond the political-territorial divisions which have always existed in a world which is a sort of more or less fortified bulwark able to suggest ‘border worlds’ that are ‘city’, ‘border land’. We observe a porous border with a rhizomatic trend that reformulates a synergistic relationship between the individual and the territory in an antinomic game of actions and reactions. Appears an idea of multiplicity in which the ‘rhizome-like’ structure becomes decentralized configurations where each part can be connected to another without go through specific points, as the infrastructure network or even the virtual system of global contacts. So, the space in the borders results in a new map of the delocalized space that increasingly requires of a design thinking that, on the basis of critiques of data, variables and statistics, sometimes becomes ‘hard’ and sometimes ‘elastic’, sometimes ‘insurmountable’ and sometimes ‘flexible’ and that finds an answer in the connivance between opposites and in the territorial synergy

    E' iniziato il tempo del mondo finito

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    The Time of the Finished World has Begun. The present research is the first study systematically analysing the field of evaluation of territorial-political division as resulting from the practice of migration experienced. In particular, the project is aimed to study all those places at the limits, the Walls that divides territories and people, observing as the place where a new identity expressed by temporary settlements arose in a milieu characterized by a deep relation between social, politics, typical cultural and revolutionary practices. Therefore, drawing the line is an act of duty, necessary to confront and as a social need to guarantee a certain recognition to the people and territorial identity. On the other hand, crossing the border does not imply elimination of it but rather its momentary transformation in open space, used, organized. Well, in the contemporary scene sometimes global and sometimes ‘shattered’, in an increasingly construction of Walls which will spatial organization be in the future
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