Program

POLITECNICO DI MILANO           

Town Planning Design Workshop a.y. 2014-15

Isabella Inti, coordinator/ Caterina Padoa Schioppa/ Paola Pellegrini

Pompei Laboratory_ Heritage and Urbanism

“Alarm in Pompeii, new collapse in the Temple of Venus and in the necropolis of Porta Nocera. On Tuesday the Minister Franceschini convene an urgent meeting”.                                                                   Corriere della Sera magazine, 2nd March 2014

“A plan to save Pompeii. Too many mistakes in the past, now we focus on maintenance”.                                                                             Corriere della Sera magazine, 11th April 2014

“Bohème and Carmen at the Great Teatro. Already started the hunt for the ticket. Pompeii opens to the opera. Franceschini explains the project”.                                                                                                      Corriere del Mezzogiorno magazine, 9th September 2014

1. Brief

Over the dense fabric of Naples and its gulf, the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the landscapes of the baroque villas and the pulviscular area spread at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, are a city of 700,000 inhabitants. This urbanized and layered landscape is a unique opportunity to reflect on the need to preserve the past and to create a more sustainable and aware present.
Italy has an artistic heritage of 5 thousand museums, monuments and archaeological sites, of which 49 are UNESCO sites. According to MIBAC (Ministry of the Property and Cultural Activities and Tourism) data in 2013, the 202 museums and the over 220 monuments and archaeological sites were visited to approximately 36.4 million people. First the Coliseum in Rome with 5,2 million people, second the Pompeii archeological site with 2,3 million visitors and third the Uffizi gallery in Florence with 1,8 tourists. The total revenues from all the Italian artistic heritage of around 113 million euro, it is almost equal to the income for the visit of the Louvre museum in Paris. Italy as other countries of southern Europe focuses on the artistic heritage conservation policies, while other states such as France, England, Sweden have managed to put the emphasis on more complex strategies of cultural production.
Pompeii (as well as Herculaneum) is the testimony of a city born in relationship with its landscape of Vesuvius and the sea. A landscape and archaeological site later explored since the ancient times and part of the “Grand tour”, the “Voyage of Italy”. The journey in Italy described in the literature by Lassels in 1620, by Goethe in 1817, by painters of the XIX century such as Pompeo Batoni, Canaletto, and Piranesi. An archaeological landscape that has yet to find a balance with urban sprawl born at its edges and which could be enhanced with the tools of an ecological approach to the transformation of urban land.
In the Anglo-Saxon tradition the intertwining of ecology, landscape and urban design is particularly felt and is the basis of a significant tradition of interdisciplinary research. In the last twenty years a theoretical and urban design expression, in this sense, is Landscape urbanism. During the Town Planning Design Workshop will be shown the main projects, strategies and key concepts of landscape urbanism defined by Shane, Corner, Waldheim, Mohsen, Najle such as: process over time, the staging of surfaces, the imaginary, the network systems, collisive site, eco-field, landscape unit, the thickening of the ground…
However, the facts of chronicle and the data provided by the Department to Cultural Heritage also speak to us of another approach to territorial development.
Many agree that culture is more and more the business of cities (Zukin 1995), but to what extent do cultural activities become mechanisms for economic development and urban regeneration? What types of cultural activities, urban transformations and programs do municipal governments support? Which are the intended goals and benefits of these interventions? How do cities balance urban, economic, social and educational goals in pursuing cultural strategies?
Starting from the paradigmatic case of Pompeii, an archaeological heritage site, which is currently not boosted and poorly managed, we will investigate several case studies worldwide representing three types of cultural strategies: “entrepreneurial strategies”, “creative class strategies” and “progressive and heritage strategies” that describe the goals, the urban transformation focus, the types of cultural projects and programs, the target audiences.
The aim of the course will attempt to answer the following town planning design question: what vision, what tools and strategies we need to adopt for the enhancement of Pompeii landscape and humanity heritage archaeological sites? In the goal of enhancing the area, what can be the design relation between the archaeological remains, clearly defined in its dimension and value, and the developing contemporary city? Should integration or separation of the Pompei heritage site and the contemporary diffused city be expressed
in cultural terms (acknowledgement of the exceptional frozen past) or can they become infrastructure, feasible physical connection, open spaces for tourism and scholars? How can the constraints, i.e. the denial to build anything around the remains (zona di rispetto, area di vincolo) become a hint for design? How can heritage become a tool for re-qualification of periphery? What is the proper dimension of intervention for enhancing the heritage and the surrounding metropolitan area? Should interventions be public or private? What is the possible coexistence of informal and formal design tool and solutions dealing with a high expression of formality as the archaeological heritage is? What are the consequences of mass tourism and how can they be controlled or guided with planning and design?
We will also compare and verify if the tools, strategies and vision given by the student project groups deviate from the new Great Pompeii Project 2015, recently drawn up by a pool of experts and adopted by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage.

2. Method

The course will be organized as follows:
1_In the first part “Pompei, archeological heritage in my country”, students will start by comparing Pompeii to other protected site and international case studies, and following with a broad investigation and critical reading of Pompeii and its territory. The aim of this first investigation is to grow on specific knowledge and to build a first cultural and strategic reading of the topic. Students will start with an individual exercise and will be divided in 7 groups by the end of October, before the fieldtrip to the archaeological site of Pompeii and its landscape between Naples, Herculaneum, Vesuvius and the sea shore.
2_In the second part students, divided in 7 groups, will progressively develop an operative material with a bottom-up approach, that is by selecting one specific theme – i.e.: landscape and landform of the volcano region; urban tissue and informal settlements; urban structure of the Roman city of Pompeii; agricultural system and drosscapes; the touristic machine; the infrastructural system; borderscapes and administrative constraints – and working at multiple scales simultaneously. The production of this stratified system of knowledge will be interpreted and will drive the design phase. This period will end at the end of November.
3_In the final part students will be asked to develop a site-specific urban planning projects, with a multi-scale and time-based programmatic strategy and a formal proposal. The initial theme will be driving but not limiting the richness and variety of the projects.
We expect from students to react to the ambitious course program with a project that is capable to interpret the multiple contemporary approaches to urban design, that is to build-up a consistent narrative in which landscape urbanism, open design guidelines, scenarios, cultural and architectural features may clearly emerge. By the beginning of January the class will establish a common date for the final exam in February.

3. EVALUATION MODE

First part | “Pompei in my country” = 10
Second part | Investigation and site visit = 5
Third part | town planning project = 10
Third part | questions on the topics of the lectures, 2 books and 2 articles (of your choice) = 5