Environments by Design
Abstract
Today’s global cities are facing increasingly complex problems and challenges. It is necessary to promote the sustainable and healthy development of cities through reasonable planning and design, which could adapt to the adverse impacts and major threats of climate change on urban security and ecological environment and create urban development pattern of symbiosis between man and nature. The metropolis of Milan (Italy) and Beijing (China) – even with their differences in number of inhabitants and dimension – can be taken as references for Europe and Asia as both are included in the list of Innovations Index (2018) with a comparable rank position (Beijing #37; Milan #40). In the last decades both Administrations in different cultural contexts have started a process of redesigning their urban territory taking into account the deep transformation in terms of society, economy, ecology and space. The paper reports the evolution of the post-industrialization effects on sites in both Milan and Beijing. Their regeneration is considered as opportunities for the structural adjustment and quality improvement of public open space, and parts of new green networks that could be read as an ultimate infrastructure based on series of landscape components. Over the past 50 years, in both metropolis a kind of parallel progress has endeavored to apply concepts, strategies, and models developed in the field of landscape and environmental design theory. Milan is now a town demonstrating that change can be operated through the opportunities linked to the presence of a strong network of public open spaces, while Beijing is transforming its consolidated built urban fabric in the context of urban renewal and applying the processes of Shan-shui City within the dimension of traditional urban morphology and Sponge City from the perspective of landscape ecology.
Mengyixin LI, Ph.D., is a lecturer in Landscape Architecture in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. Her research focuses on green open space, cultural landscape, and post-industrial landscape.
Luca Maria Francesco FABRIS, Ph.D., is a journalist and associate professor of Environmental Design at Politecnico di Milano, and a distinguished expert in Environmental Design at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. His research focuses on sustainable technologies for the recovery of landscape, and innovation in contemporary architecture.
Riccardo Maria BALZAROTTI studied architecture in Milan and Paris and is currently Fellow Researcher at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Politecnico di Milano. His research focuses on the revitalization of the Community Cinemas in the Italian parishes. The research is published with the co-author and scientific coordinator, Prof. Luca M.F. Fabris, in the volume “La Sala del Futuro. Linee guida per la rigenerazione delle Sale della Comunità” published by Maggioli.
Gerardo SEMBREBON, architect, is a Research Fellow at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Politecnico di Milano and has been recipient of two doctoral degrees, one from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and one from the Politecnico di Milano. His research has a focus on design strategies for the revitalization of rural settlements with regard to China and Italy.
Federico CAMERIN, city planner, postdoctoral research fellow in Urban Planning at the Dept. of Culture del Progetto of Università IUAV di Venezia (Italy), obtained in 2020 a double PhD degree in the frame of European Joint Doctorate “UrbanHist” between the Instituto Universitario de Urbanística of the University UVA of Valladolid (Spain) and the Fakultät Architektur und Urbanistik of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Germany).
8:45 am - 10:15 am
Wednesday 16th June, 2021