Environments by Design

Abstract

Along with the conference approach – which sees the city as a site of interconnected problems – this paper aims at investigating the topic of the infrastructures within urban environments as spaces of interrelated issues which should involve a variety of aspects.

Nowadays an important challenge for cities is to design infrastructures for the new mobility and also critically reflect on the role of existing infrastructures in the current condition. The need to mitigate the disruptive effects of infrastructural crossing in urban spaces leads to a re-evaluation of the opportunities that can be derived from the infrastructure seen as a habitable space. Rather than tackling the issue of reusing infrastructure – with NYC’s High Line as the main reference project – we aim to deconstruct the infrastructure into parts that can find new logic or new uses in urban space: from the whole mega form into a series conditions observed within new approaches at engineering, spatial, urban, ecological, sociological, cultural, and policy levels.

From the observation of situations in southern Italy with practices of appropriation of areas under bridges, use of interstitial spaces and the occupation of spaces at different levels, this paper then comments on proposals of transformation for specific infrastructures, studied within university design workshops: in Salerno (Italy) and in NYC itself, on the Bus Terminal by Pier Luigi Nervi and the George Washington Bridge infrastructure.

Through the design experimentations, the infrastructure rather than divide can connect spaces, offer opportunities for new urban spaces at different levels, create new urban layers, propose different logic of usage, habitability and trigger a process of urban erosion capable of transforming the city itself. The investigation focuses on the infrastructure and its related spatial categories: the territorial dimension, the narrative character, and the relation with the movement, are some of the commented qualities.