Demolition as a Territorial Reform Project
43
more dynamic situations where new volumes could be an opportunity for urban
consolidation. The task of urban planning would naturally be to identify and adjust
areas of departure and relapse of the volumes, responding not only to the need to
restrict the soil consumption bat, more generally, to issues relating to safety and
urbanity of settlements.
This territorial reorganization should have a dual requirement. First, it is a matter
of removing buildings that are in decline, abandoned or located in improper places,
which cause problems of insecurity, or involving unsustainable maintenance and
management costs. Demolition would be based on a very relevant technical topic—
what produces risk must be demolished—which reconfigures its terms. At the same
time, it would generate volumes to consolidate parts of the existing city, especially
where the settlements are less defined and where they could benefit from the introduction of new volumes. In essence, a demolition and a densification that, through
specific intervention rules, can contribute to the necessary reflection on the urbanity
forms of contemporary territories.
But it’s not just about this. A further element emerges in this territorial reorganization project. When a building in decline or an impermeable soil is removed, a
naturalization and remediation action (granted in fact by the presence, elsewhere, of
an improvement) should be combined (Girot 2005). The terms of the problem are:
more security, more urbanity, but also more nature.
The development of a procedural mechanism allowing volumetric transfers
should, in this sense, be part of a wider territorial vision, which could partially
redefine our very idea of nature. Some partial demolition could in fact collaborate in
defining a new landscape in the città diffusa contexts. A re-naturalization that takes
its distances from a restoration idea (unthinkable in a landscape that has drastically
changed the original agricultural use and hybridized its expressive codes), and can
also be activated through actions that, like the demolitions might be partial.
The removal of the most critical elements from an environmental viewpoint,
accompanied by low-cost interventions (for example, simple carry-over of land and
sowing), could trigger a reconfiguration process with significant landscape effects
and, at the same time, might change our imaginary. Partial removals, even small
and episodic, could give shape to parts of non-domesticated nature, offered to visual
perception but subtracted from use (Clément 2005).
4 Conclusions
What is synthetically exposed is a change of perspective that has unavoidable technical and cultural complexities opening up reflections in multiple directions. For
example, it becomes necessary to review the regulatory framework traceable to the
waste cycle (Rigamonti 1996), redefine the organization of the dismantling and demolition sites that could be temporarily shape up as storage depots, and more generally
rethink the concept of risk.
43
more dynamic situations where new volumes could be an opportunity for urban
consolidation. The task of urban planning would naturally be to identify and adjust
areas of departure and relapse of the volumes, responding not only to the need to
restrict the soil consumption bat, more generally, to issues relating to safety and
urbanity of settlements.
This territorial reorganization should have a dual requirement. First, it is a matter
of removing buildings that are in decline, abandoned or located in improper places,
which cause problems of insecurity, or involving unsustainable maintenance and
management costs. Demolition would be based on a very relevant technical topic—
what produces risk must be demolished—which reconfigures its terms. At the same
time, it would generate volumes to consolidate parts of the existing city, especially
where the settlements are less defined and where they could benefit from the introduction of new volumes. In essence, a demolition and a densification that, through
specific intervention rules, can contribute to the necessary reflection on the urbanity
forms of contemporary territories.
But it’s not just about this. A further element emerges in this territorial reorganization project. When a building in decline or an impermeable soil is removed, a
naturalization and remediation action (granted in fact by the presence, elsewhere, of
an improvement) should be combined (Girot 2005). The terms of the problem are:
more security, more urbanity, but also more nature.
The development of a procedural mechanism allowing volumetric transfers
should, in this sense, be part of a wider territorial vision, which could partially
redefine our very idea of nature. Some partial demolition could in fact collaborate in
defining a new landscape in the città diffusa contexts. A re-naturalization that takes
its distances from a restoration idea (unthinkable in a landscape that has drastically
changed the original agricultural use and hybridized its expressive codes), and can
also be activated through actions that, like the demolitions might be partial.
The removal of the most critical elements from an environmental viewpoint,
accompanied by low-cost interventions (for example, simple carry-over of land and
sowing), could trigger a reconfiguration process with significant landscape effects
and, at the same time, might change our imaginary. Partial removals, even small
and episodic, could give shape to parts of non-domesticated nature, offered to visual
perception but subtracted from use (Clément 2005).
4 Conclusions
What is synthetically exposed is a change of perspective that has unavoidable technical and cultural complexities opening up reflections in multiple directions. For
example, it becomes necessary to review the regulatory framework traceable to the
waste cycle (Rigamonti 1996), redefine the organization of the dismantling and demolition sites that could be temporarily shape up as storage depots, and more generally
rethink the concept of risk.