Project and context

Integrated educational activity

Course Sheet

Academic Year of enrolment:

2019/2020

Optional/Mandatory:

Compulsory

Degree:

Bachelor's Degree Programme in URBAN AND LANDASCAPE PLANNING.

Language:

Italian

Moduls:

HISTORY OF REGIONS AND CITIES

6 credits
PROJECT IN THE SOCIAL CONTEXT

6 credits

Credits:

Programme Year:

Hours of classroom activity:

132

Prerequisites:

No particular prerequisite or introductory preparation is required.

AF code:

A001488

Assessment Methods

Verification of learning:

A mid-term test to check specific knowledge and the capacity to illustrate and critically discuss the contents learnt during the course of the lessons on the history of the city and territory, also by producing diagrams and mind maps.
Regular revision during which the students will publicly present the progress of the work on the context. Final exam in which all the groupwork produced during the workshops will be discussed. Based on this discussion the theoretical contents of the lessons of the Design in the Social Context module will be dealt with in depth by each individual student. The ability to actively and cooperatively participate in the workshop tasks will also be evaluated, as well as critical and discursive capacities. The final exam mark will be calculated as the average between the mark for the ‘in progress’ History of the City module mark and the mark for the final exam on the Design in the Social Context module.

Teaching period

Second semester

Objectives

Based on the idea that the territory should be considered the outcome of a process of interaction between man, society and the environment, the course aims to reconsider project design: no longer form imposing itself on a territory without life or history, but a spiral development, able to grow over time as an integral part of the life of a community that builds itself by creating relations. Following this pathway, the course aims to contribute to developing knowledge in the students that is careful to interpret the various specificities of contexts and to interpret, through design based on the acknowledgement of the diversity of territories and the practices of living connected with them, the new ways of creating the contemporary city. This year the course aims in particular to explore the potential that poetic, sensitive languages and visual narration can provide to trigger regeneration dynamics of collective sensibility and actual perception of the territory.

It thus intends:

- to encourage students to question themselves on the deep meaning, sense and content enveloped in the actual concept of city and in the various definitions it has assumed over the course of time, providing a critical background of knowledge to be able to dismantle the common-sense categories and find new keys by which to interpret contemporary urban dynamics;

- to show that in each historical epoch the use of narrative, artistic, mythical and ritual languages has played an essential role in developing the actual ideas of city, generating pleasurable forms of appropriation and knowledge of the territory and in creating systems for educating communities.

- to provide, by studying specific cases, methods and tools to learn how to interpret the environmental features and the past processes by which the character of the various urban and territorial structures was formed;

- provide technical instruments for reflecting on the potential offered by visual languages and the new audiovisual techniques to develop, in an experimental and collective form, new ways of narrating to express the huge patrimony of memories condensed on the territory, and enable this “deposit of knowledge” to act as a base for imagination, an opportunity to consciously liberate imagination and creativity and generate novel forms of appropriation of the territory.

- teach students to present and critically discuss the theoretical shifts behind the construction of a narrative course.

Contents

This year the course will deal in particular, using the context of Gallura as a paradigmatic example, with the role internal areas and uninhabited territories can play in our reflection on the actual urban dimension. Based on the assumption that the great expanses of empty, silent land characterising this territory constitute important elements for reconsidering not just the Gallura territory-city but the idea of urban itself, the course aims to use audiovisual languages in developing new forms of narration able to deconstruct and decolonise the mental image of marginality in which these areas appear to have become trapped and enable a new idea of ‘urbanness’ to emerge where silence and emptiness acquire unusual centrality. To respond to these prerequisites the course will be divided into two modules.
First module: History of the city and the territory
Starting with the assumption that a single idea of city does not exist but different ways in which societies have, over time, built up “topographic and social devices able to make the meeting of and exchanges between men as effective as possible”, this module aims to follow through some of the forms in which the actual idea of urban has been manifested, replacing the concept of city with a more general reflection on spatial forms and their relationship with society.

Second module: Design in the social context
Based on this general framework, in the second module, after reinterpreting the environmental structures and past processes that have contributed to determining the specificity of the Gallura context and the evidence of preparation of a new one, students will work experimentally on co-producing a new kind of narration of the territory in question, proposing a reversal of the mental images that, as far as the idea of coastal holiday resort introduced with the invention of the Costa Smeralda is concerned, will lay the foundations of an original nature-city, in which internal territories acquire new centrality.

Recommended Bibliography

Decandia L. (2000), Dell’identità. Saggio sui luoghi: per una critica della razionalità urbanistica, Rubbettino, Soveria Mannelli
Decandia L. (2008), Polifonie urbane, Meltemi, Rome
Choay F. (1973), La città utopia e realtà, Einaudi, Turin
Ferraro G. (1998), Rieducare alla speranza. Patrick Geddes Planner in India, 1914-1924 Jaca Book, Milan
Lanzani A., (1996), Immagini del territorio e idee di piano 1943-1963. Dagli approcci generalizzanti all'interpretazione dei contesti locali, FrancoAngeli, Milan
Magnaghi A., edited by (2014), La regola e il progetto. Un approccio bioregionalista alla pianificazione territoriale, University Press, Florence

Methods of Provision

Conventional

Teaching Methods

The course is divided into two parts: the first has a theoretical nature, devoted to developing – by traditional lectures and by viewing films and documentaries - the different ideas of city in the past and the paradigmatic contents the course is based on; the second has an experimental nature with theory lessons interspersed with seminars and workshop activity. In this part the aim is for the theoretical content to be put to work in a tangible experiment set in context. In particular, thanks to the work of M. Pisano and G. Crivaro, students will be involved during the last two weeks of the course in producing a collective counter-representation, into which the work of the different groups will be merged. By interweaving outlines and depictions of the territory using audiovisual tools, and through exercises in assembling and reassembling archive materials, the counter-representation could create the conditions for developing a new idea of the territory.
Both in the first and second part the involvement and active participation of the students will be encouraged. In the workshops, moreover, they will be urged to develop a cooperative attitude by working in small groups.
An educational trip will be organised immersed in the context, with the aim of getting to know the territory and carrying out a series of interviews with some privileged witnesses.

Contacts/More Information

Dott. Lidia Decandia
Department of ARCHITECTURE DESIGN AND URBAN PLANNING
Tel. 3209234027;
e-mail: decandia@uniss.it
Receipt:
see the professor's homepage
Please send an email to avoid unnecessary waiting and organize the proper time of the meeting. The professor receives in other times only by appointment

- Availability to provide mentoring service also in a foreign language (French)
- Ability to take exams also with the help of a foreign language (French)

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