Suchergebnisse

Following a consolidated tradition since the first number of the journal, the 16th of Archi-DOCT is the result of a call for contribution focused on one single word "Urbanities". When we were discussing the direction that we wanted to give to this issue, we concluded that we aimed to focus its critical slant - through a specific call to action to the schools of architectures and their students - towards a new interest concerning the multiple scales and resolutions of the so-called urban dimension. During the last decades, centralized planning - as a result of the Modernist heritage - fostered the implementation of top-down hierarchic processes that despite the political and ideological background led the city to be suffering phenomena such as sprawling, undefined expansions, and the emergence of the alleged "urban voids" (that aroused a new matrix of problems and issues to be tackled. Whether we refer to Rome, Tirana, Valencia, Athens, or any contemporary metropolis, these criticalities are far from being solved and, even less, we are close to defining a methodological approach that could suggest effective strategies to proactively remedy this condition. For this, we have been interested in collecting inputs from our authors in order to set the scene so that everyone could tell a specific story and personally question the keyword we choose.

The fall of the Communist dictatorship has changed dramatically the urban structure of the city of Tirana. The original organic structure - and the later Soviet functionalist fabric - has been parasitized by a spread system of informal (and currently illegal) settlements that are perceivable as 'other spaces' (Foucault 2000), completely rejected by the historical city. Indeed, the latter generated a system of closed clusters within the urban environment, leading to the creation of a series of barriers which are either physical, psychological and behavioral. For these reasons, the city of Tirana is a kaleidoscopic and deceiving reality, where the explosion of colors and shapes hides the urban conflicts that run underneath and exacerbate the always present social tension and conflict. Previous top-down solutions - proposed by the government - have demonstrated their ineffectiveness due to a positivistic approach that could not take into account the complexity of a vital city in continuous evolution. To offer concrete and long-term solutions to these crises, there is the need for catalytic interventions that can help in the creation of different and overlapping frameworks of action: architectural, social, education, and economical ones. In this paper, we will present the incremental design project 'Tirana | Plug-in River', with the aim of demonstrating how multitasking infrastructure (Saggio 2014) can work as positive vectors in the urban fabric using playful dynamics and mechanics, and bottom-up/civic engagement design processes in the existing city where architecture, art and citizenship interaction can operate as a key for a new urban consciousness and reactivation.