V - European Urban Summer School

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Open Access
A design proposal for Place Anatole France
(AESOP, 2014) Khawaja, Hadeel
During my studies in Polytech Tours for the Master Programme Planning and Sustainability, we were asked to deliver a conceptual design proposal of developing Place Anatole France- Tours. The project was supervised by Prof. Laura Verdelli under the unit of Heritage and Sustainable development. Each group - made up of four students - had worked on a different proposal, with altered approaches to analyse the project components. This article is devoted to briefly explaining how we understood the project and what is the suggested proposal for developing Place Anatole France. Our concept design proposal suggests: unifying the space and creating interactive nodes within the site boundary would add a new experience to Place Anatole France. The group members are: Abinaya Rajavelu (India), Manasvini Hariharan (India), Alice Frantz Schneider (Brazil) and myself Hadeel Khawaja (Jordan). The design proposal was divided into three main phases: –– Phase ‘A’ focused on understanding the project through thorough site analysis and divided into three divisions: 1) its urban fabric, 2) studying the previous proposals already made by the municipality/developers for the site area and 3) notes of the site users. –– Phase ‘B’ focused on coming up with observations influenced by the site analysis. –– Phase ‘C’ is the concept design proposal. Starting with Phase (A), the urban fabric had examined four components; the thoroughfares, the landscape and streetscape, the building types around the site, and the open public spaces.
Open Access
A different perspective on architectural design: bottom-up participative experiences
(AESOP, 2013) Cimadomo, Guido
The weight of the financial and real estate components in the present crisis, and their impact on millions of people give a renewed importance to the right to housing and the wider right to the city. The paper of architects in planning the city is also changing due to new social relations and the empowerment of citizens, and we have not to forget that scarcity is a great impulse for social and technical innovation, among them architecture. Henry Lefebvre’s “The right to the city” (Lefebvre 1968), can be considered the starting point for the understanding and reconnaissance of the right to urban life, transformed and renewed (Paquot 2012). At the present moment, the idea is growing that to change the life would be necessary to change the city, and the same concept of “right to the city” should be filled with new contents. The right to the city can be related with the right to freedom, to the individualization of sociability, the right to habitat and to live. The right to the work and to the appropriation, the right for inhabitants to meet, and also the right to reject be quitted from urban space by a social and economic organization moving to segregation and discrimination. It has been developing for almost 40 years, with a renewed interest at the beginning of this century, evolving to the more contemporary “right to configure the city”.
Open Access
A long view on the European Urban Summer School in Madrid in 2013
(AESOP, 2013) Ryser, Judith
Taking a long view from inception of the European Urban Summer Schools, EUSS in Madrid marked a natural progression along a steep learning curve. Initiated through AESOP - with Izabela Mironowicz as the creative driving force - EUSS took off in 2010 with very high goals. In Wroclaw Poland, nine projects on ‘Urban change’ were tackling the city as a whole, conceptually transforming specific districts and making fine grain urban design proposals. A state-of-the-art publication supported by UN Habitat put EUSS on the global professional map. The theme of ‘Urban change’ ran through all the subsequent summer schools. They all focused on concrete sites while relating to time- and location-specific, often complex planning issues. They addressed ‘quality of space – quality of life’ in Lisbon, ‘times of scarcity – reclaiming the possibility of making’ in London, and ‘strategies for the post-speculative city’ in Madrid. Each EUSS took place in a large city, often a capital. Each had selected sites as a challenge to current planning wisdom which stretched the imagination of the participant young professionals. They delivered, in the very short time available, also in Madrid. A purpose of the EUSS publication series is to document these very rich and original contributions to pressing urban issues by young professionals from all over the world. Madrid after the property market collapse was a great opportunity for young professionals to think about alternative urban futures while making concrete proposals for the given sites within realistic constraints. They came up with innovative ideas for acity unknown to most of them. The three adjacent sites, starting from the heart of Madrid and reaching the southeast fringe with progressively increasing scales confronted the participants with a large range of issues. They benefited from well balanced formal contributions from academics as well as practitioners and were tutored by academics with both practical experience and local knowledge.
Open Access
A Manifesto
(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Maci, Giulia; Blust, Seppe de; Kustermans, Clenn
We must re-evaluate traditional concepts of planning. As planners and human beings we are used to growth. Growth seems (or seemed) to be natural, because there is coherence with our own lives: you are born, you grow, you sustain, you shrink, you die. But in urban terms today de-growth or shrinking does not necessarily mean decline or dying. We need to accept the fact that cities cannot and will not grow like they used to do. Moreover, in times of scarcity and shrinkage we can (at last!) focus on the parts that already exist. We must react to rapid urban transformation. It seems necessary to go beyond theories and try practical actions to address concrete urban issues. It is time to get out our laid-backed offices and to leave our desks, digital aerial maps and other tools. Monitoring and evaluating real daily life are fundamental in our job to learn from the experiences and to readjust theories and strategies. An urban planner experiences local struggles personally. In East Germany, for example, a vast amount of cities is shrinking. Instead of trying to find ideas for new growth in the East, there is rather a need to fulfil local needs. And instead of building new suburban neighbourhoods (market-based thinking) and breaking down high-rise areas, planners could focus on reshaping the high-rise areas into positive and well-used places by new concepts. Enter the area, experience it melancholically and do something with it.
Open Access
About the workshops
(AESOP, 2013)
Aiming to bring young professionals together to discuss and work on planning issues, the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) launched the European Urban Summer School (EUSS) in 2010. From a great variety of backgrounds and countries, encompassing North and South America as well as Europe, a total of 15 young professionals started their work in Madrid, Spain, on 8 September 2013. This was not a random day; it was a Sunday, which showed how motivated and interested the group was on this course. Getting to know about the programme and its purpose the students had to register themselves, following the instructions, which were clearly stated on the official AESOP website. The event consisted of field work, lectures and team work, which after 7 days was transformed into a presentation of clearly identified problems and solutions. After one site visit and the theoretical part, at which local problems were critically presented, together with some background requests, the professionals were divided into 3 groups of 5 students, which the organisers divided according to the professionals’ formation to create diverse as well as balanced teams. During the week, it was not just the comprehension about the topic that got clearer, but also its complexity and the necessity to link the sustainable triad: social, economic and environmental. The groups were expected to articulate their life experiences with each other. It required time and an open mind when seeking to fill the gap that existed between individuals and their approaches. (Extracted from Delicias Group final report) The selected working areas encompassed three different urban circumstances: the Delicias Axis, a void of 23 hectares located in the inner city, requiring new ideas for its proper inclusion in the existing urban fabric; the Vallecas neighbourhood, a large development built during the last decade, when the sustainable principles specified at the end of the past century were mandatory; and the areas encompassed in the Southeast Strategies, the largest urban expansion ever planned for the city of Madrid which were facing a new meaning in the present period of stagnation. After a week working on their respective sites and hours discussing the situation they were involved in, the three groups produced fresh, stimulating and innovative proposals which are presented in the following pages.
Open Access
Accessing quality of life through physical parameters
(AESOP, 2013) Lourenço, Júlia M.
As cities keep growing in size, it becomes more and more important that urban expansion takes place a planned way, so that cities can satisfy the needs of its population. Unplanned growth or planned growth with scarce implementation lead to environmental degradation, traffic jams, urban sprawl, pollution, low access to basic services and equipments, loss of identity, communities’ disintegration, pockets of poverty, etc. Urban planning is the set of tools through which interventions attempt to create urban spaces that contribute to the quality of life of citizens in the context of urban design. This can be defined as the relationship of inhabitants with the different elements that constitute urban space. Urban design determines, directly, the physical component of urban space, and indirectly, its socio-economic, political and cultural elements, influencing the relationship between the urban environment and its components.
Open Access
Acknowledging complexity and continuous urban change
(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Sengupta, Ulysses; Cheung, Eric
Current practices of urban planning and spatial design have shown an inability to cope adequately with, and successfully intervene in the complex spatio-temporal nature of our cities. With current trends of urbanisation indicating increasing speed of change, the European Urban Summer School event was an opportunity to engage young planners with complex systems and digital tool based approaches aimed at the growing necessity to address temporal and morphological urban systems. Non-deterministic computational modelling techniques simulating complex urban territories in states of rapid change provide the potential to observe, comprehend and test the relative possibilities of spatial and policy based interventions while working with unknown futures and trans-scalar influences (Sengupta, U. 2011). In order to situate spatial design methodologies within current discourses in planning theory, the wide existing gap between theory and practice in urban planning, i.e. between rationale spatial implementation and communicative theoretical intention, must be addressed (De Roo et al. 2012). We believe the potential for bringing spatial and social issues back together, and thus addressing the space of action, lies in the ability to understand the forward projected impact of political, spatial and regulatory interventions on the identifiable trajectories and trends of existing socio-spatial evolutionary conditions.
Open Access
Alexandra Tisma : Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
(AESOP, 2011)
Senior researcher at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, The Hague. Her research interest involves spatial planning, landscape development and policy evaluation, urban landscape design, and planning support systems. In 2005, she has been appointed associate professor at the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture in Novi Sad, Serbia, where she teaches landscape planning. Since 2009, she has been working as a tutor for the subject Paper Writing at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, at the third year of master studies in Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture. Alexandra Tisma obtained her PhD and master’s degree at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft, Netherlands, and her bachelor’s degree at the Faculty of Agriculture in Novi Sad, former Yugoslavia. She is a member of the Netherlands Association for Landscape Architecture and Le-NOTRE network.
Open Access
An addicted view on the European Urban Summer Schools
(AESOP, 2013) Lourenço, Júlia
Taking an addicted view from a former participant in 1994 at a Young Planning Professional Workshop (YPP), to an organiser of a YPP in 2009, from a lecturer at European Urban Summer Schools (EUSS) in Wroclaw and Lisbon to a tutor at EUSS in Madrid, I can recall some memorable moments in all of these. Nevertheless, this last EUSS experience makes for one of the best. Reasons for this may lie, at the start, in the previous knowledge all tutors of Madrid had and the long-time connections they partially shared. For most tutors it was through being lecturers at CEU, for others through ISOCARP, where they shared joint meetings or creative happenings at least since the late nineties. Therefore, the tutors were at ease under the coordination of Teresa Franchini who made things even easier by allowing choices of the site where the tutors thought they could perform best. The same applied to the participants who chose the site they would work on, provided the right mix of specialities was guaranteed. Further reasons derive of course from the participants who shared an enthusiastic motivation that matched the vibes of central Madrid and the excitingly modern topic of post-speculative cities. Going through their specific personal motivations, for several of them EUSS came as a break-through in their studies and a turning point to decide on further avenues of expertise in their professional careers. For that reason they may have lacked some knowledge in urban planning, but they had an extra-abundant thirst for learning and understanding when this topic was the right choice to follow in their future careers.
Open Access
An example in Delicia’s axis, Madrid
(AESOP, 2013) Perepichka, Anzhela; Villamor, Jose Miguel; Lihtmaa, Lauri; Mathews, Mary; Pletsch, Mikhaela A. J. S.; Ryser, Judith; Franchini, Teresa
Measuring approximately 23 hectares, the Delicias Axis is an area of Madrid with great potential. It is connected by metro and train stations, and is not far from the central museum district. Furthermore, several businesses, such as Repsol, Spain’s major oil company, are moving into the neighbourhood, and there are several attractions such as the Planetarium and the Train Museum on the site. People from Madrid use the park for flea markets and social activities like dance. However, the Delicias axis does not currently garner the attention it deserves. The Delicias working group of the 4th European Urban Summer School made several proposals to improve access and connectivity of the area into the larger fabric of Madrid. Improved urban design features were envisaged to revitalise the area and make it a real destination for locals and tourists. Through field work and discussions, the group produced a development plan focusing on the goals of attracting tertiary activities and linking the area with the adjacent Tierno Galván Park, the largest green open space in south Madrid.
Open Access
Approche historique de la Place Anatole France, un espace en contact permanent avec l’histoire A historical approach to the Anatole France Square: an urban space in permanent contact with history
(AESOP, 2014) Durdevic, Jan; Lamirault, Valentin
Anatole France Square is a public space in the oldest part of the city of Tours. Through the centuries it has undergone many changes, but its unique historical wealth and identity are inseparable from those of the city of Tours as a whole. The purpose of this short chapter is to briefly trace its history. During the Celtic era, the Tours region – called ‘Touraine’ - was occupied by the Gallic people of Turones, so Anatole France Square was probably an agricultural site with orchards. Tours was founded following the Roman annexation of Gaul in 52 BC. The area now covered by the Anatole France Square was not included in the first settlement, implanted in the present Saint-Gatien neighbourhood. In the medieval era, Tours, like many contemporary cities, was divided into two distinct urban centres: the Cité and the Châteauneuf. Even though the square did not belong to either of these neighbourhoods, an abbey dedicated to St. Julien was located on its perimeter and the successive enlargements of the abbey since 1240 are still partly visible. During the Hundred Years War, to defend Tours against the English, the ancient walls of the Cité and the Châteauneuf were replaced by a new wall which enveloped the area now known as Anatole France Square.
Open Access
Après nous le déluge? Climate adaptation and urban development in Antwerp, Hamburg and Rotterdam
(AESOP, 2013) Kustermans, Clenn
Fear of water is embedded in our human minds. This natural reaction (based on the indisputable knowledge that we cannot survive in water) has been portrayed in many forms of classic and modern culture. Although Biblical examples and Hushpuppy lived as nomads in an ever-changing world, the majority of the world consists of permanent urban structures. Cities are normally perceived as strongholds of culture and prosperity, and must therefore be protected against external threats such as water. Despite a growing consciousness of shortening production chains and reducing energy consumption, port cities are still the turning wheels in national and international economies. While their economic importance remains unscathed and local populations are growing, port cities are increasingly challenged by major climate changes. Port cities have always intertwined with water, and they therefore encounter the advantages and the disadvantages of water. Of all climate implications, water level rise is perceived as the most important one for port cities. Besides the rise of the general sea level, the unpredictable occurrence and implications of storms have increased too. Longer and more intense periods of drought and heavy rainfall inland lead to flooding of the main rivers on their way to the sea. These climate changes necessitate new water protection measures.
Open Access
Architecture & Planning in Times of Scarcity Reclaiming the Possibility of Making
(AESOP, 2012) Iossifova, Deljana
UN-Habitat, represented by its Central European Office in cooperation AESOP in September 2010 organized the 1st European Urban Summer School (EUSS) for young planning professionals. The host was the Wrocław University of Technology, Poland. The topic of the EUSS was Heritage and Sustainability. Izabela Mironowicz was the head of the school while Krzysztof Mularczyk acted as UN Habitat Coordinator. The 2010 EUSS took as its starting point the fact that urbanisation is a global process, yet it has left a particular legacy in European cities. Students and tutors with diverse backgrounds congregated from all over Europe and beyond in a central European city to gain a better understanding of urban change. Reconciling heritage with development was the challenge to achieve a more sustainable urban future. ‘Sustainability’ was conceived here as a balance between historic legacy, regeneration and citywide urban transformation. Wroclaw, the host city generously provided the empirical setting to test these assumptions, to verify their validity through international comparisons, and to offer young professionals the opportunity to elaborate interventions towards a more sustainable urban future.
Open Access
Architecture with architects: urban proposals for three villages in the province of Tarragona, Spain
(AESOP, 2014) Peralta Zaragoza, Anna
land in Spain; by 2006 that had increased to 1.014.000 hectares, almost doubling urbanization in 20 years. Thousands of hectares of rural land have disappeared by applying a model of city-building with many shortcomings, such as priority for traffic above people, poorly used public space, mono-functional areas and low density. As a result there are sustainability problems (both environmental and economic), inefficient public transport, bad quality of the public realm and loss of ‘place identity’. This study focusses on the fact that there still exist a large amount of land with an approved urban plan with the same deficient characteristics. This article shows the conclusions of a study of some villages in the province of Tarragona by students and professors from La Salle architecture school in Barcelona, on alternative ways for planning our built up areas. The aim was to establish a balance between both the history and the culture of the settlement and between high environmental quality and functional issues. The research project has resulted in a new method of interpreting and projecting the settlement and its landscape, which could be more widely applied.
Open Access
Artur da Rosa Pires : Universidade de Aveiro
(AESOP, 2011)
Dean for cooperation and regional development of Aveiro University, is graduated on Civil Enginery (Coimbra, PT, 1978), have a Master on Regional and Urban Planning (Cardiff, UK 1983) and PhD on Regional and Urban Planning (Cardiff, UK, 1987). Professor at the Social, Political and Territorial Sciences of Aveiro University. His field of work is Planning Policies and Theory, Strategic Territorial Planning, Inovation Policies and Sustainable Development Policies. Between 2003 and 2005 was Vice-President of Regional Coordination and Development Commission of Centro Region (CCDR-C). Was State Secretary of Environment and Territorial Planning of Portugal (May to June 2004) and Consultant of Presidency of the Portuguese Republic on Science and Environment between 2009 and 2011.
Open Access
Borderlands : Changes for peripheries
(AESOP, 2010) Cimadomo, Guido
The first known concept of land goes back to the time of the Egyptians, who believed it to be flat and floating on water. Later on, other civilisations raised similar concepts. In Babylon the priests described the universe as an oyster with water above and below, the whole sustained by a solid sky like a closed and round room. The Mesopotamian concept foresaw an ocean that surrounded flat land; it was forbidden for navigation and punishment for those who ignored this was to fall into the abyss. Later still, around the 8th century B.C. the Greeks imagined land as a flat and round disk held up by columns. Anaximander of Miletus saw the world in the form of a cylindrical column surrounded by air that floated at the core of the universe without support and couldn’t fall because it was right in the centre. What is clear is the absence of fear of early civilisations to raise some abysmal edges – very difficult to justify – but with a persuasive and frightening force, highlighting the predominance of specific interests over rationality.
Open Access
Branko Carvic : Department of Architecture and Planning at the Faculty of Engineering and Technology. University of Botswana
(AESOP, 2011)
Is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Planning at the Faculty of Engineering and Technology, University of Botswana. He gained his Ph.D., M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in geography and spatial planning from the University of Belgrade. He has been involved in professional practice, research, management, government service and academia since 1980. Before joining the University of Botswana in 1997, he served on the Board of directors in Yugoslav Institute of Town Planning and Housing (YUGINUS), as an assistant professor at University of Belgrade (Faculty of Geography and Faculty of Architecture), as director of GISDATA Belgrade, and as a senior urban planner in the Department of Town and Regional Planning, Ministry of Lands, Housing and Environment of the Republic of Botswana. During period 1997-2005 he was a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning of Serbia (IAUS). As geographer and chartered town planner with the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), he devoted his professional, research and teaching interest around issues of spatial planning and design, environmental land use planning, development and management, applied geography, institutional and organizational aspects of GIS, focusing on selected countries of Southern Africa and Western Balkans.
Open Access
Changing conditions – changing our role
(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Maci, Giulia; Blust, Seppe de; Kustermans, Clenn
After briefly discussing the changing context of urban planning, the article focusses on our experiences in Bromley-by-Bow. During the summer school we had an in-depth visit to this East London neighbourhood. Our colourful experiences are then put in a manifesto, which can help young urban planners understand their jobs. To arms! Times are changing fast. The economic crisis points out the risks and the limits of our current planning system. In times of scarcity it becomes inadequate for, let’s say, three reasons. First, traditional planning is characterized by a strong hierarchical structure, with a promoter that coordinates the actions of different urban players. This model needs a high availability of scarce public resources (financial, human resources and knowledge) and lacks the needed transparency and democracy in today’s multi-actor society. Second, traditional zoning as a tool to regulate land use is not able to manage the emerging dynamics of the transformation of the territory. Its ‘catch 22’ between the necessary flexibility for new win-win situations on the one hand and the stringent framework to guarantee spatial quality on the other hand leads to stagnation. Third, the complexity of society is growing. A growing diversity and social inequality puts society under pressure. Space and spatial planning interact in this process by putting socio-spatial incongruence in focus and by making social structures spatially permanent.
Open Access
Changing contexts and visions for planning: the case of madrid central area
(SoftGrid in association with AESOP and IFHP, 2014) Franchini, Teresa
How to cope with the concept of scarcity as an issue for planning? What does it imply for a traditional planning system based on a set of instruments aimed at guiding the city in the long term? To what extent does a master plan have the capacity to deal with the issue of scarcity? How can these plans be successful - or not - in this attempt? In which way does the changing economic and social context influence the type of planning pushed forward by the authorities in charge of the matter? This article tries to give some answers to these questions by exploring the interplay which exists between the overall economic context, the dominant vision in planning, and the planning instruments produced for cities affected by changing circumstances, drawing on the master plans designed for Madrid during the last 30 years. The article is structured around these three key aspects, with the aim to extract some lessons from this experience. The laboratory used to explore these questions is the central district of the city. It is an urban realm to which all the approved planning instruments have given a special treatment to improve a traditionally deprived area, whatever their supportive vision.
Open Access
City centre regeneration : Оld town east
(AESOP, 2010) Barranco, Ricardo; Egyud, Reka; Maeiyat, Mohammad; Murseli, Rizah; Swistun, Deborah; Triantis, Loukas
The area is located in Wrocław’s historic city centre, close to the central market, in the most touristic part of the city near the Odra river. Replacing second world war destruction the area was regenerated mainly with blocks of flats and public open spaces following the principles of modern urban planning and architecture. Not well connected with its adjacent historic core, the main city market, commercial activities and educationalcultural buildings on the river bank, it has valuable permeable internal spaces between buildings. We have identified several problems which impede the material value of the area and needs redressing. The immaterial value is represented by the modernist style of the housing blocks, their layout and the associated open spaces, together with historic events still present in the collective memory. Interaction with local inhabitants informed our SWOT analysis.