CrosScapes: Integrated Methodologies and Urbanized Territories

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It’s difficult to discuss about urban design, when territories are almost completely urbanized and infrastructural connections are diffused and articulated, redefining thresholds and introducing differentiated needs and identities in developing or shrinking contexts. We have to decode and work with new scales and not codified models of urbanity: dynamic patches, satellite structures, recombined fragments, micro districts. These, involving territories and each part of the city at the same time, are able to define the shifting from the dimension of the city to the network of cities of the megalopolis, towards the idea of a “meta-city” where flows, movements and ephemeral phenomena become a major component. Borders are in fact, frequently blurred and unrecognizable, overlapped and mixed in new formal, functional, social and also structural solutions articulating the whole of our built environments. The palimpsest of elements to deal with in holistic way, requires considering and reformulating the entire territorial system which is involved in the process of change towards a new “urban ecology”. The extended net of actions and reaction which articulates our complex landscapes, goes from the palimpsest of the layers of history, to the ones of geology; from the cultural and social settlements, to the reasons of economy and territorial management; from methodologies of production to systems and technologies of circulation and policy of distribution of human been, goods and information. Our urbanized territories become the “text” where new ground writing takes place, creating new cross interactions within the landscape, and new visual relationships as well. The articulation of a “systemic vision” establishes relations at geographical scale with the systems of water distribution, natural and man-made, with the structure of soils and their superficial and inner characteristics, with the agricultural and spontaneous cycles of growth of vegetation in a complex and fragile ecosystems.

Stream: Environments

Paper: CrosScapes

After obtaining a degree in Architecture from the I.U.A.V.-Venice, he earned a Ph.D in Architecture and Urban Design from Politecnico di Milano, where he received postdoctoral research grants to study and verify “Contemporary Urban Design complexity within the global City Network.” At Politecnico di Milano, he taught Theory of Architecture and Urban Design studios, while he took part to several EU-sponsored research projects. For six years, he has been taught Ph.D. courses in Architecture and Urban Design for Politecnico di Milano, where he is co-creator of the International Exchange Program with New York Institute of Technology. He has been teaching at NYIT several studios in the undergraduate and graduate program since 2008. He participated to several exhibitions, and International competitions receiving awards and mentions, while he is very active in publishing and lecturing in Universities between Europe and USA. The key focus of his research is related to the shift of the Urban Design perspective towards a more articulated concept of Landscape Urbanism/Architecture, which concerns several constructed environments of post-industrial era, including ecology, producing lands, pollution, sophisticated technologies, and alternative energy processes. These elements delineate a new systemic and integrated vision, defining landscape structures which include infrastructure, urbanism and agriculture