It all began in Detroit. Or, better, it began all over again in Detroit a few years ago, at the end of the last century.  With the economic crisis that it had generated, the most important assembly-line city had to ask itself about its own survival and fate.  In just a few years its population fell from 1,850,000 to 740,000.  2,000 buildings were demolished.  For several miles around the center, the desolation is dramatically obvious.  Detroit is the Pompeii of American manufacturing capitalism, with more than 320,000 jobs lost between 2001 and 2008.  Since the 1970s 57% of the population has left the city, 25% just in the last decade.  Charles Waldheim, currently chair of landscaping at Harvard, Georgia Daskalakis and Jason Young understood immediately that something decisive for the future of the city and urban planning was happening at Detroit, and in 2001 began documenting it directly.

Ten years on, Detroit is slowly finding another dimension.  Today the best itinerary to visit the city is called Cloudspotting Detroit, Best Places for Viewing the Sky and is promoted by local government.  Despite its name, this tour leads the tourist (best if on a bicycle) to the most interesting places to visit, those which make Detroit worth visiting.  There are not many.  Only 31 places of interest for America’s 11th city, an ex(?)metropolis of 900,000 inhabitants in the urban area (there were two million in the 1950s).  The important thing is that many of the first 16 conspicuous places of the city are, as Alan Berger would call them, drossscapes and others are evanescent.  Demolished areas, abandoned parks, steam rising from manholes fed by underground heat, large abandoned public buildings, markets for used objects or where one can barter, Victorian villas reconquered by nature, houses occupied by squatters, re-naturalized infrastructure, abandoned neighborhoods that will be replaced by artistic installations… Clouds of dust, of steam or of tastes that substitute the traditional urban attractions (architecture, museums, libraries, Detroit even lacks some basic shops) and return the ruins of the assembly-line city to narration and nature, transforming Detroit into the first post-metropolis. ... read more

Numbers. Chiara Rizzi

Bodie, California 1987.  Città mineraria, diventata una delle ghost town più famose degli Stati Uniti, dichiarata National Historic Landmark nel 1961 e parco storico l’anno successivo, si trasforma nel set fotografico dell’album The Joshua  Tree degli U2.  Sospesa in uno stato di  arrested decay la cittadina, che negli anni più fiorenti ha ospitato fino a 10.000 abitanti, è meta di circa 200.000 visitatori l’anno.

Quella di Bodie è una storia che racconta molto delle trasformazioni urbanistiche degli Stati Uniti, ma non solo.
Spopolamento e nuova urbanizzazione sono due facce dello stesso fenomeno.
Nel 2010 l’82% della popolazione statunitense viveva nelle città, si stima che nel 2050 la percentuale salirà al 90%.
Secondo il Census Bureau le aree urbane hanno subito un incremento del 13% dal 1990 al 2000 e nel 2002 circa il 3% dell’intera superficie degli Stati Uniti risultava urbanizzata. Dal 1945 al 2002 le aree urbane sono quadruplicate passando da 15 milioni a 60 milioni di ettari, mentre nello stesso periodo la popolazione degli Stati Uniti è quasi raddoppiata. Le aree urbane sono cresciute ad un ritmo quasi doppio rispetto al tasso di crescita della popolazione.

Durante gli anni ’70, per la prima volta l’impronta ecologica del pianeta ha superato la sua biocapacità. In altre parole dagli anni ’70 in poi si è affermato un trend secondo il quale l’umanità ha iniziato a consumare.... read more

The High Line, Urban Landscape and Ecological Reintegration on Manhattan. Carlo Gasparrini

What we see happening in the Chelsea District of Manhattan around the High Line is emblematic of a trend that is far from Le Corbusier’s refusal of the “grid”, the tabula rasa and his claim of radical transformation in the name of a model he considered the only one possible; it is equally far from Koolhaas’s fascination with a fertile competition among urban fragments and a happily omnivore capacity of skyscrapers when confronted with public spaces.  Here instead is a trajectory which takes into account the interferences solicited by “sudden” pre-existing entities and the modern and contemporary city’s need for historicization that is emerging notwithstanding the unceasing reconstruction of Manhattan.  But above all it is fed by the possibility that new forms of open space can produce a revisiting of the traditional competitive rules of the single lots of the “grid” within a system of morphologic and ecologic relations capable of soliciting unusual ways of constructing in three dimensions inside the “grid”.

Interaction among big open spaces, ecologic regeneration and the architecture of the city is unquestionably central to the urban experience of New York.  After the construction of the compensatory pause of Central Park, theoretic speculation and the 1900s’s experience of open spaces explored progressively innovative visions and practices in the ways and forms of urban construction.  In this sense, the New York riverfront, on the east, but above all on the west side of Manhattan, has always been one of the most interesting and controversial laboratories for design.  The extraordinary “modernity” of the Henry Hudson Parkway – the highway along the western shore of Manhattan, designed and built by Robert Moses in the 1930s to connect Manhattan and the Bronx to the Hudson River Valley – is a well-known reference point for any imaginable landscape infrastructure project in any existing city.  And not only in Europe, .... read more

High Line riding. Valeria Sassanelli

Now that the second of the three stretches of Manhattan’s High Line has opened, on June 8th, 2011, a linear park and aerial ribbon suspended ten meters above the ground, like a subtle melody parallel with the Hudson River, crosses the district of Chelsea from south to north.  Realized on the infrastructure of the West Side Freight Railroad (commonly called the High Line) which was built in the 1930s and then went out of use in 1980, this contemporary park is right in the center of the process of evolution and change of the city of New York, whose cardinal points are the requalification of its waterfront and the current administration’s “green” strategy.  The modification of Special West Chelsea District Rezoning of 2005 strengthens and supports a spontaneous process of re-functionalization and requalification of the post-industrial buildings which began in the 90s with a confluence of cultural and economic interests centered on this district, changing it physically, but above all functionally into a space on the frontier, suspended between the dynamics of reuse and abandon.  In the Meatpacking district of West Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen/Clinton, the warehouses, slaughterhouses and the factories which had made up the dominant functions of the twentieth century (linked to a dedicated infrastructure system which included the HL and the wharves on the Hudson), have today been converted into art galleries (there are more than 200 between 19th and 24th Streets), architecture studios, shops, restaurants, museums, theaters, hotels and homes.  Today’s Chelsea attracts like only Soho and Tribeca did in the past.  A pioneer in this change was the well-known gallery DIA which was founded in Chelsea in 1987, then moved to Beacon in 2004, but is now back in Chelsea.
The HL experience is a child of this process and the one of its real show pieces, but at the same time it is the driving force toward a new phase.  In fact, not only is it an element of requalification and re-appropriation .... read more

ReCycle Columbus. Kay Bea Jones

THE CASE OF COLUMBUS

American baby boomers grew up believing that Christopher Columbus discovered America. The power of that myth is not lost on the capital city of the State of Ohio that is his namesake. Columbus, Ohio is not the oldest or most populous city in a state that has provided 8 American presidents; a state that fostered the agricultural and industrial development of 19th century America.  Columbus can be counted among the Midwestern boom cities of Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Indianapolis, now striving to emerge from an industrial past. But Columbus is unique among them with a most fluid identity open to perpetual reinvention. Not tied to specific capital industries or family dynasties, Columbus is a product test market, appreciated for its homogenous demographic cross-section. The city can claim no monumental landscape features or physical characteristics to qualify the incorporated city of a million and a half residents.  Instead government, universities, banking and insurance are dominant sectors of its economy, and they continue to draw people in.

Unlike other Midwestern metropolises, Columbus is growing in population. .....read more

Toronto.  Infrastructure and landscape for a new urban ecology. Jeanette Sordi

Toronto is located on the northwest coast of Lake Ontario, the easternmost of the Great Lakes.  The city of Toronto, together with Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Hamilton, was one of the most important centers of the “Manufacturing Belt”.  In fact, the area which surrounded the Great Lakes was dubbed with this sobriquet for its role in transforming raw materials and industrial production which, in the 19th century, drove the United States to expand toward the west.  For about a century the region attracted millions of immigrants from Europe and the southern United States, catalyzed capital and dominated domestic and foreign markets (Ford and General Motors are only the two best known).  The peak in productivity and wealth of the region was reached during WWII, but a few years later, the opening of global markets and the removal of duties on imported goods, determined its fate.  Car production, metalworking and chemical industries moved to south-east Asia.  In just a few years the “Manufacturing Belt” had become the “Rust Belt”.
Because of the decentralization of productive activity this region used up its economic resources and passed through a period with high unemployment.  In the 1970s investors and workers abandoned the industrial cities which caused such a loss of fiscal receipts that it became almost impossible to maintain the urban infrastructure, with serious consequences on a social level.  With the economic crisis the environmental consequences of decades of intense industrial production began to emerge as well.  These effects were not considered during the boom years of economic expansion.  The fires on the intensely polluted rivers of Cleveland, Toronto and Chicago, .... read more

Interview with Daniel E. Williams. Cesare Corfone

C.C.  In your last book, “Sustainable Design – Ecology, Architecture, and Planning”, you often refer to ecological processes as sustainable design tools. How can the ecological model  guide architects and planners towards innovation sustainable-solutions?

D.E.W.  The ecological model illustrates that ecology is a spatial web of connections where energy, materials and information are linked between multiple organisms and places. It shows the processes that drive the ecological system under study, as well as the cycles associated with the flow of energy and materials essential to its existence. The success of the system is due, in part, to the connectivity between parts. The model devised by Dr. Howard T. Odum illustrates the relationship between flows of energy and materials between system components and between producers and consumers. Deers are born in forests where they eat the lower plants then defecate which nourishes the plants and the trees that provide them food and habitat so that they have a place to be born and eat and so on... simple! The ecological model is a powerful tool as it illustrates that the challenge of designing sustainable patterns is simply to design the linkages and the structures that will recreate and reinforce the natural system cycles.
An example of a design and planning challenge to be revisited is: California uses 20% of its electricity to distribute water, but gravity does it for free - therefore over the next 100 years start by redesigning urban and agricultural patterns and urban locations in California so that water is distributed by gravity....read more