During the 2014 Triennale di Milano the Italian Council of Architects, Planners, Landscapers and Conservators (Consiglio Nazionale degli Architetti Pianificatori Paesaggisti e Conservatori – CNAPPC) and the European Forum for Architectural Policies (EFAP) organized in partnership with Architect’s Council of Europe (ACE) the interantional conference EU Cities reloading on Strategies and Policies for Urban Regeneration. The Forum is bringing together European political leaders, mayors, legal experts, bankers, architects and urban planners to discuss how to move to a new urban paradigm, for more sustainable and inclusives cities, able to meet the economic, social and environmental challenges of our time. SMAQ is invited to bring to discussion as a best practice example their urban project for the former train station Bayrischer Bahnhof in Leipzig done in collaboration Anna Viader.
In Europe, cities share a common history, developed through the millennia and then reconstructed after the devastation of the Second World War, followed by hastily-erected structures built to meet urgent needs, to house the citizenry and re-start industrial activities.
The consequent extensive use of land, the abandoning of the industrial areas, the increase in energy consumption and pollution and the influx of migrants from other countries and cultures have combined to transform urban spaces without convincing replies to the key problems from urban planning and architecture policies, with the former shackled by normative structures and the latter dazzled by urban marketing, flashy and expensive.
But for some years now, concurrently with the crisis, first financial and then economic, that is besetting the continent, it has become evident as never before that there is an urgent need for new policies and strategies that will combine environmental concerns and development, efficiency and social inclusion, with a vision that provides a solution to the problems of the city ‘as a whole’, from social interaction to transport, from environmental sustainability to urban waste, from enhancing the value of public spaces and monuments to the digital infrastructure.
European cities drive the continent’s development: they are the locus where social and intercultural relations are regulated, and our ability to transform them is critical to the future of our children, for their health and safety, as well as their possibility of accessing culture and well-being.
European policies, as well as national and regional legislation, have promoted actions with varying degrees of practical utility, sometimes due to the actions of National governments and their ability to enforce them in their territories; today, on the threshold of a new European political day, a strategy, shared and realizable, with platform that can coordinate sector policies and concentrate the available financial resources on clear objectives of practical use to the citizenry is absolutely indispensable.
The European Union must prioritize sustainable urban regeneration policies and discard its myopic approach of investing primarily on large-scale transport infrastructures while paying scant attention to residential housing, without taking into account the fact that tens of millions of Europeans live and work in the “other” Europe; the one outside the high-speed networks, whose historic cities, abandoned by public and private investors, risk a quiet annihilation.
European architecture is more than a great cultural and scientific asset for the Union: it can also provide practical solutions to the problem of regenerating the cities and the environment, as well as facilitating territorial and social inclusion.
European architecture can concretely express the new paradigm of reduced land consumption and reuse of urban areas, so that European cities, large and small, can keep pace with contemporary trends, which combine innovation, development and environmental protection, without overlooking the inhabitants, the communities and the natural habitats by designing macroeconomic strategies that do not consider the quality of daily life and are blind to the future.
For these reasons, in the Italian semester of Presidency of the EU, in the region of Europe that epitomizes the beauty, the complexity and the grave state of our cities, the National Council of Architects, Planners, Landscapers and Conservators (Consiglio Nazionale degli Architetti Pianificatori Paesaggisti e Conservatori), the European Forum for Architectural Policies (EFCP) and the Architect’s Council of Europe (ACE) have scheduled the Forum entitled “EU Cities reloading”, to discuss, in terms of European policies, a viable path towards improving the quality of life of their citizens and stimulating economic, social and cultural recovery in the EU.
(from the conference abstract)
Participants: Lorenzo Bellicini (director CRESME), Stephano Boeri, Tommaso Dal Bosco (Head of Department for Urban and Territorial Development – IFEL), Claudio De Albertis (President Triennale di Milano), Ada Lucia De Cesaris (Deputy Mayor – Concilor for Planing, Private Building, Agriculture, Municipality of Milan), Craig Dykers (Snøhetta), Catherine Jacquot (President French National Council of Architects), Sabine Müller (SMAQ), Patrick Rimbert (Past President SAMOA Frances – Iles de Nantes, Ex-Mayor of Nantes), Silvia Viviani (President INU), Cino Zucchi and others (see program).
EU Cities reloading – Strategies and policies for urban regeneration
Triennale di Milano, Milan
7-8 Novembre 2014
Further information:
EU Cities reloading – program
Project:
Bayrischer Bahnhof, Leipzig