active participatory urban design

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abstract_active participatory urban design: an approach to bottom-up process in urban planning. the case study of modenacambiafaccia planning prize

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Emanuele Bompan, Gaspare Caliri, Marco Lampugnani, Beatrice Manzoni, Michele Restuccia

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Participatory planning, participatory GIS, shared urban policies: Those words have became fundamental as urban politics moved towards bottom-up decisional processes. However these processes often fail due to corporate real estate interests, lack of political intervention, obsolescence of participatory technique or lack of tool who can actively produce meanings, uses and new urban vision.

This paper aims to propose an alternative that can parallel Participatory Planning. We call this tactic Active Participatory Urban Design (APUD). Through which devices (conceptual and concrete) can people take direct action on shaping the city they desire? We will show how APUD can work through the case study of the urban design prize ModenaCambiaFaccia (Modena, Italy), created in 2008 to request new ideas in planning.

Slowness is the core concept we adopted, derived from the concept of slow urbanism. Slow cities allow people to know their cities deeply and think about the use and narratives of their space. We used light urbanism, ephemeral urbanism and new technologies (such as *r-fid, Bluetooth, GPS, etc.).

Our aim is to make people active players in producing public spaces configuration, create narrative on specific places, invent new uses of existing place or produce critics on normative urbanism. Through cross feedback, mobile urban street furniture and active multidirectional communicational systems, people can effectively take urbanism into their own hands. In other words we aimed to induce slow tactical modification of the urban structure.

We conclude that tactical participation is an everyday action and is an approach that could help  stimulate adding new frames of intervention and political representation.

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This paper is part of the Paper Session: Spatial Politics of Urban Planning

Posted on Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 12:04 AM. Filed under: + research Tags: aag, chairsharing, partecipazione, pianificazione, planning, snark RSS 2.0 feed.