Annalisa Lodigiani
Annalisa Lodigiani is a planner and a PhD candidate from the Politecnico of Milan working at TU Delft as a guest for a few months. Her daily supervisor is Alex Wandl, currently at the Chair of Environmental Technology and Design (led by Professor Arjan van Timmeren). Annalisa presented a talk entitled: Across boundaries: Visions and norms for the periurban space beyond the urban-rural divide in planning and policies
This is the summary of the talk:
In recent years, the urban fringe has been one of the main topic of planning debate across Europe, since all countries has started to face the challenges posed by urban sprawl.
It is usually describe in negative terms and seen as truly problematic landscape: a transitional landscape, with a messy and fragmented coexistence of urban and rural functions; a landscape under pressure between containment policies and ad hoc, iterative and haphazard transformations; the place of business park and entertainment and shopping “big boxes”; a terrain vague filled with unwanted uses; a landscape of a threatened agriculture; a territory of borders and tensions between municipalities, planning instruments and sectoral policies.
Consequently, during last decade, several research projects, many of them funded by the European Union, has tried to develop new strategies and planning tools to manage the urban rural fringe, also in relation to the solicitation of the European Landscape Convention (2000).
The outputs of international researches have been quite contrasting. Many of research conduct in the United Kingdom that the dynamism of the urban fringes of large cities was a force to which the rules of protection and conservation couldn’t entirely resist, insomuch that the question was how to manage the change.
On the other hand, especially in our country, the awareness of the critical rate of land take is pushing researcher to take more seriously the environmental challenge, meditating on new radical way to design and plan.
On this basis, my PhD research aims a) to clarify the nomenclature associated to edge and transitional landscape between rural and urban and to give an overview of their phenomenology in developed countries; b) to outlines approaches that address issues in the periurban space, looking at it “at the local scale”, i.e. the porous urban peripherical tissues and the closest rural lands.
But, specifically, the research aims to investigate the ways in which planning documents could put into focus the periurban, with a particular attention to the coordination of policies and to regulatory aspects.
How to promote the integration of the rural development policies and local/territorial planning in the peri-urban space? How to make operative the agro-urban scenarios, in order to obtain the desired landscape and territorial structures, through a consistent and effective regulatory apparatus ?
LISTEN TO THE PRESENTATION HERE [we can’t guaranty the sound quality, unfortunately].
