The European Union (EU) has identified the digitalisation of the building permit (DBP) process as strategic to the twin digital and green transition of the construction ecosystem, enhancing transparency and collaboration along the entire value chain by a data-driven approach. In 2021, under the Horizon Europe programme, three innovation actions (DigiChecks, ACCORD, CHEK) were funded to investigate the synergy between processes, human resources, and advanced technology in DBP, providing system prototype demonstrations in operational environments. The research outlines the objectives of the three projects, contextualising them within the international literature through a bibliometric analysis, and highlighting the main emerging research topics.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
Among the dedications my students gave to me for on of my consecration anniversaries, one struck me particularly:“Twenty-five years are longer than most of our entire lives.”
I had never thought about it: the years of my own rebirth coincide with their birth. In this quarter of a century, time has passed in handfuls – swiftly, intensely – and none of us has remained the same.
Architecture, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Departamento de Urbanística y Ordenación del Territorio ETSAM
Este número especial se presenta como un homenaje al profesor José Fariña y a sus valiosas contribuciones al fortalecimiento de la investigación desde el Departamento de Urbanística y Ordenación del Territorio de la ETSAM, en la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Las tesis doctorales que dirigió, su blog personal y esta revista —de la que fue uno de los principales impulsores— son tres de sus aportaciones más significativas a la internacionalización, difusión y divulgación del conocimiento en el ámbito urbanístico. Este número reúne una cronología de las tesis doctorales que dirigió, acompañadas de sus respectivos resúmenes, así como una selección de entradas de su blog. Su contenido refleja el alcance y la profundidad de su pensamiento organizado en tres conceptos: urbanismo, territorio y paisaje.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
IntroductionThis paper focuses on how a (assumed) entrepreneurial shift in urban planning and development has been implemented in a medium-sized city in northern Sweden, and how sustainability-as in sustainable urban development-can be argued to be a second shift in urban planning and development or represents an alternative form of neoliberal governance.MethodTo explore how and when urban entrepreneurialism and sustainability are interlinked, as well as when they are not, urban policy documents from 1988, 2007 and 2016 focusing on the development of Sundsvall city center has been examined using thematic content analysis.ResultsThe result shows that the 1988 document is significantly influenced by social democratic welfare politics, with prioritizing social bonds and the Sundsvall resident being the focus, while the newer documents emphasize visitors, potential residents and architectural design to promote the flow of people, money and goods. In this sustainability is put forward as a mobilizing metaphor, and serves to conceal the potential paradoxes of the priorities of the strategy, which involve the contradictions between economic, environmental and social values.DiscussionConsequently, it is possible to claim that sustainability, as a concept, has acquired a new function: to disguise the less palatable consequences of growth by evoking sustainability as a guarantee of the strategy's quality.
O Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local (SAAL, 1974-1976) foi uma iniciativa única na cultura arquitetónica portuguesa, sobretudo pela dimensão sociopolítica da disputa da casa e da cidade a partir das e dos moradores pobres urbanos. As mulheres foram protagonistas. Exploro as motivações e as contribuições de moradoras e técnicas no desenvolvimento do SAAL/Norte. A partir do programa televisivo Nome Mulher (1975-1976), pergunto sobre qual a relação da luta pelo direito à habitação com a construção da cidadania das mulheres no contexto da participação no processo SAAL. Metodologicamente, o levantamento dos assuntos abordados no programa são alinhados com o episódio Direito à Habitação (1976), no qual uma arquiteta e moradoras do SAAL/Norte falam na primeira pessoa. A análise interseccional do grupo “mulheres do processo SAAL” acompanha a discussão das estruturas sexuais e raciais a partir das quais Carol Pateman (2010) sublinha os principais obstáculos à construção da cidadania plena das mulheres: além da feminização da pobreza, também a sub-representação e a atribuição social e histórica dos trabalhos de cuidado às mulheres. Estes têm ainda o potencial de ser entendidos como “gestos políticos radicalmente subversivos” (hooks, 1990). O direito à habitação está intimamente ligado ao direito a ser parte ativa na sociedade (Muxi, 2009) e ao direito à cidade, conceito que tem sido ampliado por teóricas feministas (Pérez, 2013). A par da representação das mulheres, defendo que o acesso a uma habitação – digna, adequada e lugar de individualidade e descanso - é um pilar na efetivação da cidadania plena das mulheres.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Anthropology
Andrea Tartaglia, Giovanni Castaldo, Adolfo F.L. Baratta
In the face of the challenges of effectiveness and efficiency of resource expenditure imposed by the Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR) and by the Next Generation EU (NGEU), the solutions introduced in Italy mainly appear to be of an emergency nature, with the adoption of extraordinary procedures and an overall “containment” of the Public Procurement Code. This essay, recognising the current scenario as an opportunity for structurally redefining methods and processes with particular attention to the dimension of the feasibility and environmental sustainability of the interventions, aims to investigate the possible contributions of the technological area for the innovation of practices and tools in the field of planning-design-construction-management of public works in Italy.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
Este artigo enfoca a influência da forma urbana no acesso da população aos equipamentos e seu objetivo é sistematizar uma metodologia para a avaliação da equidade no acesso a equipamentos de saúde pública, baseada em modelos configuracionais. O estudo analisa como a população de Porto Alegre está localizada com relação ao acesso às unidades de saúde de atenção primária (US). Os dados empíricos provêm do banco GEOSAÚDE da Prefeitura Municipal (2010) e do IBGE, Censo 2010. A metodologia apresentada envolveu o cálculo da acessibilidade direcionada das demandas (moradores) às ofertas (US), com base no modelo de oportunidade espacial. A análise da equidade foi realizada de forma comparativa, considerando diferentes grupos de renda e bairros selecionados. A metodologia mostrou-se com potencial para analisar e discutir a complexidade dos padrões de acesso da população aos serviços de saúde e também pode contribuir para testar cenários alternativos, servindo de suporte à tomada de decisão.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Carlo Rovelli’s book is a journey through time and space that brings us to the essence of the human being and, I would like to say, of the technological man who lives in us. The path of knowledge that the author offers us goes beyond his recent discoveries as a scientist and obliges us to deal with three essential aspects of our nature as observers of the cosmos: unceasing curiosity, the need to find an order for what we see or we think we understand, and the inevitable desire to connect events through memory. The power of his reasoning and the ability to clarify difficult phenomena even if only to guess lead us on a fantastic journey whose destination seems impossible to know. But the ultimate goal is certainly travel.
The first part of the book helps us to distinguish how the concept of time was understood by modern physics: to then dive into the multiplicity of times we live today. «What we call “time” is a complex collection of structures, of layers» (p. 11) The more scientists have studied time with the methods and tools of modern physics and more time, like a speck of snow between their hands, has gradually flaked, layer by layer. Today we can easily detect with current measuring instruments that there is a theme of slowing down time in physical space. The non-uniqueness of the measurement of time is an achievement of Einstein, even if the watches of that time were not yet able to record it. We now know that there are innumerable measures of time for each point of space, there are infinite times and «every phenomenon that happens has its own time, its own rhythm» (p. 29). Modern physics therefore describes how things evolve in their relative times and how times also evolve with respect to each other (p. 33). The second part concerns what we know today, in a contemporary dimension that seems to have lost almost every trace of “temporality”. The physics of which Carlo Rovelli is expert, or quantum gravity, is as if he had before him a lunar landscape made of motionless sands and a landscape at the ends of the peaks of the earth where we only see snow and sun rocks. With current tools these landscapes appear beautiful, extreme and timeless. The third and final part of the book is about the challenge we can face in the near future. In the timeless world we interpret today, there must be something that allows us to define an order between past and future, glimpsing a point of origin and a direction of flow of time. This by Rovelli appears as the wish of the researcher whose curiosity is infinite and unstoppable. In this regard, he says: «Our time must somehow emerge around us, on our scale, for us» (p. 12). So in the third part he proposes a journey back to the lost time of the first part, “chasing the elementary grammar of the world” and finding time as an approximation sometimes useful, sometimes clear, more often still confused what we are, or of what we still don’t know.
Let’s ask ourselves what we are interested in knowing about the weather. Today it is demonstrable that for everything that moves, time passes more slowly. Again, Einstein was able to guess this truth many years before the experiments conducted between those who are on the ground and those who fly on a jet plane provided a measurable demonstration. «The “proper time” does not only depend on where you are, on the proximity or not of masses, it also depends on the speed at which we move» (p. 75). This is the disruptive conclusion of contemporary physics is that “now” no longer means anything. Rovelli warns the reader that this notion is really hard to understand; in a simple way it suggests that we think that our “present” is like a bubble close to us, which derives from our experience and that we absolutely must not think that it can be extended to the whole universe around us.
After having unhinged all our consolidated way of living in time, from here on the author helps us to create in our minds an admirable illusion of new systems.
Let’s discover the “temporal structure of the universe” (p. 82) where special relativity describes each present event as a point from which two opposing conical structures take shape, one concerning past events and the other events future.
Now the question becomes, what exists in the universe? Let’s go back to the young Einstein, who after a few decades from a world agreement reached by the industrialized nations to divide the globe into time zones, realized that it was not possible to make such synchronization exactly. Aristotle affirmed that time is the measure of change and we call time the accounting of this change. Then Newton unhinged this certainty and showed us that time flows even when nothing changes, even going so far as to describe in mathematical formula that time flows regardless of what changes and what moves. To both these definitions of scientist-giants of the past must be added a new astonishing certainty, continues Rovelli: «we can think that there is the great Newtonian canvas on which the history of the world is drawn. But this canvas is made of the same substance from which the other things of the world are made, of the same substance from which stone, light, air is made» (p. 123). These substances are today defined by scientists as “gravitational fields” and constitute the plot of the physical reality of the world.
What Rovelli is working on today are loop quantum gravity equations. In these equations the time variable no longer exists. One searches for order in a fragment of the universe, one searches for coherence between pieces, no longer a unifying design of the universe, until one glimpses a new elementary minimal form of time (p. 215).
We are increasingly fascinated by Rovelli’s studies when he comes to describe the phenomena that regulate the relations of adjacency between the grains of space. Today the links between the grains of space are defined with a term borrowed from mathematics, spin – or the group of symmetry of space – while the single ring of a spin network is defined precisely as a loop, from which the theory takes its name, in which Rovelli delves into an essay entitled “Reality is not what it appears to us”. For the moment, we must be satisfied with observing this thin and mobile canvas woven from the elementary grains of the universe.
At the small scale, the theory describes a “quantum spacetime”, while at the scale of the spin nets we can for now observe a furious swarm of those who appear and disappear (p. 212). Loop quantum gravity is the current way of finding coherence in the universe of space and time for us human beings who are however a piece among many in the cosmos in an irreversible entropic process. In the apparent disorder of the cosmos, phenomena self-regulate, mix, flake away in a transformative dance of growing entropy. Who knows, these overwhelming concepts of spatiality are not a starting point to revolutionize even the spaces of architecture.
Alessandra Zanelli
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
Pablo Herreros-Cantis, Veronica Olivotto, Zbigniew J. Grabowski
et al.
Abstract Climate-driven changes in coastal flood risk have enormous consequences for coastal cities. These risks intersect with unequal patterns of environmental hazards exacerbating differential vulnerability of climate related flooding. Here we analyze differential vulnerability of coastal flooding in New York City, USA, as an environmental justice issue caused by shifts in flood risk due to increasing floodplain extents. These extents are represented by updates to the 100-year floodplain by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and urban changes in land use, land value, and socio-economic characteristics of flood exposed populations. We focus on six local community districts containing disproportionately vulnerable communities. Across our study areas, we observed increases in the floodplain’s extent by 45.7%, total exposed population by 10.5%, and population living in vulnerable communities by 7.5%. Overall flood risk increases regardless of increases in the updated floodplain extent, as do floodplain property values. However, variability is high between community districts; in some cases, increases in exposure coincide with decreases in vulnerability due to shifts in racial demographics and increases in income (i.e. potential floodplain gentrification), while others experienced increases in exposure and vulnerability (i.e. double jeopardy). These findings highlight that the dominant drivers of coastal flood risk in NYC are ongoing real estate development and continued increases in sea level rise and storm severity, both of which have explicit implications for flood vulnerability. We describe the social processes governing development in the flood zone, namely zoning, resilience planning, and the determination of potential flooding severity and related insurance rates. We also discuss how these social drivers of risk intersect with social dimensions of vulnerability due to racist housing markets, and the distributions of public housing and toxic chemical hazards. We conclude with a framework for the analysis of contextual and outcome-based vulnerability to coastal flood hazards, and provide policy recommendations to reduce risks over the medium to long term.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Cities. Urban geography
The LED project develops and implements a model for filling a gap in contemporary landscape planning and design education. We observed that contemporary Landscape Architecture and Planning education exposes students to a traditional and obsolete consultancy- driven understanding of the profession, subservient to the social needs and wishes of private clients, rather than preparing them to fulfill the social responsibility as advocates or ‘trustees’ of the larger society (Horrigan and Bose 2018). The Landscape Education for Democracy (LED) programme used a blended pedagogical format, consisting of online teaching sessions and on-site summer intensives, with the purpose to expose students and young professionals in landscape planning and design to an emergent area of practice that is re-defining design as a collaborative act of co-creation in partnership between experts and civil society. In designing the course, we sought to engage many perspectives so that we could attract the most diverse audiences and making an impact that wanted students to transcend the boundaries of our campuses. In designing the LED seminar, the project partners wanted to fulfill the Erasmus + Strategic Partnership Programme’s mandate to foster transdisciplinary, cross-cultural learning for both students and educators involved by introducing into the curricula of each institution digital learning settings. Students who enroll in the course are expected to do so as active participants. On individual and group assignments where they engage in an open dialogue across professional and cultural boundaries, The LED programme is similar to immersive Erasmus exchanges, teaching and learning approaches which were co-created by the project partners and were refined thanks to an iterative feedback loop with the students and instructors involved in both the online seminar sessions, as well with further intensive summer workshops that followed them. Altogether, they form the pedagogical framework of both the LED online courses and the Intensive Study Programmes (ISP; also IP). This chapter also reflects the role of the internet and web-based educational environments for achieving LED objectives. The web-based mode enabled the participation of a broad and diverse range of interested learners, regardless of their financial possibilities or proximity. The following is an illustrated account of how the learning activities have been conceived and it focuses on the role of ICT technologies for the development of procedural competences which are also relevant for LED qualification.
Architectural drawing and design, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
While there has been no shortage of discussion of urban big data, smart cities, and cities as complex systems, there has been less discussion of the implications of big data as a source of individual data for planning and social science research. This study takes advantage of increasingly available land parcel and business establishment data to analyze how the measurement of proximity to urban services or amenities performed in many fields can be impacted by using these data—which can be considered “individual” when compared to aggregated origins or destinations. We use business establishment data across five distinctive US cities: Long Beach, Irvine, and Moreno Valley in California; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and the New York borough of Staten Island. In these case studies, we show how aggregation error, a previously recognized concern in using census-type data, can be minimized through careful choice of distance measures. Informed by these regions, we provide recommendations for researchers evaluating the potential risks of a measurement strategy that differs from the “gold standard” of network distance from individually measured, point-based origins and destinations. We find limited support for previous hypotheses regarding measurement error based on the abundance or clustering of urban services or amenities, though further research is merited. Importantly, these new data sources reveal vast differences across cities, underscoring how accurate proximity measurement necessitates a critical understanding of the nuances of the urban landscape under investigation as measures appear heavily influenced by a city’s street layouts and historical development trajectories.
Adolfo Baratta, Laura Calcagnini, Fabrizio Finucci
et al.
The contribution presents the results of a research work which addresses the vast theme of urban regeneration of settlements characterized by social and economic marginalization, degraded housing, environmental and technological inadequacy and shortages of services. The territorial context is that of the peripheral marginal areas of the city of Sogamoso in the Boyacà district of Colombia. This research work aims at the development of procedural and design strategies capable of regenerating spontaneous settlements and, in particular, the implementation and realization of solutions identified for improving performance and safety of existing residential buildings relating to forty study cases.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Architectural drawing and design
<p>En la primera escena de <em>El proceso Paradine </em>(<em>The Paradine Case</em>, Alfred Hitchcock, 1947) la cámara penetra en una casa, se convierte en sombra de un mayordomo con bandeja y se introduce en un elegante salón donde una figura femenina toca el piano de espalda al espectador. Ya sin rubor ni pretexto, la cámara se recrea en la nuca femenina, muestra la laboriosidad del recogido de su cabello y gira hasta llegar al rostro, el cual solamente abandona cuando, siguiendo su mirada, se abre en un plano general que abarca el retrato de su esposo, el señor Paradine.</p>
History of the arts, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying