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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled Urban Eutopia vs smart city from 2015 by Marina Montuori, published in the Festival Architettura Magazine. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see specific design actions based on the use of reversible, low-tech and low-impact building systems of urban regeneration. This article introduces integrated procedures to focus on adaptive maintenance to update architectural objects in order to restore high typological and performance standard.

The theme of urban and territorial regeneration is to day crucial not only for the architectural and urban disciplines but also for the economic growth of any country. It seems fundamental to begin with the definition to promote the dialogue between different urban actors and an interaction of different skills to produce new virtuous forms of hybridization collegially involved in the urban regeneration practice.

Montuori brought Italy as an example. Italy shows different and dramatic forms of dyscrasia affecting the urban environment. The lack of jobs, the disposal and neglect of the productive areas, the degradation of the peripheries could be exorcized with the requalification and reactivation of all those buildings that are not adequate anymore to satisfy the living requirements of the users and the regulations with an energetic, seismic and typological retrofit. The urban regeneration would represent for the local community a sort of reparation, mending and compensation, of the spaces currently unapproachable for the accessibility, the fruition, the life.

Urban regeneration is not a utopia, a no-place, but a real place strongly dependent from the buildings’ characteristics and recurrent performance deficits. This place is impossible to deny because it is inconvenient and because it would be impossible to replace the remains. Utopia can instead become eutopia or many good places, defining guidelines and organic and sustainable techniques within the strands of European theorization and realisations. Architecture has the strength and the duty to operate an aesthetical redemption, producing a new urban quality. But this will be only possible through professionals with an appropriate project culture and able to develop a more mature vision of the profession inside the civitas.

The capitalistic and speculative processes produced massive wastes of land and constructions which are demolished once they are not used any more, creating even more waste and dissipating energy. The possibility to profitably repair is something forgotten too often. The firm belief of the so-called radical construction which demolishes in order to rebuild, is indeed of a short-sighted utilitarianism. The advantages of a regenerative process based on reuse and substitution of smart parts are represented also by the revaluation of professionals producing building techniques based on technological excellences and artisan knowledge.

The complexity of the skills required today should necessarily lead to methodologies allowing a multi-purpose approach, never self-referential. To convince an institution and even more a private stakeholder that remodelling a building or a group of buildings is more convenient than demolishing it is an articulated and complex operation. It is necessary to list actual possibilities reachable also without the modification of the current regulations beside showing one’s virtuous practices. It would be beneficial to direct students while learning about architecture to develop pilot-projects from which they can deduce a proper regenerative solution with materials and interventions for both residential buildings and working places.

Montuori described such an attempt at the University of The Study of Brescia, within the Department of Civil Engineering, Architecture, Territory, Environment and Mathematics. They experimented with adaptive maintenance, based on the use of building systems that are reversible, low-tech, with low-impact and able to convey a renewed relation between typology and technology. It is an integrated system of building works capable of technological and typological update due to standardised and interchangeable technologies and building systems. This has a dual character: preventive to avoid the degradation of the constructions, and corrective to reintegrate a typological and performance standard qualitatively improved.

This practice can be applied in two fields of intervention: new design practices for the sustainable requalification of the residential habitat related to the integrate regeneration of the constructions and their contexts, like architectural reshaping, energy efficiency, and structural safety; and formation of experimental scenarios for the recovery of industrial and or dismissed areas. The research group developed a technological device defined as adaptive exoskeleton which is a structural system morphologically comparable to a stiffening framework external to the existing building and collaborating with it to optimize the structural response and energetic performances, and to improve the quality of the internal spaces. A sort of technological superstructure that includes new services and seismic devices.

In a real-estate market such as the Italian one, it will become necessary to redefine a new theory of the value from the quality of the building and of the context. This is inclined to privilege the substitution strategies ignoring the possibility of recovery, maintenance and regeneration of the existing heritage. Awareness is increasing towards the energetic and environmental resources, promoting a more evolved strategy of intervention on the strand of ecologist policies adopted by the international community. These operative modes with regeneration will be able to reduce consistently the waste and to develop tools able to generate urban quality and to improve the environmental contexts. This could be an approach to the smart city.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Urban regeneration with revitalisation and revaluation of urban areas is needed not just for sustainability, but for economic purposes as well.
2. Designers, architects, engineers, and urban experts need to be able to offer solutions and convince clients in regenerative terms, and their education could establish such knowledge and skills.
3. Regenerative approaches help to keep historic aspects of a city, while reducing waste both in land use and output and improving urban quality.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How can urban regeneration become popular instead of demolishing and rebuilding?
2. How can decision-makers advocate for regeneration instead of rebuilding?
3. What do you think could be regenerated or revitalised in your environment

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