EMU

Eu~op~~n Master of Urbanism

Un1vers1ta IUAV di Venezia
Coordinator
Paola Vigano

Design studio
Bernardo Secchi, Paola Vigano, Emanuel Giannotti
with
Sybrand Tjallingii (Landscape ecology),
Pa~la Pellegrini (Fields of Knowledge),
Gu1do Guidi, Luisa Siotto, Mariano Andreani
(Tools of representation, Photography),
Silvia Dalla Costa (Tools of representation, GIS)
and LATITUDE
Fabio Vanin, Marco Ranzato, Valentina Bonifacio
Lectures
Enrico Anguillari, Vincenzo Artico (Consorzio
di Bonifica Piave), Alice Brombin, Andrea Goltara
(Centro Italiano per Ia Riqualificazione Fluviale),
Luca Guarino (Autorita di Bacino f1u me Adige),
Emanuel Lancerini, Andrea Masc1antonio,
Alessandra Marcon
Thanks to
Giovanni Bonotto, Paola Dalli Cani, .
Lorenzo Fabian, Roberto Gaino, Andrea Mon,
Diotisalvi Perin, Carlo Tessari (mayor of .Monteforte
d'Aipone), Fabio Sgrev.a, CRIF.(Consorzlo
Regimentazione ldraullca Fluvlale),
gruppo Sorgo Malanotte,
Comitate lnsieme per Sorgo Malanotte

Graphic design
Studio lknoki
Translation
Dominic Ronayne
Ilene Steingut

Un~rsiti luav
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diVenezJa

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 An approach
Today thinking about the contemporary city requires the use of contrasting and
distant epistemologies.
Describing: looking closer, measuring the fractures, faults and craters that
open before our eyes. Describing places and recognising situations. Accumulating
idiographic stones of people and territories. 1 This first epistemology involves a great
deal of fieldwork, collections of hybrid observations, loosely structured interviews,
casual exchanges, the construction of a g:ance tnat can single out significant figures
on ordinary backgrounds. 2 The recognition of subjects and actors, gathered around
a circle ideally open to natural dynamics and their rationales.
The descriptive effort takes place in the present; it belongs to the present and
deals with it From this position, it derives its ability to read possibilities - written
in present time and in the present territory - still relevant today, neither burned
nor severed from history, but that can be inscribed in possible itineraries. In this
sense, the territories of description are also territories of design.
Thinking about the future: the second epistemology is apparently opposed to
the first; it looks straight ahead, opening its glance, observing vast horizons detached
from contingency. It opens to the long term - a time frame that the design of cities
and territories has often feared and rarely evoked. In looking at the long term, at
what has changed and transformed over time, this operation often recalls history
and geology. Thinking about the future mobilises the deep past, the environmental
history of places, slow movements, but it also requires the knowledge of the great
upheavals and consequences caused over time by the transformations that have
altered the ecological functioning of the territory.
These two epistemologies are the focus of the research, that began in 2005

9 Situations, scenarios Paola V1gano

 with students in the European Master of Urbanism (EMU)a, explo~ing areas of urban
. . 1n the central Veneto area, or in a few large metropolitan areas such as
d1spers1on
4
Grand Paris and St. Petersburg. . . .

Often pitted one against the other- the f1rst ep1stemolo~y JUXtapose? to purely
phenomenological positions and the second to the construction of genenc rhetoric,
policy_ description of the present and thinkin~ about the .future are, however, from
our point of view, two key aspects in construct1ng the proJect for the contemporary
city and territory. . .
Through the concept of possibility, the two ep1stemolog1es rooted both in the '[he jU
present and future and in the short and long terms, can find points. of contact that cal fielo
bring into play individual and social expectations, new urban and reg1onal conditions \~~ th
and the contradictions and paradoxes that nourish them. Perhaps it is necessary to nave so
penetrate the concept of possibility more deeply in order to clarify the initial position ~e C(iSI
statement regarding the need to use distant and contrasting epistemologies, albeit the con
linked by this concept ban qu
the two
Possibility scenario
The word 'possibility' is very nuanced. Possibility is inherent in ability, in faculty, in be- relation
ing able to do something In the explorations of the territories of dispersion described parad:g
in this book, the abil1ty to support a kird of development that uses non-renewable
magnitu
resources or resources that require a very 1on~ t'rne fra7.e to be Rble to renew was
can ope
questioned. What is possible is what the territory can sustain, its carrying capacity.
(1964}1
If traditional geographical determinism and its relationship with Darwinian
ture s1tu
evolution seem to come to the fore in this first meaning, the word possibility also
of the f
contains an echo of eventuality, opportunity, chance, unexpected occasion, even the
contingent and the unrepeatable occasion. How can an area like the metropolitan Oecomes

area of Venice that is undergoing a critical period in economic, social and envi- Tod
ronmental terms turn some of its supposed limttations - inherent in the character ca~sed 0
~f long-term dispersion, in its various morphologies, in the structure of its support ~at wed
mfrastructure - into opportunities or possibility? as often
Much research effort (and this book describes only a small part) has been respons,
devoted to this question; the effort has added another point of view, formed precisely If th
thr~~gh 10.the understanding of the description of places, the comprehension of th~ir Conseque
~OSition the world and the possible trajectories towards the future. The hypotheSIS
IS that the.dispersed city is able to support an innovative city that can take on new 9ood,or
urban, enVIronmental and territorial issues.
~'~hat role
The word possibility also contains a strong reference to power: having the and
f~culty, force, st~engt~, power to do, to choose, to impose. But in a democratic so- tondi

Ciety, ?nly what Is socially acceptable and tolerable is possible. Another term often ~iU lhe
associated with possibility refers to power: potential, something with promise, but es
f~r~ 1 d
~ t~
1
0 Our Common Risk
an
as not yet in act. The term also includes the idea of latency: that which is hidden, that
does not betray evidence, that seems not to exist, but that could re-emerge under
ely certain conditions.
ric, Starting from these two terms, the territory of the present is seen as a store of
brn possibility and potential that require skills of reading, aware idiographic content and
ry scenarios that reveal and use them.

he A radical question: our common risk

at The juxtaposition of the two contrasting epistemologies defines a large hypotheti-
ns cal field within which design activity moves with fluidity. In the present, continuities
to with the recent or remote past emerge, but also foreseeable ruptures or ones that
n have sometimes just occurred. A new radicalism is revealed and demonstrated in
the crisis of our present era; it lies in state of things, in their inability to adapt, in
eit
the conclusion of life-cycles that do not allow second thoughts, in a renewed ur-
ban question that poses new topics to planning. The hypothetical field defined by
the two epistemologies becomes the terrain upon which to test interpretations and
scenarios; an enquiry that takes on radicalism and the process of radicalisation in
- relation to the era of transition that we are experiencing and to the emergence of
d paradigms different from the past. Radicalism is needed to better understand the
e magnitude of the changes underway and the potential and possibilities that they
s can open. The descriptive effort is transposed to the future Citing Gaston Berger
(1964), scenarios and research prospects become the concrete descriptions of fu-
n ture situations. The phenomenology of the present becomes the phenomenology
0 of the future, close readings of possible trajectories and of reactivated latencies. It
becomes construction of images.
Today, the condition of risk seems inevitable. Any territory is fraught with lo-
- calised or global risks. Safe places and, consequently, places to address the risks
r that we do not want to share no longer seem to exist. In confusing hazard and risk,
as often happens, we seem not to be able recognise the individual and collective
t
responsibility that, day after day, creates conditions of greater risk.
If the need for sharing risk and its inevitability is increasingly confirmed, their
consequences on urban design and planning are still not clear. To paraphrase the
Brundtland report that put the future at the heart of thinking about the common
good, or citing Beck and the problem of redistributing risk, like wealth in the past:
what role can design play in the construction of the common good, a shared future
and conditions of risk that do not discriminate? 5
The two cases discussed in this book made it possible to explore territorial con-
ditions in areas in which hydraulic risk is strong and creates enormous social costs:
levees, dams, catch basins, canals, river banks are, at the same time, opportunities
for the redesign of common space and devices for monitoring events. In the second

11 Sltutlons, scenrlos Paola Vigano

 . ter scarcity that increased risk to the area's
. f 1 ted It was wa
case that was 1nves ga ' . torage space that can meet water demands
. hich requ1res s ,
irrigated agnculture, w 'ding plundering the rivers that have already been
. g the summer, avol b' t .
especially dunn use The degree of am 1gu1 y Increases due to
ht and upstream
burdened by droug th t .15 rlch in gravel making the construction of new
0 f bsurface a
the presence a su f . r excavations) an advantageous operation from
pits (instead of using p.laces o pno
an economic point of vieW. It' oints of view different ideas of the future and the
B 0 th ases make mu 1p 1e p ' . . .
c .f. 'tes collide and test different 1deas of public space.
1 d'fon
11 of spec1 IC s1
phys1ca con lut'lon or perhaps we might say that chance allows

It . not the casua1 so '

The resu ~s rtunity to probe deeper, to radicalise, to understand
more solutions, but an oppo . d f k
. d descriptions and scenanos as pro ucers o nowledge
more fully, ustng estgn,
(Vigano 201 0).

Re-cycle . .
obiects and territories are observed as express1ons of l1fe
In both cases, artefacts, J
- cycles (Viganb 2011) in different stages. Each is also .a re~ult of differ~nt forms of
rationality in which we can recognise the passage of t1me, 1deas, techn1cal cultures
and social evolution. Close analysis of the riverbank space over time performed in
the first case study presented in this book allows us, for example, to observe the
flow of ever-changing ideas regarding what sharing the space of protection means,
along with several different ideas of individual and common responsibility reaching,
eventually, a loss of awareness and knowledge of the real stat JS of a place or the
responsibility connected to it. The issue of maintenance, over time, of spaces that
are fundamental for our security, together with processes of the spontaneous ap-
propriation of the space of risk create frameworks for interesting thinking, albeit full
of contradictions.
Adapting the territory and its different parts, even minute ones, is a continu-
ous process of beginning and ending life cycles, today made more obvious in their
transformation, particularly due to the period in which we are living. Recycling im-
plies broad understanding of the processes of territorial transformation; it is not just
stratification or an incremental project born progressively and based on existing
conditions. The scenarios constructed by the three groups of students regarding
the two case studies face the theme of recycling thus conceived.
Recognising morphologically-defined local situation&, as Samona suggested,
~ut also distin~uishing re.lative positio~s in space, scenarios that explore possibili-
ties and potentials emerg1ng from read1ng the differences among single places: this
small book, published with the help of students and teachers is a contribution to the
thinking on the project for cities and territories. '

12 Our Common Risk

 's
NOTES
s, ' The reference is to the book by Edoardo Nesi
n (20 10) Stona della mia gente. The bttter tale
of the rise and decline of an economic
to cycle, of wtdespread small and medium texttle
enterpnses, measured on the space of a
city and a territory, Prato, began in 1995
w1th Fughe da fermo, through the catastrophic
scenario of large abandoned brownfield lots
~e portrayed 1n L'eta del/'oro, 2004.
2 In the exerc1ses presented m this publicat1on
e. the jo1ned work conducted by students with
s photographers and anthropologists gives
substance, w1th greater rigour, to a plural glance.
d
3 In particular: in the program EMU coordinated
e by Paola Vigano at the luav University in Venice
and in the 'Situations, Scenarios' semester and
des1gn studio conducted along wtth
Bernardo Secchi.
4 In recent years students have been involved

in many research projects. See for example

fe the work on the Parisian agglomeration in:
f Secch1, V1gano, 2011 .
5 WCED 1987; Beck 1986. See also:
s
Fabian, Vigano 20 10.
n
e REFERENCES
Beck U., Risikogesel/schaft - ~uf dem Weg in eine
andere Moderne, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt aiM
'
, 1986 (English Translat1on: R1sk Soc1ety-
Towards a New Modernity, Sage, London, 1992).
Berger, G., 1964, Phenomenolog1e du temps et
prospective, Presses Univers1ta1res de France,
- Paris.
Fabian, L., Vigano P., eds., 20 10, Extreme City.
II Climate Change and the transformation of the
waterscape, luav press, Venezia.
Nesi E., 201 0, Storia della m1a gente, Bomp1ani,
- Milano.
Nesi E., 2004, L'eta dell'oro, Bompiani, Milano.
Nesi E., 1995, Fughe da fermo, Bompiani, Milano.
Secch1 B., Vigano P., 2011 , La ville poreuse,

MettsPresses, Geneve.
Vigano P., 20 11, Recycling Cities, in Ciorra P.,
Marini S., Re-cycle. Strategies for the Home, the
City and the Planet, Electa, Milano.
Vigano P., 20 10, I tern ton dell'urbanistica.
II progetto come produttore di conoscenza,
Officina, Roma (French Translation: Les
- territoires de /'urbanisme, MetisPresses, Geneve,
2012).
s WCED (World Commission on Environment and
Development), 1987, Our Common Future,
Oxford University Press.

13 Situations, scenarios Paola Vigano