Università Roma Tre

The course consists of a project exercise, at the scale of the urban project, which proposes a special focus on public space and its “equipments."

One of the main objectives of the course is for students to deal, in the first instance, with an exercise of complex and layered reading of the territory and contexts of action at different scales; an analysis capable of interpreting and comparing with the elements belonging to three fundamental systems that characterize the contexts of contemporary cities: the natural systems (soil, water, vegetation, ...), the "evolutionary" system of anthropic and settlement modifications, and the infrastructural networks that guide and orient these modifications.

This exercise of critical interpretation of the specific characters of territory and of their interactions is the first step in addressing the challenges of contemporaneity developing urban planning strategies that concern the way we occupy and modify the space we inhabit, especially when it comes to collective spaces.

The design exercise, that is the subject of the course, focuses, therefore, on an area of the city of Rome in which the three highlighted systems (buildings, natural, infrastructural) present elements of particular interest: this is the territory although the Via Tiburtina and that, like a palimpsest, is composed of multiple stratifications. In the image of the present landscape, although with different intensities, these stratifications still manage to be read in a more or less defined way: the natural system of the Aniene riverbed and its tributaries, the anthropic development of residential and productive areas, and a dense infrastructural network connecting east-west. These systems intersect, combine or overlap, making themselves recognizable with different gradations all along the road. Their history and origin is ancient and traces a direction of movement that is linked to the shape of the land and still belongs to the progressive and uneven eastward expansion of the city of Rome. This expansion causes the intensity of the flows of people who move to and from those places every day, ensuring that this quadrant of the city still remains heavily attended.

The course is divided into two phases:
- the first develops and guides students through the process of critical analysis that will focus on an "assigned" sector of the via Tiburtina and its environs; the first phase concludes with the students' identification of a more defined "project area" that will allow them to approach with the project main themes of interest that emerged from the critical analysis.
- The second phase is the project phase. The main focus of the exercise will concern the design of a new public space: the theme may be declined in different directions that will have be coherent with the motivations that, in the previous phase, led to the choice of the "project area" (open space project and/or landscape arrangements and/or settlement of new devices of collective interest, ...); the general objective of the project will be to imagine transformations capable of triggering virtuous processes for the life and care of common spaces.
The project will have to confront, on the one hand, the theme of "complex uses" of public spaces, studying and questioning the social components and the overview of actors present, and on the other hand, the increasingly urgent issues of sustainability, with a focus on the themes of adaptation and mitigation of the effects of climate change in the urban environment.

Bjur H., Santillo Frizell B., Via Tiburtina: space, movement and artifacts in the urban landscape, Svenska institutet i Rom, Roma 2009.
Boano, C. (2020) Progetto Minore. Alla ricerca della minorità nel progetto urbanistico ed architettonico, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa
Corboz A. (1985) Il territorio come palinsesto, «Casabella» 516, pp. 22-27.
De Solà Morales, M. (a cura di) (1999), Progettare città/Designing Cities, «Quaderni di Lotus», 23.
Erbani M. (2022) Il territorio manoscritto. Strumenti per un’indagine territoriale lungo la via Tiburtina da Tivoli a Roma, Tesi di Dottorato in “Architettura: Innovazione e Patrimonio”, Roma Tre.
Pone M. (2019) Architetture devianti. Il potenziale infrastrutturale dell’architettura, Tesi di Dottorato in “Paesaggi della città contemporanea”, Roma Tre
Pone M. (2021) ‘Sul potenziale della situazione: architettura come infrastruttura’, in Op.Cit Selezione della critica d’arte contemporanea, 170.
Rykwert J., Learning from the Street, «Lotus», 158, 2015, pp. 102-113.
Salat, S. (2011) Cities and forms: On sustainable urbanism. Editeurs des Sciences et des Arts Hermann

RE-MOVE-ROME-ROADS, as an integral part of the Laboratory of Urban Space Design, provides a series of critical elements to reinterpret the space of the road, and in particular that of the roads in the Roman territory, on a design level.

The Roman territory that falls within the administrative limits of Roma Capitale has a road network extension of about 8000 km (Roma Capitale, 2022). This network is difficult to maintain, not only because of its linear extension, which is coupled with a large surface area of asphalt, but also because of the nature of the subsoil and the microclimate, which is characterised by significant temperature variations.

If the pandemic emptiness of the roads has made possible unprecedented forms of temporary appropriation of the space of the car by humans and non-humans, the performative capacity of the road tends to remain limited to mobility, mainly automotive.

RE-MOVE-ROME-ROADS investigates design tools and processes instrumental in subverting the still monofunctional understanding of the space of the street, exploring actions and processes that allow to multiply the horizontal and vertical relationships that this urban device can entertain with the context.

The course is part of RE-MOVE-ROME, an action-research project of the Department of Architecture of Roma Tre, which explores the possibilities of removing the impermeable surface layer that pervades the metropolitan area of Rome in order to give more space to water and its infiltration and thus strengthen the regional water cycle and at the same time facilitate reforestation processes, contribute to the absorption of heat waves and droughts, and encourage processes of re-appropriation by the inhabitants.

Jacobs, Jane (1961) Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House.

Viganò P. (2010), I territori dell'urbanistica, Officina Edizioni, Roma.