LA3: a productive square
Basic information
Project Title
Category
Project Description
Under the theme “Productive Cities” of Europan 15, our project focuses on the city of Laterza, rediscovering cultural traditions and the unique natural environment. Proposing and promoting a new identity for the territory, the institutions are willing to rediscover the cultural offer in order to enhance touristic flows. Thereby, the centre of Laterza embraces the opportunity of becoming an important showcase for traditional craft products for citizens, enterprises and tourists.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
Under the theme “Productive Cities”, the Europan 15 competition challenges urbanists and architects to generate opportunities in existing urban conditions. The project is about the city of Laterza: a town in the Puglia region with a population of 15.000, located on the border with Basilicata region and overlooking the largest canyon in Europe. During the last decades, the city has been excluded from the main destinations that every year national and international tourists come to visit. Therefore, the administration of Laterza is building the foundations for a sustainable future, moved by the desire of promoting a new identity for the territory: investing in artistic locations, the redevelopment of neighborhoods and involving the population in many seasonal events. Thanks to the analysis on a territorial scale, we have discovered that the community wishes to have a new center for sociality, close to the historical city and a beautiful natural landscape. Therefore, the project focuses on a new centrality: a popular destination that could host, at the same time, old and new activities.
Key objectives for sustainability
In our project for Europan 15, circularity has been thought as the possibility to transform the profitable unproductiveness of the empty spaces within the existing urban landscape, investigating its potentials as a starting point to re-establish the city identity. Helping building a self-sustainable and attractive place, the project aims at increasing the awareness of its inhabitants, strengthening their involvement in the transformation process.
In Laterza, we started reading the existing urban conditions, and that provided us with a clear method to manage circularity. By following this approach, we developed a strategy divided into several phases. The first phase started re-establishing the connection between the natural and urban landscape, by activating the empty spaces in between. This allowed us to rediscover an unlimited potential and to open a dialogue with the main institutions and local businesses. We considered their participation to be essential in building awareness and spreading the city's production throughout the territory. Social Innovation is the tool that let us unveil Laterza's identity, contaminating its existing traditions while shaping new urban sustainable spaces.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
We saw design as a tool that can encourage coproduction, increasing the beauty of the territory to the eyes of its inhabitants. When we first look at existing resources, we find ourselves opening a dialogue with existing institutions and businesses whom participation is essential to encourage a collaborative and creative production.
The site potential have been divided in three main categories that enhance the authenticity of the territory, such as nature - with the amazing landscape of the gravina - production - with the traditional food and the local art&crafts- and culture - through social innovation and the new synergies within the community-. Analysing these potentials helped us generate ideas for spatial interventions, opening up a conversation to be discussed in a broader social field, increasing participation and co-production.
During our analysis we found unproductive areas at many scales. Both the urban and the social fabric needed to be reconnected in order to regain trust in the territory. The time factor allowed us to divide our project into scales and phases, with the goal of giving back the lost beauty of the city. At the macro scale We connected the natural unbuilt landscape to the built environment through slow mobility and green systems. Meanwhile, a conversation with citizens shifted our focus to the architectural scale of voids, with vacant housing and non-permeable ground floors.
As we began to fill these spaces with adaptable activities such as a diverse tourist offer and manufacturing using technology and innovation, we contaminated Laterza's existing traditions, consolidating them to the mobility systems, thus creating a new urban space in where anyone would have been keen to live in.
Key objectives for inclusion
We imagined an open conversation between the main cultural and educational institutions of the territory along with the participation of the businesses and local workers able to bring innovation into the production cycles (traditional craft sector, food production, tourism). We asked the participants to take ownership of the present of the place where they live, thus becoming responsible for their future and the legacy to be left to the following generations. Because cities are not individual entities but dynamic parts in larger and complex territories, we needed to bring the project from a local to a regional scale, to enhance a sustainable and efficient use of primary sources and to link it to a bigger itinerary between the gems of the southern Region, from the Adriatic Sea to the Tyrrhenian.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
Our thought about how to enhance circularity in this project started through an acupunctural drawing that helped us trace the unproductive spaces, highlighting the deep fragmentation in the urban fabric. We then continued shaping our ideas on the territory focusing on the quality of life, developing slow-mobility itineraries linking landscape, cultural heritage and local production. To promote the city of Laterza in a long-term vision, we shaped a new collective urban space that could host weekly activities and monthly events for locals and tourists, to let them enjoy Laterza's culture. We then bring all of these ingredients to the citizens of the city, making them believe in a sustainable and richer future, where the territory truly reflects their needs and aspirations.
