Rebuilding the Edge
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
Category
Project Description
Rebuilding the Edge is a mapping exercise. It is a reprogramming strategy for struggling towns along an infrastructural reinvestment project. It is also a design project for a single station along the rail that can maximize a town’s ability to capitalize on incoming economic activity. This project is only the beginning of a Liminal's research initiative in partnership with Fondazione Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, MIT's UrbanRisk Lab and the municipality of Pettorano sul Gizio.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
Rebuilding the Edge takes as its point of departure the depopulation of small centers in Italy over the last century, a social reality with a direct impact on the built environment and consequences for citizens–local and national. The project focuses on the redevelopment of the Sulmona-Carpinone rail line in the region of Abruzzo and what this means for depopulating centers along it. By studying this event at a variety of scales–national, territorial, and local–Rebuilding the Edge explores how architecture can make a contribution to issues usually tackled by non-spatial thinkers, such as politicians, policymakers and economists. In this effort, the project experiments with ways in which design can play a role in some of the most challenging issues of social cohesion that affect rural Europe.
Rebuilding the Edge is a mapping exercise. It is a reprogramming strategy for struggling towns along an infrastructural reinvestment project. It is also a design project for a single station along the rail that can maximize a town’s ability to capitalize on incoming economic activity.
This project is only the beginning of a research initiative in partnership with Fondazione Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, and MIT's Urban Risk Lab. Liminal, a research design and consultancy group that uses a multi-disciplinary approach to tackle the challenges that lie ahead for the Italian countryside, is actively working with the community of Pettorano Sul Gizio to access governmental funding in order to repurpose the abandoned infrastructure in the town. As part of this initiative, Liminal will host a three weeks workshop with MIT students along with, Fondazione F.S. and MIT Urban Risk Lab to further vision the future of this small community.
Key objectives for sustainability
Rebuilding the Edge focuses on Pettorano sul Gizio, the first town along the Sulmona-Carpinone rail where services are in the process of expansion. It proposes a new program for the town’s station and an access from the station to the town. Pettorano sul Gizio is surrounded by orchards, a river, and natural reserves. The project involved 3D scanning and mapping the whole settlement. This revealed that Pettorano has the typical formation of central mountainous Italian towns developed along the ridges of low promontories, with a tight linear street pattern that follows the steep contour lines. The roofs that have collapsed are usually on steep or narrow streets, usually along the cliffs that face the river. On the other side of the town where slopes are shallower and main access roads have been built, buildings have remained better preserved and more used. Based on the findings from the research conducted the project proposes the following:
- Reusing the existing station, which is too distant for pedestrians and currently surrounded by orchards, as a lab to study how different species react to drastic climate changes in the area, building on some other nearby towns are doing.
- Creating a new way of entering the town by adding a new station with a market facing the side of the town that has no direct access. This would revitalize the decadent edge of the town and generate a source of income for the town that is directly tied to the produce generated around the existing station.
- Creating two primary access strategies from the station and market to Pettorano: An elevated covered path that connects you directly to the town and a path along the valley and its orchards, reconnecting and repaving eroded streets. Both paths start at the station and land at a new garden that precedes the town's main access plaza.
- Along the repaved path and the garden plaza, reusing and expanding some of the collapsed buildings to host student housing for those who will work at the lab.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The project at the scale of Pettorano sul Gizio is principally concerned with choreographing the experience of travelers and visitors that arrive at the town, which is currently in the midst of a revival effort. It eases access to the town from the station by bridge the gulf between them, whilst offering an alternative natural path for those experiencing the place at a different pace. It aso inserts programs along the way that make local products and services visible to visitors, thus enhancing the competitiveness of the town’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
All of this is achieved through an aesthetic and architectural strategy that seeks both to be respectful of the historic town, and premonitory of the new technologies and ways of life coming to reimagine its future. The station’s sloping site is formed through the use of traditional dry stone masonry walls that host the market and other related programs. Travelers have the option to enter, move through and exit the single roof of the station, through the paths made by this traditional element of agricultural infrastructure. For those instead that choose to take the bridge over the valley that drops them off at the town directly, a direct path is offered form the train platform that minimizes barriers for people with limited mobility. The bridge though is not a path sitting on a conventional bridge. The bridge is structured rather like a roof that blends into the towns upon which it arrives, and below which people may move through a hanging platform where they are protected from the intense summer heat, and the slippery winter snow.
Key objectives for inclusion
The role of the architectural intervention in this context is one that promotes union across towns. It is crucial to think about how a large investment for one project can serve multiple municipalities. This is a difficult task since it requires extensive conversations and communal decision making, but an essential one as well in order to create a strong economic network that can survive over time. This project works in the spirit of ongoing regional initiatives like the MITO project–a joint regional planning office with the objective of thinking strategically and territorially rather than each municipality in isolation. Often, top-down investments can fuel existing tensions and rivalries amongst towns that want to benefit from funding coming through initiatives like the current EU Recovery and Resiliency Fund. However, there are services and programs that multiple stakeholders can share. The main objectives of the project focus on creating a large enough shared investment that has the capacity of achieving the following:
- Incentivizing families and young people to move to the region and the town of Pettorano sul Gizio;
- Creating better tourism infrastructure, services, and connectivity infrastructure;
- Improving the educational facilities in the area for young families; and
- Creating resiliency plans to mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis on the local environment and agricultural economy.
By creating mixed programmed shared stations along the railway, the project sets up the framework for moments of exchange, inclusion and social innovation to take place between different communities. At the architectural scale the project incentivizes the involvement of communities and the employment of local labor by implementing construction techniques, such as dry stone terracing, that are local to the region.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
From an academic standpoint, this project highlights the importance of a feedback loop between urbanism, architecture and the communities involved to arrive at a shared vision for the future of a territory. Working at different scales allows this project to find different areas on which to intervene that include transforming certain structures into education facilities, remote working service and mobility infrastructures. The implementation of different tools, commonly used in isolation, allows the research to go from a broader to a more granular understanding of the potential of the railway infrastructure in revitalizing some of the internal areas of Italy and diminishing the Italian CO2 car emission, in fact italians are the highest car owner per capita in Europe.
From the perspective of practice, Rebuilding the Edge starts to point out where architecture–and more generally spatial disciplines–can contribute to the articulation and resolution of larger-scale initiatives. The project starts to explore what solutions are prototypical and which ones are specific to the researched context and town of focus.
It is also important to highlight some of the limitations of this project at this stage. Rebuilding the Edge is not a manual of work since the work of the detective is always determined by the personal inclinations of the detective herself. Although the project proposes a framework, it is not a manual that predetermines what instructions to follow to guarantee a specific result. Rebuilding the Edge explores one way to begin proposing tangible solutions to some of the initiatives undertaken in Italy today. It proposes how tools, such as GIS photogrammetry or stakeholder interviewing can provide insight that paves a path towards design solutions concerned with tangible problem-solving.
