Curso de Postgrado Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona
Emplacement
Piacenza, Italy
Master Directors
Emiliano Armani in collaboration with Franco La Cecla and Zaida Muxi
Project Type
Master plan
Program
City Atlas for new urban purposes and growing strategies
Project date
May - June 2008
Current Status
Realised
University
Fundació UPC, Barcelona
Client
Sogecos
Piacenza is mid-sized Italian city of approximately 100,000 inhabitants. Until a few years ago, it was considered one of the best cities to live in Italy. Today, this is changing: the city is suffering the consequences of the absence of economic renovation and competitiveness, together with the effects of a certain inability to face the phenomenon of social precariousness and new immigration.
Situated in the center of the extensive plain of the Po river, to the north of Italy, Piacenza is at the crossroads of the principal routes of transportation of the North of Italy. Throughout time, it’s strategic position in the national territory defined it’s military destiny.
However, the city of Piacenza as well as the rural territory that surrounds it have not stopped growing, to the point that said rural zone has become a reference for a new group of residents proceeding especially from the next metropolitan zone of Milan and characterized by their privileged capacity to separate the moment and place of their workspace versus their living-space, which has allowed them to orient themselves towards the nearby rural and natural territory of Piacenza.
Today Piacenza is faced with the opportunity of having to rethink it’s urban, territorial and economic development: almost all of the military areas located within both the modern urban perimeter as well as the historic, are destined for civil use. The soon liberated areas will be converted in the largest historic occasion since the founding of Piacenza: the possibility of forging its new destiny.
Today, Piacenza has the need to prepare itself to re-urbanize a surface area of more than 1.5 million square meters: for a city this size, this signifies having to redefine it’s future growth plan as well as it’s actual identity as a city. A unique oportunity for any city, for Piacenza, in it’s scale of posibilities it is a chance to rethink itself completely.
The master course will be carried out between Piacenza and Barcelona.
This real-time investigation is organized as an active investigative platform and as a project for a case that is absolutely unique and unprecedented.
See online : Atlas ciudad: www.piacenzafutura.net
