Tactical Urbanism in Italy: From Grassroots to Institutional Tool—Assessing Value of Public Space Experiments

Alessandro Cariello,Francesco Rotondo,Rossella Ferorelli

doi:10.3390/su132011482

Abstract

The paper aims to evaluate the value that the experimentation of tactical urban planning activities can assume for the city, through the critical account of some practices in three Italian cities of large (Milan), medium-large (Bari), and medium size (Taranto), which in recent years, in some cases unknowingly, have experienced its effects, also forced by the thrust offered by the need to respond to the consequences of the pandemic. The authors reflect on how short-term interventions started by tactical urbanism movement are inspiring planning institutions to implement short-term place-making initiatives. The contribution moves within the context of new generation urban regeneration in which the transformation of existing spaces is a process of community reconstruction through the redevelopment of public spaces increasingly open to multiple and temporary uses. First through a process of rereading the state of the art of the project of public spaces in Italy and its transformation caused by the pandemic, then through a comparative look between the three case studies, conclusions are drawn on the urban value of the experiments conducted and, on their ability, to identify a new reference point for the sustainable urban regeneration of public spaces.

Highlights

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Urban planning has profoundly evolved with respect to the objectives, methods, and tools that had promoted and spread it to govern the phenomena of pollution, congestion, and settlement spread caused by the industrial revolution that developed in England in the late eighteenth century and subsequently spread throughout the world [1,2,3]
Contemporary urban planning has changed objectives, actors, methods, and tools following the progressive affirmation of some environmental, economic, and social phenomena and as a consequence of planning failures: the demographic contraction and the progressive aging of many cities and nations of the so-called industrialized world [4,5,6], the affirmation of the cultural paradigm of sustainable development still to be implemented in ordinary practices [7,8,9] to modify the era of the Anthropocene and to reconstruct a balanced compatible relationship between man and nature [10,11], the shift of meaning of contemporary urban planning from the expansion to the re-generation of the consolidated city, through the concepts of recovery, redevelopment and regeneration [12,13,14], with attention to the reuse, reversibility, and temporariness of the interventions [15,16,17]

Summary

Introduction

Contemporary urban planning has changed objectives, actors, methods, and tools following the progressive affirmation of some environmental, economic, and social phenomena and as a consequence of planning failures: the demographic contraction and the progressive aging of many cities and nations of the so-called industrialized world [4,5,6], the affirmation of the cultural paradigm of sustainable development still to be implemented in ordinary practices [7,8,9] to modify the era of the Anthropocene and to reconstruct a balanced compatible relationship between man and nature [10,11], the shift of meaning of contemporary urban planning from the expansion to the re-generation of the consolidated city, through the concepts of recovery, redevelopment and regeneration [12,13,14], with attention to the reuse, reversibility, and temporariness of the interventions [15,16,17].

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion