11th EAEA Envisioning Architecture: Design, Evaluation, Communication Conference in 2013Track 3 | Conceptual Representation | Exploring the layout of the built environment |
|
Towards a visualization of attractiveness: urban centrality as a multifactorial processKeywords: centrality; attractiveness; configuration |
|
ABSTRACTThe notion of urban centrality is commonly and widely used – sometimes abused – with reference to several meanings, aimed at different purposes: to complain about the poor vitality of urban edge areas that, despite any effort in projecting and working out redevelopment and renewal plans, still appear lacking in movement and activities; to report and denounce the weakening of appeal of urban historic cores, which frequently empty with the traditionally located activities that shift toward new development areas; to advertise development plans in external areas that, despite their actual distance and isolation, are expected to get so appealing as to compete with the inner cores. In all cases, what appears to characterise the notion of centrality is the (lacking, wished or expected) appeal towards activities, that is their actual attractiveness. A wide scientific literature shares the assumption of the notion of centrality in terms of attractiveness: roughly speaking, a central urban place is a place where activities seek a location, and the struggle for a central location is assumed as the ordering principle of the internal geography of towns. This is a somewhat tautological approach (‘a central place is a central place’), and can’t account for the factors that determine such attractiveness. |
AUTHORSValerio CutiniUniversity of Pisa, Italy Assistant Professor in Town Planning in the University of Pisa, since 1996 Valerio Cutini teaches Town Planning and Urban Systems Analysis in the courses of Engineering. His main research interests focus on the analysis of urban systems, on their development and on the diachronic genesis of their spatial and functional settlement. Since 1999 he ha gone focusing his attention on urban spatial analysis, in particular by means of a configurational approach, so as to verify its reliability on a wide set of cases, to experiment several possible applications and to contribute to the development and improvement of the operational techniques. Giovanni RabinoDipartimento di Architettura e Studi Urbani (DAStU), Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy Giovanni Rabino is full professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Polytechnic of Milan. His research interests cover epistemology of the discipline, theories of urban systems, rigorous techniques for urban analysis and for supporting planning activities (with a special focus on the effects of the Complexity Science and of the new Information and Communication Technologies on all these domains). He is widely recognized for his applications of urban operational models (since pioneer studies in the '70s, till to more recent MAS models, participative models, morphological models ...). |