In line with the general objectives of the ASP, the proposal for this Summer School aims at providing students with a multidisciplinary environment in order to frame issues more commonly associated with the sphere of urban design in a more complex and pervasive approach, one that takes into account the diverse components, causes and effects of the processes that regulate the form of a city.

The main theme of the school revolves around the nature and causes of the processes of decline that have characterized the city of Turin in the past few years – and continue to do so. One can legitimately speak of a generalized urban crisis that has invested many similarly-sized European cities and that has taken the form of a crash of the building industry, a drastic reduction of real estate markets, and so forth. Specific to the city of Turin, though, is the persisting difficulty in carrying out those projects that are considered strategic to the large-scale transformation scenarios envisioned by the city. The result is that Piedmont holds the national record for the amount of total investments on unfinished public works, that concern both the center of the city –well known but still noteworthy examples are Variante 200, Corso Marche and Corso Romania, where the unforeseen but persisting lack of investors threatens to nullify the City’s plans – as well as its peripheries. Here, the decrease of public services, the low value of real estate, the presence of vacant buildings, and the increase of social and housing problems are issues that had been successfully eradicated, but are coming back, like an inertial mass that an opposing force had only temporarily pushed aside. As a result these outward urban areas gain, again, the status of periphery in its worst sense, one that implicates features of constant disequilibrium and constant need of assistance in order for degeneration to be avoided.

Given the breadth of the issue, the school wishes to exceed the usual boundaries given to (and by) the disciplines of architectural and urban design. While the main object of interest remains the potential physical transformation of places, commonly accepted narratives like that of urban mending (“rammendo urbano”) and of passive compensation, spoiled by their dependency on resources that are notoriously hard to find, and more optimistic perspectives of strategic comebacks based on public marketing interventions, will be discarded in favor of a search for more realistic and horizontal proposals. The result might be a proposal for a low-profile maintenance operation, as well as a reasoned speculation strategy, should conditions indicate it as the most feasible possibility. More importantly, the objective should be a study of the possibilities of determining an effectual future for a complex process of transformation – meaning with “effects” those outcomes that it is possible to foresee given the existing conditions. Methodologically, the school proposes to compare the main “sciences of effects” and test their actual impact on the transformation from their respective viewpoints.

The morning lectures will provide insights into the aforementioned “sciences of effects” and their diverse methodological approaches.  These lectures will give students eminent glimpses into the disciplines of sociology, semiotics, as well as into the professional world of building developers, in the attempt of trespassing disciplinary boundaries in the framing of the problem.

In particular

-sociosemiology (wich question does this contribution answer?)

-mapping and design processes

- …

Ideally, the students will immediately test out such methodological approaches, as explained during the morning lectures, in the course of the afternoon workshops.  during which the wider theme of the summer school will be employed as common ground for a series of brief and impromptu experiments and analytical stances. Students will be divided into small multidisciplinary groups, and will be asked to unpack the theme of the workshop through diverse mapping techniques ...