“In Modena we lost the watermark of the city’s design when we started planning for ‘pieces of the city'”. Words of the architect Carla Ferrari, councilor for urban planning in essence, pronounced in 2013 in the magazine ‘Note modenesi’, the periodical of the Ferrari Center, and discovered by La Pressa. Ferrari prefers to speak once the appointment has taken place, after July 1st. But from this article it is possible to get an idea of his vision of the city and the direction that mayor Massimo Mezzetti intends to give to the future of Modena.
In the article, Ferrari commented critically on the path of the then municipal administration of Modena (mayor Giorgio Pighi, councilor for urban planning Gabriele Giacobazzi) contained in the document of guidelines for the new PSC. “It is an outdated approach – argued Ferrari –. It is a document that needs to be rethought because it lacks a vision of the future shared by the whole city. The city of Modena deserves a plan worthy of its past, when the Italian universities, in the courses of urban planning, took as an example the Modena experience of the Prg signed by Osvaldo Piacentini and Giuseppe Campos Venuti in the 1960s”.
In particular, the urban planner maintained that “when you make a plan there must be some fixed points that make up the urban structure: they are the fundamental axes on which, for example, the development lines are directed. It is on this structure that you build urban design. In recent decades, in Modena, the city has been designed in individual portions, distributed randomly, according to the various private proposals that have been taken into account in the planning. This was the case for the ‘F zones’, which are have been ‘broken up’ by removing them from the original design of the plan’s service system, and allowing, in part, private construction. From here, in my opinion, the decline began.”
And to those who object that the administration complains about the lack of public resources and the need to turn to the private sector which in exchange asks for ‘virgin’ areas for building, Ferrari replied that “as long as there is an alternative, even just one, between building on virgin land and build on a disused site where, before intervening, it is necessary to demolish what was there and reclaim that space, it is obvious that the real estate system will choose the least expensive alternative and without ‘stumbles’ in execution. But it will mainly be the community that will pay the costs. The Municipality will finally decide not to plan expansion areas on free areas, it is clear that companies will also begin to choose those to redevelop”.
Considerations from over ten years ago, but still very current and which anticipated some points that would then explode in the following years.
“The new PSC – Ferrari continued, raising another issue on which today everyone seems to agree – should guarantee ‘zero’ consumption of agricultural land, orienting all settlement policies within the built city, which is also made up of large empty spaces and abandoned or in the process of being abandoned areas. It is on abandoned areas in particular that the urban regeneration and redevelopment interventions of the PSC must converge, to avoid maintaining situations of degradation and pollution, such as decayed teeth in the urban fabric, which sooner or later they will present the bill. The higher costs that the company carrying out the regeneration bears for the reclamation, in the initial phase, are actually a saving for the future”.
Urban regeneration “is also the key to saving and relaunching the construction industry, making it make a leap in quality, starting from the maintenance and renovation of the enormous existing housing stock”.
