Heterotopic Cities

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DIALOGUES

ON DESIGN

Notes on Doctoral Research in Design 2018

edited by Luca Guerrini and Paolo Volonté A dialogue is not just a conversation. It is not about establishing the truth: a

temporary, fragile, and often deceptive one. A dialogue is not a matter of winning an argument but of looking at different opinions and making them interact and cross-fertilise. Dialogues have an extraordinary capacity to draw energy from people’s differences and channel it towards something new.

This book presents the most updated developments of design research in the form of six dialogues between scholars of the Politecnico di Milano and inter-national scholars. Each dialogue focuses on a specific topic recently addressed on the Politecnico di Milano’s PhD programme: the role of users, social inno-vation, fashion design, colour design, interaction design and urban design. Accordingly, the book deals with a variety of topical issues for designers, such as recent forms of co-design and co-creation as well as design in relation to the Internet of Things and smart cities. It also addresses more problematic, controversial issues, such as the tyranny of the “thin ideal” in fashion design and the influence of social dynamics in determining the meaning and use of design products.

Many perspectives, then, are brought together to depict the challenges fa-cing design, and especially design research, over the coming years.

Luca Guerrini is associate professor of Interior Design at the Politecnico di Milano’s Department of Design. He is a former director of the PhD programme in Design and is in charge of the joint degree programme in Design offered by the Politecnico di Milano and Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has acted as con-sultant to the National Museum of Architecture in Ferrara. Author of books and essays, his current research interests focus on the notion of design, the relation-ship between design and the arts, and design research methodologies.

Paolo Volonté is associate professor of Sociology at the Politecnico di Milano’s Department of Design. He is a former president and co-founder of STS Italia (the Italian Society for Science and Technology Studies) and co-editor of the

In-ternational Journal of Fashion Studies. His main research topics are in the fields

of fashion studies, design studies, and the sociology of knowledge. He is the author of books and journal articles on the fashion system, the sociology of science, and the theories of German sociologists and philosophers.

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DESIGN INTERNATIONAL SERIES

Direction: Silvia Piardi Scientific Board:

Alessandro Biamonti, Ezio Manzini, Carlo Martino, Francesca Tosi, Mario Piazza, Promil Pande

Over the last few years the international design research network has become an important reality, which has facilitated the sharing of ideas and opinions, improved understanding of the subject and increased awareness of the potential of design in various socio-geographical contexts.

The current expansion of the educational network allows teachers, students, researchers and professionals to meet, both online and in person.

It would seem therefore that the time is now right to propose a new series of books on design, contributing the construction of the international design community, helping authors bring their work onto the world scene.

The Design International series is thus born as a cultural setting for the sharing of ideas and experiences from the different fields of design, a place in which you can discover the wealth and variety of design research, where different hypotheses and different answers present themselves, in an attempt to draw up a map of Italian design, though in a continuous comparison with the world scene.

Different areas of design will be investigated, such as for example: fashion, interior design, graphic design, communication design, product and industrial design, service and social innovation design, interaction design and emotional design. Books published in this series are selected by the Scientific Board and submitted to two referees for peer-review.

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F

RANCO

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NGELI DESIGN INTERNATIONAL

D.I.

DIALOGUES

ON DESIGN

Notes on Doctoral Research in Design 2018

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Cover by Ilaria Mariani

L’opera, comprese tutte le sue parti, è tutelata dalla legge sul diritto d’autore. L’Utente nel momento in cui effettua il download dell’opera accetta tutte le condizioni della licenza d’uso dell’opera previste

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Six dialogues on contemporary design

by Luca Guerrini, Paolo Volonté

Politecnico di Milano

In any doctoral community, the discussion or “defence” of the final thesis is a solemn ritual demanding concentration and courage on the candidate’s part. The term itself, “to defend”, evokes the battlefield, the legacy of a long-established tradition of “fighting” for the primacy of ideas (Lakoff and John-son, 1980). Consequently, candidates discuss their thesis with a panel of scholars made up of members from their own community or extended to in-clude foreign experts, and generally behind closed doors.

In 2012, the faculty of the Politecnico di Milano’s PhD programme in Design (established just three years previously, in 2009) set out to trans-form this ritual into a public celebration of knowledge. Discussants were selected internationally from expert scholars in the fields investigated by the candidates. Candidates presented and discussed their theses publicly. Guest scholars were invited to lecture on their most recent design studies and practices. Parties, music and art performances completed the pro-gramme of the event, which lasted one week. The event thus emphasised the collective effort of the design community, rather than candidates’ indi-vidual endeavours, as is usually the case in traditional defences of theses and official award ceremonies.

A lively debate ensued between two opposing “factions” within the steering committee about what to call the event, with one wishing to underscore its academic significance and the other its community spirit. Eventually it was the latter group who prevailed, and the choice fell upon “festival”.

Originally conceived to publish the results of the first Milan PhD Design Festival in 2012, this book has taken six years to make it into print. In the meantime, despite having already racked up eight editions, the festival formula remains a success. The panel of discussants is split equally between members who worked on the theses during the review stage and members

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assessing them for the first time. The former group focuses on progress and improvement made during the thesis preparation process, while the second gives an external assessment. The balance between formal and informal sessions creates a relaxed, friendly atmosphere which not only encourages candidates in their thesis defence but also stimulates conversation among participants.

In order to promote participation and debate, the space given over to formal lectures was progressively reduced until in the most recent edition they became a series of very short talks bringing several scholars together. This new approach makes it possible to concentrate the festival into two and a half days, making it easier for both guest scholars and the Politecnico design community members to attend.

While the festival’s main goals – such as sharing the new knowledge contained in the theses, promoting the Politecnico’s PhD programme internationally and cultivating relationships among researchers – have been achieved, dissemination of results remains an open issue. Although a digest of the theses discussed in the festival has been published recently, the lectures have not yet been collected in print.

This book thus represents a new development. It focuses on the newest, most innovative developments in design through six dialogues between in-ternational scholars and members of the Politecnico di Milano design com-munity. A dialogue is not just a conversation. As Richard Sennett points out (Sennett, 2012, pp. 18-20), conversations may be of two different types: he terms «dialectic» conversations that seek to find common ground in order to resolve oppositions into a new, synthetic position, while conversations that seek to form a relationship between the participants are «dialogic». Accord-ing to Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), a dialogic discussion characteristically does not succeed by finding “common ground” regarding what is claimed, but ra-ther by giving the participants an opportunity to understand one anora-ther. A dialogue is not about winning an argument or establishing the truth: a tem-porary, fragile, and often deceptive one. It is about looking at different opin-ions, letting them interact and cross-fertilise. Dialogues have the extraordi-nary capacity to draw energy from people’s differences and channel it to-wards something new. «Though no shared agreements may be reached», states Sennett (2012, p. 19), «through the process of exchange people may become more aware of their own views».

Each dialogue focuses on a specific topic addressed by a 2012 PhD can-didate. The list of contents thus provides an insight into the most commonly selected topics and an overview of the broad scope of the Politecnico’s PhD programme in Design. It includes such topics as the increasing role of users

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in design processes, the current commitment of design to social innovation, the social meaning of clothing and the practices of fashion design, the func-tion of colours in design, recent developments in interacfunc-tion design, and de-sign of the urban environment in the digital era.

The first dialogue focuses on the role of users in design processes. Elizabeth Sanders’ wide-ranging essay on the main changes produced by the participatory turn in design serves as a counterpoint to a report by a large research group from Milan’s Politecnico (Giuseppe Andreoni, Pelin Arslan, Fiammetta Costa, Mar-cello Fusca, Marco Mazzola, Sabrina Muschiato, Paolo Perego, Maximiliano Romero, Carlo Emilio Standoli and Giorgio Vignati) on three case studies about projects in which the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach has made it pos-sible to meet specific user needs in a user-centred design approach. Sanders argues that the turn towards co-design and co-creation is the apparent manifes-tation of a deeper transformation in the ultimate sense of the profession of de-signer. This profound transformation concerns the designer’s primary interloc-utor, who has gradually shifted from producers to users, from industry to social communities. The transition involves far-reaching changes in the forms and le-gitimacy of the design profession, especially in four areas: a) changes in the design process, related to the involvement of people at all stages in the process of developing a product or service; b) the progressive change in the role of de-signers, step by step, from professionals serving the industry to user-centred designers, to facilitators of the creativity of non-designer participants, and to catalysts of the process of collective creativity in co-creation settings; c) the extension of the value of co-design from being purely monetary (a tool for mak-ing products that sell better) to experiential (a methodological approach to im-prove the user experience), and social (a mindset for improving long-term qual-ity of life); d) a thorough renewal of the methodological tools available to co-design. These profound transformations in the spirit and organisation of design as a profession are also the conditions for enabling people to practise their own creativity. In the following chapter, Andreoni et al. describe projects that com-bine qualitative and quantitative methods to improve the quality of life for users with special needs (such as children or the elderly). Three cases are presented: a) the design of a standardised, adjustable solution to enable workstations to be adapted to the various specific needs of disabled workers; b) a co-design pro-cess for evaluating and prototyping children’s products according to design-for-all principles; c) a system to permanently connect the elderly with their relatives and care givers. In each case, a multidisciplinary approach integrated different research methods through the collaboration of various stakeholders, such as re-searchers, designers, engineers and staff from manufacturing companies and

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healthcare institutions, enabling a better understanding of the needs to be ad-dressed and improving the quality of the final results.

The second dialogue continues the discussion of recent transformations in design both as an activity and as a social function, with a special focus on the commitment of design to social innovation. Here, more specifically, the authors reflect on transformations in the designer’s role when, with the emer-gence of co-design, social change has gradually become one of the central objectives of design itself, as already pointed out by Sanders. Furthermore, the co-design techniques have transformed the designer into a sort of com-munity coach: someone with the skills and ability to teach a certain commu-nity tools and tactics to create, develop and prototype ideas. Tuuli Mat-telmäki discusses how the transition from a user-centred design culture to a co-design approach specifically affects the role of empathic design. Em-pathic design developed to facilitate the designer’s access to the world of users. Yet, today the same distinction between designer and user is weakened in co-design approaches. Designers need to become facilitators for co-crea-tion settings and providers of co-creaco-crea-tion tools. Experiments reported by Mattelmäki show that even in this new role of facilitators in creating collab-oration platforms, designers can usefully draw on the well-established tools of empathic design. The Politecnico research group led by Anna Meroni (with Daria Cantù, Daniela Selloni and Giulia Simenone), on the other hand, introduces the concept of community-centred (as opposed to user-centred) design as a co-design strategy to support social innovation. Designers have become process activators whose role has to be understood partly in terms of indirect social value (Moulaert et al., 2013), such as the value generated by the creation of relationships and competences within a community. Within this framework, the role of the designer is that of a connector, of a «commu-nity coach», as opposed to that of the traditional facilitator, since the coach performs the task of teaching the community to use design tools and methods to develop their design skills.

The third dialogue introduces a completely different field of research, that of fashion studies. In fashion, the designer’s role is closely linked to the in-fluence of consumer cultures. The authors focus on two contemporary fash-ion phenomena that are apparent indicators of deeper social aspects relating to marginality and exclusion. On the one hand, Joanne Turney addresses the use of hooded sweatshirts, which is very common among young males and in many contexts (particularly the UK) has become a symbol of transgres-sion, social disobedience and crime. The hoodie is a universal garment with a specific feature: it removes the function of clothes as a means of expressing identity. Its form allows wearers to conceal their face and render their body

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ambiguous. Thanks to its pervasiveness, it hides the individual in the crowd. At the same time, however, garments bear traces of their social use. So the hoodie carries with it traces of the centuries of imagery in which hooded figures have traditionally represented evil. Wearers of hooded sweatshirts are aware of this, be they rioters who want to express their social margin-ality to the affluent society, or high street consumers who want to project themselves as somehow rebellious. On the other hand, Paolo Volonté stresses the segregation of plus-size clothing and fat bodies from the fash-ion world as a consequence of the enduring tyranny of the ideal of thinness in Western cultures. In the second half of the twentieth century, slenderness became the standard of reference for women, which it continues to be to-day. Fashion has been a driving force in the emergence of the thin ideal since its industrialisation and the advent of the sizing system. However, adherence to the thin ideal is at odds with the significant share of the pop-ulation in Western countries who are overweight. The reason is that the ideal of slenderness is currently incorporated in concrete elements of the fashion system, such as models’ bodies, which makes it hard for protago-nists of fashion, including designers, to change their attitudes and practices regarding the standards they aim to pursue.

Colour design is the topic of the fourth dialogue, between Stephen Westland and Mario Bisson. Both authors emphasise the importance of col-our in design, discussing it from complementary points of view. Westland focuses on the semiotics of colour as a tool to investigate the meanings that colours bring to artefacts, while Bisson mainly treats the relational aspects of colour as a means of communication. The combination of both contribu-tions clearly reveals what may still be a fundamental issue for understanding the function of colour in design, namely to what extent colours can have cross-cultural significance. Do colours have stable meanings? Are those meanings consistent across culture, age or gender? Can we rely on colour attributions? Research results are still inconclusive, which continues to pose a challenge to design practice today.

Interaction design is constantly evolving as a consequence of the tumul-tuous and apparently limitless development of digital technologies, meaning that our understanding of interaction is never complete. It thus seemed im-perative to us to include a dialogue on the potential of interaction design. Massimo Botta and Giovanni Profeta’s theoretical essay is complemented by Raffaella Trocchianesi’s piece, which is based on a rich array of empirical cases. Botta and Profeta’s chapter addresses the visualisation of intercon-nected objects, pointing out that in order to be effective it must be linked to

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the multifaceted array of capabilities of interactive artefacts, such as perceiv-ing the surroundperceiv-ing conditions, detectperceiv-ing positions, rememberperceiv-ing, predict-ing, sensing object conditions, and so on. In fact, these new capabilities are the source of a huge amount of data available today, the appropriate visuali-sation of which would enhance our understanding of complex phenomena. The authors propose an analysis of object capabilities as a starting point for the articulation of information design elements for the visualisation of con-nected objects. Focusing on the increasing role of digital technologies in cul-tural and exhibition settings, a role that opens up space for a broader integra-tion with the urban environment, Trocchianesi examines the consequences of the proliferating hybridisation of real and virtual places. This trend leads to new urban experiences of interference, displacement and ubiquity – con-sider for instance flash mobs, temporary stores, forms of temporary appro-priation of public spaces such as Illegal Tango – which designers should be able to interpret through their work. In the field of cultural heritage, Troc-chianesi proposes three paradigms aimed at transforming public spaces (such as museums, exhibitions and urban environments) into experiences mediated by new technologies: game, hypertext and performance.

This digital transformation of urban environments is also present in the final dialogue, with contributions from Carlo Ratti and Giovanna Piccinno about the role of design in transforming cityscapes. Here, however, the focus is on the physical city and how digital technologies could help in governing urban life. Carlo Ratti describes the activities of his SENSEable City Lab at the MIT, which focus on the analysis and development of services based on the exchange of data collected in the environment. Giovanna Piccinno argues that the age of urban deindustrialisation and smart cities offer a new oppor-tunity to create spaces as common goods that reconfigure public places.

The final chapter, by Luca Guerrini, proposes an overarching interpreta-tion of such recent developments in the field of design. Starting from Ezio Manzini’s view that the focus of design has shifted from artefacts to pro-cesses (Manzini, 2016), and from the understanding of design as a kind of «dialogic conversation» (Sennett, 2012, p. 18) based on empathy, Guerrini suggests that today’s designers, who are increasingly involved in co-design settings, are expected to take the lead in decision-making processes thanks to their empathic ability not only to listen to and understand users, but also to envision the design solutions implicit in their demands. This approach cor-responds to a long-standing tradition in Italian design, whose protagonists have always focused on the intellectual as opposed to the technical dimen-sion of their discipline, nurturing the human, critical and constructive aspects of their profession.

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To complete the work, we asked Francesco Trabucco, who was coordina-tor of the Politecnico di Milano’s PhD programme in Design at the time when this book began to take shape, to express his vision of design today. His pro-posal is in some ways surprising and provocative. It is based on a thoughtful consideration of the hermeneutic interpretation of aesthetic judgment, that is to say, of the social nature of taste. In a manner reminiscent of Pierre Bour-dieu’s analyses (Bourdieu, 1979), he describes taste, and therefore the per-ception of beauty that inhabits aesthetic judgment, as a social fact dependent on the individual’s social trajectory. Aesthetic judgments are qualitative judgments, therefore they are intrinsically relational: neither purely subjec-tive (personal) nor purely objecsubjec-tive (impersonal, unbiased), but an expres-sion of the social history that has settled on the shoulders of the individual and which is grounded in a solid tradition. Particularly interesting is how Trabucco uses this hermeneutic approach to understand design. Compared to other fields in which aesthetic judgment is applied, design is characterised by the key role played by market success. Therefore, experts must always compare their appraisals with those of the mass of consumers who determine the actual success of a product. Market success should be appreciated as an expression of the aesthetic judgment of the multitude, because if taste and beauty are social facts, mass consumption is to be considered their authentic manifestation. Except – we would add – for the power that the educated clas-ses still exert to clean up the world from what does not reflect their “civi-lised” taste (Elias, 1969) by managing heritage (through history, archaeol-ogy, museolarchaeol-ogy, antique stores).

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. La distinction. Paris: Les éditions de minuit.

Elias, Norbert. 1969. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press.

Manzini, Ezio. 2016. «Design culture and dialogic design». Design Issues 32(1): 52-59. Moulaert, Frank, Diana MacCallum, Abid Mehmood and Abdelillah Hamdouch, eds. 2013. The International Handbook of Social Innovation: Collective Action, Social Learning and Transdisciplinary Research. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Sennett, Richard. 2012. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of

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12. Heterotopic Cities

by Giovanna Piccinno

Politecnico di Milano

Heterotopias, “those spaces which have the particular characteristic of being connected to all other spaces, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralise or invert the set of relationships which they designate, reflect or mirror”

Michel Foucault

12.1. Introduction

Towns and cities today stand concretely at the centre of a phenomenon of unforeseen development, in terms of dimensions, importance and reasons. They are becoming ever more diffuse and de-structured, bearers of different citizenships, each of which representative of a part of a complex multiethnic society, combined, by contrast, with an increasing lack of identification with the physical space occupied, a space which tends to be changing increasingly or even actually virtual. The 21st_{century sets really} the scene for a profound and radical change in the way people live and will be the era of cities.

For the design discipline – which works as a continuous process, by identifying and interpreting the needs which trace the new paths and scenarios of life as it develops, and then by proposing design actions which become space, objects and ways of behaving – it is a unique opportunity to generate new creative spatial concepts.

The territorial sphere, which is undergoing profound metamorphosis, provides design with a field for experimentation with great potential. By freely facing challenges and imbuing itself in its work with the languages of architecture, art, communication sciences, urban planning, landscape design and territorial marketing – with an extremely full exchange of composition grammars and behavioural responses – spatial design can carry through a concrete revolution in the dynamics of the design of the other

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Img. 1 – G. Piccinno, Heterotopic cities: Urban landscapes, 2015.

Postmodernity is actually formulating a new demand for towns and cities, “the future of towns and cities is no longer written in the past, they must be completely reinvented” Amendola (2010, 3-4) wrote.

The formal destructuring of contemporary cities and metropolises – an on going condition which is occurring hand in hand with a process of profound transformation for social communities – requires consequently the identification of design strategies that are not only valid and reliable interpreters of social reality, but also easy to apply and implement and above all, able to express a new design poetics for places and people.

The contemporary spatial designers must be able to use their creative and visionary capacity for the comprehension of the new citizens and the different other urban spaces and to respond with innovative design driven actions.

It’s interesting to remind today that in his Republic (written around 380 BC), Plato described a city as a pasture, a place of growth “... the city

nourishes souls, bodies and minds day after day, almost without them realising it”. It is an effect that we are almost unconscious and unaware of

that the designed physical environment exercises over those who inhabit it, living little by little assimilating sensations, perceptions and messages and therefore by living we are also inhabited. There is like ‘radiance’, an

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emanation, which comes from objects, from architectural, landscapes, which acts in us and which conditions us (Emery2007, 18-19). In the age of the deindustrialisation of urban areas, of the global city and the nascent

smart city and cyber city, we have come to a new opportunity for

metropolises which incredibly reconnect with Plato’s ideas of the usefulness of creating spaces as common goods, of again mixing the

differences – through precise and knowledgeable design interventions – to

respond to the new demand for quality and the request for different life opportunities for many.

We are in fact seeing the growing presence of two new major so-called global social classes, the knowledge class and the world of migrants. They are different and find themselves collaborating on parallel layers on the development of the global society. This phenomenon leads to another perception and occupation of spaces through a process that Perulli (2009, 120 and 122) has defined as the occupation of gaps. He underlined that the occupation of spaces occurs in relation to both that part of physical reality left free by the move of the cities of modernity and also to those conceptual/operational spaces generated by a different market, within which new inter- and trans- national activities move today.

While it is no longer basically territorial, the process of occupation does in fact have an important spatial dimension through the suppression of all those limits, which contained national societies, and through the “creation of a global structure able to unify the world starting with market forces” (Perulli 2009, 122).

Incredibly, in relation of this fact, it is precisely the margins, the borders, the thresholds, the filter, the transit areas, the passages, the big squares, the residual green belts, the places of the infrastructures and all the border-line places which – because of their physical or critical nature – are taking on a new meaning in the contemporary design of the city. It is as if the level of the overall complexity of cities in recent years were calling for a capacity of designers to respond more openly and experimentally, less conventionally and to be flexible to the ever-increasing difficulties of implementation.

The incessant production of tensions in the spaces of changing contemporary towns and cities creates, among the congealed layers of urban matter, that discontinuity which generates the in-between spaces (Piccinno and Lega 2012, 55). Spaces that, with their interstitial gaps, amplify those areas traditionally defined as serving, distributed, connected with movement and developing, which I believe today to be privileged places because of those design expressions which place high value on the

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favouring also the emotional and participatory dimension. “If the key trait of contemporary towns and cities is therefore precisely that discontinuity of a space fragmented and divided through the multiplication of thresholds and borders in a myriad of disconnected entities, then to build today […] what could be recognised as a new ecology of space” (Iacovoniand Rapp 2009, 66) means, above all, working to re-establishing a continuity of experienced space at all scales of design, from the layout of a sidewalk to the design of natural systems on a regional scale.

Also Stefano Boeri underlines that the space that surrounds us, not only the geopolitical space, but also that of everyday life, “seems to be increasingly wrinkled and rugged, cut and interrupted by walls, fences, thresholds, obstacles, regulated borders, virtual frontiers, protected zones [...]. Space, at least in this part of the world, seems to have become a dense agglomeration of sub-systems, which wrinkle the landscape, claiming their identity (social, cultural, ethnic, religious dominance). Instead of flowing freely, our movements increasingly take the form of starts and stops, a sequence of ‘stop and go’” (Boeri 2011, 39).

In this complex scenario, we are also observing – since modern urban planning has existed – a radical change of approach to the subject of urban development. Researchers and planners are not concentrating on how to build new/external neighbourhoods, but on how to make existing districts more dense – that is to build ‘inside’ – working on the idea of building on

top of, in the middle of, underneath, around and inside existing buildings.

They are pursuing logical strategic objectives of countering the consumption of land and ecological resources, rationalising transport and putting a brake on the formless growth or towns and cities without limits, attempting to control urban sprawl through project linked to the subject of densification (Ciorra 2011, 51-52). Interventions which, in various ways, integrate and establish relations in existing developments, providing solutions which often surprise by the power of the language and their effectiveness in generating urban and relational quality.

The interspaces are consequently becoming knots in an urban social system which shows how much the concrete spatiality of the urban

‘re-figured’ and ‘re-setted’ public places are again becoming necessary to give

us a perception of participating in proxemics exchange between people and of creating our mental and physical landscape and future environments.

Real heterotopic places, in a constant state of imbalance that I like to imagine as future cyberspaces of stone (Piccinno and Lega 2012, 27), able to produce different conditions of performance and at the same time, to generate sentiments in which to recognise oneself and others, exchanging emotions and knowledge. They are hotspots which can assume from time to

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time a metaphorical spatial meaning that is more congenial to the context and persons: thresholds, doors, chambers, bridges, living, stages, markets, etc.

12.2. New Urban Scenarious

The main problem in our age is so the need to seek different design interpretations for metropolises that are not evolving in a linear fashion from the so-called modern city, but which are developing according to unforeseen criteria and even spontaneously as is happening for example with processes to change the use of spaces which have lost their original function.

Img. 2 – G. Piccinno, Heterotopic cities: TEXTURE City-scape, 2015.

One of the many changing conditions, for examples, includes the greater integration of major infrastructure facilities which are acquiring a new role and are being reborn through the integration of accessory functions, implemented by the demands of the wandering citizen, a cosmopolitan and a consumer. It is an experimental design condition of great importance. In fact the so-called infrastructural landscape constitutes an open field, to be re-interpreted, in which years of environmental and social degeneration may be redeemed with design intervention which – by also playing on the dual natural-artificial effect and on the many individual needs of a user tied to an almost constant mobility or, on the contrary, to an affection for the local values of a place – knows how to introduce quality to it. I mean the quality of the use of places to be expressed, amongst other things, by means of intervention to integrate and to extend, a sort of ‘plug-in’ for spaces.

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investigating, that integrates, modifies, adapts and enlarges already existing situations and functions in a territory, but which fall short of the very varied demands of the contemporary inhabitant and his activities today.

In Europe, besides, the historical contrast between the city and the countryside has decidedly disappeared along this evolving path – in the passage that is from modernity to postmodernity – and in reality, a real agricultural landscape that is ‘other space’ with respect to the urban landscape, no longer exists in areas occupied by the diffuse city, “a sort of

interchangeability exists between the city and the countryside in the

post-industrial society, a growing structural analogy, a profound functional similarity. Open countryside is being urbanised, while the city is progressively renaturalising” (Purini 2011, 71).

The beginning of an intermediate landscape is therefore originating, which appears as a total landscape, essentially unitary, in which elements from both environments increasingly overlap, align and replace each other. By now the concepts of centre and periphery are tending to become equivalent. “Fundamental categories of urban experience, such as for example, proximity and distance are being redefined by the new scenario. Far and close have new meanings: far from what, close to whom?” (Purini 2011, pag ???).

Cities are so defined today on different spatial scale levels in term of the qualities of their mutual network; a city is a relational product that is at once a hub and a transformer, a space of flows, of streams of people, ideas, goods and services (Eisinger and Seifert, 2012, 47).

In this process of adaptation and transformation, whether on the scale of entire urban and extra urban sectors, that of interstitial spaces or of connecting structures (therefore from the huge to the tiny), spatial design is therefore that field of action, fairly free, which has the chance to make a join – almost totally absent today – between architecture and public places and between users and urban space, acting as an important medium for man.

In this new urban scenario man is definitely a different being, ‘an other’ compared to that of the twentieth century. He is a citizen used to receiving a rich and continuous set of stimuli which evolve and change rapidly in a succession of heterogeneous impressions and images and in order to defend himself from continuous over stimulation, he has developed a sophisticated intellectuality which leads him to respond in a detached and rational manner to these various demands on him, with great powers to select essential information. This new man is therefore to be found living in a

territorial context which can be metaphor, changing continuously,

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take root, are renewed and structured according to criteria which derive basically from information distribution systems and therefore from different ways of working, living, knowing and passing time.

Img. 3 – G. Piccinno, Heterotopic cities: VOLUME, 2015.

The structure of modern towns and cities is therefore crumbling rapidly driven by planetary development and both our physical and mental landscape is deforming “the urban landscape is changing radically [...] in just a few decades our most familiar environment has been transformed. The categories of sensation, perception and imagination have been overwhelmed by technological innovations and the power of the industrial framework that is spreading them” (Augé 2012, 65) providing precisely that condition of instability which is an opportunity for spatial design in urban planning interventions, which are certainly more in line with a medium-term approach to action. They are more scenic and aesthetic interventions, linked to solutions, which also favour the use of an open component, based environmental system and provide fewer opportunities for the substance and permanence of architecture, necessary for long-term programmes. Towns and cities can therefore adapt more easily, compared to other use categories, above all those relating to the fast and fluid use of services by citizens and to the continual demands for them to adapt

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behaviourally and functionally by means of lighter, micro-invasive,

interstitial interventions, benefitting in this from the experimental potential of design interventions.

12.3. Heterotopic, Virtual and Self Sufficient City

In the context of global competition, today local geographical areas also compete amongst each other in an attempt to attract increasingly mobile flows of resources, both through the proposal of recognised tangible categories – historical and environmental, enterprises, commercial places, infrastructures, etc. – and also those considered intangible, such as the quality of life, local cultures, specific capabilities, etc. (Piccinno 2004, 19-36). The new architecture and spatial design interventions are tending to evolve as a function of the innumerable and diverse demands which are changing and leading designers to respond in widely different ways (i.e. with many different results in terms of interpretation: original, experimental, provocative, nostalgic, fashionable, approved, branded, hyper-technological, “classic”, smart, cyber, etc.), but increasingly more often to define the physical as more permeable, practicable, metamorphic. The path taken is in the direction of complex future scenarios in which art, architecture, design, technology, electronics, communication and so forth “are combining in a creeping undergrowth, interconnected with the new society of the era by access” (Bradaschia 2003, 99-100).

One sees then, and many contemporary authors are observing and studying this aspect (Florida 2002, Baldini 2003), that the creative disciplines are taking an essential assertive role in contemporary society, “we find ourselves living in an exciting age, in which we see a fight between the executive society which is dying and the creative society which is blossoming” (De Masi 2003, 363). Creativity is therefore becoming a resource for the world of production, which as a consequence is tending to locate in the cities in which this class prefers to live. The investigation highlights the values, ideas and life styles of a social group, which is composed of architects, engineers, research workers, scientists and advertising, leisure, fashion and design professionals, etc. The concept of the creative city is therefore coming to life in the third millennium.

As Maurizio Carta noted the creative city must not just be a strong attractor for new economies and a place for the settlement of the creative class on the planet, but it must also be able to become a generator of creativity, it must activate opportunities and be a producer of quality: this requires powerful use of design (Carta 2007). The passage from being a

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city which attracts a creative class to being a city which produces new identities, economies and geographies – based on culture, art, knowledge, communication and co-operation – is the short-term objective, that of nourishing creativity within the city.

The full panorama of actions connected with the definition of space through creative activities also includes experimental aspect of virtual design.

One of the leading experimental designers in the field of architecture connected with new digital technologies, Stephen Perrella, considers cyberspace as a totalising and pervasive space, really capable of causing serious problems for traditional concepts of meeting and entertainment. He considers that in the interpretation as it is developing of coming scenarios, new space is not to be defined purely as Euclidean or Cartesian space, bound by known spatial relationships, such as length, breadth and height or by predefined planes, but for the first time other dimensions may be investigated physically in virtual space. Time is taking on a new meaning in relation to the new space that is becoming increasingly more related to that of the Internet, which is infinite and its territory is populated indiscriminately by anyone who has access to a digital connection point. For scholars and designers it is therefore the space of democracy, which makes no distinction of age, sex, social status and nationality. It costs little – compared to physical structured space, which must be managed and maintained constantly – and it is sustainable from an environmental viewpoint, even if it is very highly populated. In this context Perrella experiments with hyper-surface, a single surface able to contain all the intellectual horizons and trends in the contemporary period. We objectively can observe the potential limits of cyberspace that are useful today to understanding that the new digital environment is opening up an- ‘other

design place’ for us, an unexplored heterotopic city. We can say that the

contemporary period is characterised by the co-presence of three free horizons which each have their own autonomous life: the physical space, the virtual space and the space of the Internet. It is exciting for a designer to investigate the possible relationships between them, which in their causal, arbitrary and autonomous components, amongst other things, characterise the space of the current era (Bradaschia2003, 100).

Cities are the actual place where billions of people live and they are and will be always more the locus of the real economy. The cities and the territories that will be leaders in the near future will be the ones that can create value for the surrounding territory using a minimum of resources (Guallart2010, 6-7).To reach this goal the in-becoming cities need to be designed as system made up of closed cycles for the entrance of energy and

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where their resources are produced locally. The only thing entering and leaving cities will be information.

In recent years we have seen a number of initiatives related to open code and open systems, and citizens have started to interact and participate in the design of goods they use and cities they inhabit. The platform for Open City Data have begun to emerge, making the information from the city transparent, so that both governments and citizens can use that knowledge to improve the quality of city life. Making the information transparent and making rational decision about the management of cities with the participation of the inhabitants, will be one of the rules of governance and design of the urban other spaces in the 21st_century.

References

Amendola, Giandomenico. 2010. Tra Dedalo e Icaro. Bari: Laterza*.

Augé, Marc. 2012. Futuro. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri*.

Baldini, Massimo. 2003. Popper e Benetton: Epistemologia per gli

imprenditori e gli economisti. Rome: Armando.

Boeri, Stefano. 2011. L’anticittà. Bari: Laterza*.

Bradaschia, Maurizio. 2003. “Verso l’iperpiano: Stephen Perrella e la transarchitettura.” In Livio Sacchi and Maurizio Urali, eds., Architettura

e cultura digitale. Milan: Skira*.

Carta, Maurizio. 2007. Creative City: dynamics, innovations, actions. Barcelona: (LISt) Actar.

Ciorra, Pippo. 2011. Senza architettura. Bari: Laterza.

De Masi, Domenico. 2003. La fantasia e la concretezza: Creatività

individuale e di gruppo. Milan: Rizzoli*.

Eisinger, Angelus, and Jörg Seifert. 2012. Urban reset. Basel: Birkhäuser. Emery, Nicola. 2007. Progettare, costruire, curare: Per una deontologia

dell’architettura. Bellinzona: Casagrande.

Florida, Richard, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s

Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, New

York: Basic Books, 2002.

Foucault, Michel. 1997. “Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias.” In Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural theory. London/New York: Routledge.

Guallart, Vincent. 2010. The Self-Sufficient City:Envisioning the Habitat of the Future. New York: Actar.

Iacovoni, Alberto, and Davide Rapp. 2009. Playscape. Melfi: Libria*. Perulli, Paolo. 2009. Visioni di città. Turin: Einaudi*.

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Piccinno, Giovanna. 2004. Design & Territory. Milan: Abitare Segesta. Piccinno, Giovanna, and Elisa Lega. 2012. Spatial Design for in-between

spaces. Rimini: Maggioli.

Purini, Franco. 2011. “Contro l’antipaesaggio: Note su una trasformazione mancata.” IDEM 1(1), 67-75*.

Heterotopic Cities

DIALOGUES

ON DESIGN

Notes on Doctoral Research in Design 2018

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L. GUERRINI,

P.

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FrancoAngeli

DESIGN INTERNATIONAL SERIES

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DIALOGUES

ON DESIGN

Notes on Doctoral Research in Design 2018

Contents

Six dialogues on contemporary design

by Luca Guerrini, Paolo Volonté

References

12. Heterotopic Cities

by Giovanna Piccinno