Articoli taggati con ‘Urban Renewal’
L’Ososphère: Popular Music, Temporary Uses and Planning in Strasbourg France
This article focuses on the temporary activation via popular music of former industrial buildings awaiting redevelopment in Strasbourg, France. The renting out of lucrative areas for certain periods of time, either for continuous use or one-off events, to cultural entrepreneurs, artists, NGOs and small businesses is increasing. In relation to popular music, temporary uses work in relation to one-time live events and yearly festivals attracting crowds to former industrial areas, the creation of affordable rents for rehearsal spaces, studios and clubs, and other experimental uses. These processes increasingly develop durable effects in cities, both on the spatial and on the socio-cultural level. This article analyses in particular Les Nuits électroniques de l’Ososphère festival, which has taken place in Strasbourg France since 1997.
Regaining Spaces and Territories. Reflections about the blank side of Italy
Just few years ago, Italy was a Country with more people than spaces. Nowadays, we’re living the opposite conditions: Italy is a Country full of spaces but without people. In Italy we build 8 meters per second, the urbanization rate grew of the 400% between the Post-War period and the 2000, in the same period, the population grew only of the 27%. Depreciation of real-estate goods, due also to the increment of the supply-side of the market, generated an over-production crisis that, as occurred in Spain and in US, has been the origin of other and more complex difficulties of the entire economic system, generating other structural crises. It is not a case, thus, that this economic phase is lasting since 2008 and that today in Italy we have more than 6 million real-estate goods that are unused or underused (that is two times the city of Rome completely uninhabited). These goods are residential buildings (5 millions), public, semi-public and private buildings as, for example empty factories or abandoned industrial buildings, abandoned schools, buildings owned by mutual aid societies or People’s House cooperatives, Winemaking Cooperatives, colonies, and other closed spaces owned by municipalities (hospitals, neighborhood branches, schools and other spaces donated by private citizens as e. g. bequests), abandoned rail stations, buildings confiscated to the mafia, ghost towns, unused road worker’s houses, and many other cases could fill in the list of the parts of Italy that we let go.
Trust against fear. The Role of Culture and the Future of Europe
In a fragile political and economic framework, the attention to the role that culture can play in creating the bass for the future of Europe is growing rapidly. This paper investigates the impacts that culture create in several aspects of our lives: from the social cohesion to the economic development, from the mechanisms through which culture shapes our cities to the awareness of the sense of our lives resulting from knowledge. Finally, in this paper we would like to point out the links that relate culture, economic development and intangible assets such as feeling of identity and trust. The paper compare the evidence emerging from a recent paper commissioned by the European Economic and Social Committee with the insights provided by several literature reviews and the results of specific projects dealing with culture and social dynamics. In the first chapter, we present the study, comparing several ways to look at the phenomena involved in the process of trust building; in chapter 2 we will underline the relevance of intangible assets such as social cohesion, in Chapter 3 we will analyze, more in detail the necessity of a sustainable economic growth. Our conclusions will show how cultural interventions within the city territory can foster social inclusion, cohesion, and trust.
