Large Projects for Small building construction companies: from the Key Diagram, to the Architectural Model, to the Local Plan

Along 2016-2019, some educational experiments on the planning of large urban neighbourhoods were developed at the Laboratorio Integrato di Progettazione Urbanistica of Udine University, coordinated by the author with the participation of the architect Elena Olivo and the engineer Giorgio Verri. The attempt is to reverse the traditional urban planning process, anticipating the Volumetric Project, to arrive at the Local Plan only at a later time. Three cities were used: Venice, Udine and Treviso. In Venice compact forms of the lagoon settlements have been designed. Here we tried to rebalance the city with respect to the mainland districts, creating transfer opportunities for inhabitants scattered throughout the metropolitan area, and promoting a new lagoon architecture. In Udine and Treviso forms of infilling, compaction and urban regeneration were sought, with the aim of reducing the sprawl and the spread and to provide urban areas for the construction of buildings demolished in the open countryside for the purposes of landscape refurbishment. The method used is: divide the students into project groups; draw up a Key Diagram of strategies; assign an area to every group; develop analyses on the city and its historical centre and use them to design the urban areas on a 1:1000 scale; join them together in a single project and realize the volumetric model; sketch up some architectures on a 1:100 scale; finally draw up the Local Plan of the whole borough.