Recondition the urban texture through public interventions

Constantinescu, Cristina; Harmanescu, Mihaela, 2014, Recondition the urban texture through public interventions, in: Crăciun, C., Bostenaru Dan, M. (ed.), ‘Planning and Designing Sustainable and Resilient Landscapes’, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

  • Author : Constantinescu, Cristina; Harmanescu, Mihaela
  • Year : 2014
  • English Title : Recondition the urban texture through public interventions
  • Published in Book : Planning and Designing Sustainable and Resilient Landscapes
  • Abstract in English : During the time, every human society puts its own footprint on the space they are using (living space whether we mean public or private spaces), so when we are talking about the city, the thoughts leads to the heritage space and how we use it, daily living experiences into the space and its consequences. As a living entity, the city constantly is evolving and redefines itself through completing with the interventions, its identity constantly being a subject of the conditions born from pressure of the continuity – competitiveness relation. The effect of this relation is the transformation of urban texture, because today there is a real issues faced by a number of cities that are loosing their controlled development and become more and more unsafely places, without identity. If we think this report, in the global market, in order to compete, cities are in search of the best congruent vision to take place in this competition and the regeneration urban projects are most affectively and widely applied tool to achieve this target. The interventions are based on different attitudes and interests, but at the same time give rise to changes in long-term effect on the specificity of the urban tissue. Identifying the needs of a place whether it is about functions, activities or the need for a physical form that meets its own minimum conditions to adapt to changes induced by the process of living, use, consumption and re-defining concern of society to create their living environment, with optimal space and distinctive as the society itself. Capacity of urban areas to be flexible and to change according with it’s needs is reflected in the quality of concept and form relations established through the project planning but also through their local integration in the general urban as in-volvement of the relations connectivity part in existing territories. Urban tissue as a product of the accumulation of various interventions as temporality, technique, scale and attitude, is the reflection process of continuously changing conditional framework such as the number of users, types of relations, the composite of segregation, social, ethnic, religious, political and economical conditions. In this case, we are dealing with different approaches on urban tissue texture, with the development of ambiguous identity composition but which are the response of certain urban policies. What kind of mutation suffer the urban texture, how their consequences are affecting the urban landscape local identity and specificity, what is the relationship between space and all these characteristics? These are the questions that seek their answers in this paper. Listing some cases of existing projects, we want to reflect on the coherence of the approach and the way conception interventions into the urban landscape. Hence, the paper deals with major interests of space syntax (cultural landscape, urbanism, public space) based on provocative analyze: of the spatial relations between physical and abstract realities into the contemporary city and reveal the effects of the external pressure on the urban textures. When we are in a position to change a place, we should be aware that the final product will be more then its mere existence, it becomes part of local culture and accurate representation of the user.
  • Outline in English : Introduction Theoretical framework City and its formal features – tissue, the reflection of the activities – in or out pressure Typology of urban interventions through urban tissue Urban landscape as cultural landscape Public space projects as a tool of urban texture recovery Culture as a part of the public spaces projects Conclusions