DOCTORAL PROGRAM IN TERRITORIAL DESIGN AND GOVERNMENT

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1 752 Chair: Prof. Rossella Salerno DOCTORAL PROGRAM IN TERRITORIAL DESIGN AND GOVERNMENT The new doctoral program in Territorial Design and Government merges the two previous Ph.D. courses in Urban, Regional, and Environmental Planning (head by Prof. Valeria Erba) and in Urban Projects and Policies (head by prof. Patrizia Gabellini), where one Ph.D.thesis presented in this yearbook have been carried out. Objectives of the Doctoral Program Basic objective of the course is to provide analytical and interpretative tools, as well as planning/design methods, able to apprehend and improve institutional approaches, ordinary procedures and experimental practices for territorial government and design. The complexity of territorial change in an open society requires a wide, pro-active innovation in planning practices and expertise. The interrelation between urban design and projects evaluation, environmental planning and landscape urbanism, together with urban governance, growth management and real estate development are the foci of the research projects developed by the faculty and the students involved in the course. The formative program assumes that many planners are involved with development not only from a regulatory position, but also proposing and managing actual projects at different scales. Comparative assessment of best practices and explorative design at territorial, urban, and local scale are the tools used to pursue more effective planning methods and techniques. context, and the actual actions for mastering territorial change also exploiting international best practice comparisons. The latter will be achieved through the organization of international seminars and through an internship in international research centers, universities, and public administrations. The central importance assigned to the doctoral thesis determines the attribution of a significant quota of formative credits to the activities finalized to conceive and write the dissertation along all the three years, as well to the training on specific themes related to the final doctoral dissertation by an active participation to applied researches and workshops. Professional and research profiles The Ph.D. program is aimed to prepare researchers and skilled professionals for public Doctoral Program Board administrations and the private sector, research centers, and universities, with specific expertise: in governing territorial development through integrated projects and innovative procedures able to share planning decisions with the involved actors and communities; in urban policy/project evaluation and management, with skills for mastering market oriented planning policies, impact assessment and compensations; conflicts mediations; betterment recapture and p/p joint development; in applied urban and environmental design, in order to create physical projects able to interpret and guide the economical, social, and political dimensions of land development, and improve the quality of life and the sustainability of the built environment. Andrea Arcidiacono Patrizia Gabellini Pierluigi Paolillo Matteol Bolocan Goldstein Francesco Infussi Paolo Pileri Bertrando Bonfantini Arturo Lanzani Angela Poletti Lidia Diappi Chiara Merlini Paola Pucci Valeria Erba Federico Oliva Rossella Salerno 753 Contents and research training The doctoral program offers advanced training in the critical construction of territorial plans, projects and policies by integrating different disciplinary approaches. The varied inter-disciplinary suggestions offered to Ph.D. students represent a great opportunity for understanding the multiple dimension of territorial projects and policies, but the students will be required to convey them to a clear research project among the following research streams: Spatial plan formats and tools Role of the project in leading territorial change Evaluation and management of urban projects and policies Descriptions/interpretations of cities and territories Decisions and governance Nature and soil The doctoral candidates will be asked to reflect upon the traditions of planning and urban design within the Italian and European Scholarship Sponsors Assolombarda, Settore Territorio Globus et locus Milano Metropoli; Associazione europea delle Agenzie di Sviluppo Regione Lombardia, DG Agricoltura Provincia di Milano, Direzione Centrale Pianificazione Territoriale Comune di Milano, Settore Pianificazione Urbanistica

2 754 QUARTIERI IN GIOCO. Localism Act e attivazione locale, un dialogo tra Londra e Milano Linda Cossa - Supervisor: Claudio Calvaresi Quartieri in gioco is the outcome of a research interest toward local community engagement processes, in view of strengthening and innovation of public action, and from a direct experience developed in the management of the Neighbourhood Lab in the Plan of Social Support to the Contratto di Quartiere II in Ponte Lambro. I ve observed the recent English reform promoted by the Localism Act, aimed to realize the Big Society and to encourage powers devolution toward local dimension. This reform introduces significant changes in the planning system, through recognising legally the new Neighbourhood Planning level, and fostering new neighbourhood governance form based on local communities responsabilities and engagement: the Neighbourhood Forum. So, I ve studied his empirical application in Highgate, a neighbourhood in London. In particular my focus is about those policy tools that can be useful to accompany this kind of processes and work in the direction of community, stakeholders and institutions capacities development, by their rooted dimension and the proximity to territories and to the issues they raise; as Neighbourhood Lab and Neighbourhood Forum are. At the core of the reflection there are the neighbourhood dimension, the community led development and how to build the conditions for: a real engagement and activism of local communities; a productive confrontation among communities, institutions, and experts competences; social innovation and a self-guiding society. In closing, the research suggests a dialogue between London and Milan, developing a reflection based on findings from case studies and stances from literature which are critically discussed, identifying new possible issues for a new urban policies agenda. 755

3 756 Analysis of the degree of mutual influence between the evolution of the automotive industry and the metropolitan socio-spatial domain. The case of Detroit, Michigan Letizia Imbres - Supervisor: Prof. Costanzo Ranci Ortigosa Coordinator: Prof.ssa Rossella Salerno The thesis aims to investigate the mutual influence between the evolution of the US automotive industry and the metropolitan area of Detroit, Michigan, the latter examined in its spatial and social constituents. The analysis has been articulated according to specific space and time frames. On the one hand, a cross-scalar spatial frame has been chosen to examine the intrinsically reticular nature of the US automotive realm while, contemporarily, allowing to investigate the rather areal and linear dimensions characterizing the metropolitan socio-spatial domain. On the other hand, an appropriate time frame has been selected according to a twofold purpose: first, the entire time span considered has to be sufficiently extended to include all crucial stages of the US automobile industry s evolution (thus allowing for extrapolating long-term patterns as well as minor trends and counter-trends); second, the temporal frame needed to be sub-divided in shorter periods to carry out more analytic investigation. In order to meet these criteria, the whole period covered by the dissertation runs approximately from 1880 until the early 2010s, where the two extremes correspond to the initial stage of the US industrial revolution and the present time, respectively. Then, the 130-year time span has been further sub-divided into shorter phases (and/or sub phases ) assuming as breaking-points between subsequent phases economic recessions and/or wartime periods. Ultimately, the body of the thesis has been articulated into 3 major phases and 5 sub-phases; in addition, this sub-division have been adopted for organizing the internal structure into chapters. In particular, Chapters 1 and 2 refer to the period, while Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 analyze the rise of the US automotive industry and the evolution of the socio-spatial domain until the recession of the early 1920s. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the interwar decades, including the Great Depression which followed the Wall Street Crash of Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 document the patterns of continuity and change in the US automobile industry and the metropolitan socio-spatial domain during World War II and the postwar period. Chapter 9 investigates the major changes occurring in the US automobile industry following the oil shortage, while Chapter 10 attempts to provide an overview of the principal trends characterizing the last decades. Finally, Chapter 11 examines the evolution of the Detroit s sociospatial domain over the entire s phase. Moreover, for each given phase and/or sub-phase, events have been analyzed by making use of analytic categories and subcategories which offer valuable interpretation keys allowing to exit the chronological description of facts as well as providing a set of guidelines used to assist interpreters in rapidly identifying features and tracing evolutionary patterns. If necessary, for each sub-category has been determined a set of indicators which have been applied for monitoring the trend of a selected variable over time. The group of analytic dimensions employed for investigating the automotive realm comprehends: a) agents of change; b) processes and operations (i.e. product development and product manufacturing); c) organizational structure (i.e. intra-and inter-corporate relations; corporate-suppliers relations; labor-management relations); d) geography (i.e. national, regional, and local scale). The sub-categories and indicators used for tracing the evolution of the socio-spatial domain include: a) metropolitan form (i.e. population change, metropolitan expansion, population density and building vacancy rate, metropolitan structure; land use); b) social morphology (i.e. ethnicity and race, educational attainment, employment and unemployment rate, jobs by occupation, jobs by industry, income, poverty rate); c) local government policies and corporate management interaction. Finally, two sets of preliminary conclusions are discussed: the former focuses on the metamorphosis of the US automobile industry, by making a specific reference to the main technical, organizational, and spatial changes illustrated for each phase; the latter reasons about the hypothetical correlation existing between the major shifts occurring within the industry and the socio-spatial evolution of the Motor City. 757

4 758 The City Network and the Regional Evolution in Yangtze River Delta, China Matteo Giuseppe Romanato - Supervisor: Prof. Luigi Cocchiarella Tutor: Prof.ssa Salerno Rossella - GPT Phd program coordinator: Prof.ssa Salerno Rossella, Politecnico di Milano. The aim of the research is to detect ideas, expectations, aspirations and wishes about the city in a bottom-up perspective. To fulfil that a very useful channel is nowadays the web and the internet communication. In this environment messages, discussions and on-line debates take shape in an extremely free way. The fields of social communication, technology and representation can help to depict a complex ground and to find out new tools to deal with such a big amount of material. It is so clear that a multidisciplinary approach must be taken into account. All these disciplines outline the panorama on which the phenomenon of social communication takes place. The postmodern condition, the space of flows and its dialogue with the space of places, the globalized imagery, the techno-urban imagery, the territorial commodification, the spectacular turning of cities and quarters both from a communitarian and media point of view, the dynamics of connected knowledge, the human shaping and the purposes of technological myths and of techno-scientific utopias are all elements that must not be underestimated in approaching the research. All these contributions allow to point out open questions which involve technical progress, society and urban space. Are the criteria trough which we interpret citizenship, urban images, community and participation still well-grounded or should they be reviewed? How does technological communication affect that? What innovations in terms of contents, ways and resources can be detected through research? From a methodological perspective it was necessary to realize that there is not a perfectly superimposable foregoing research. So it was indispensable to build an analysis path which could borrow the views of the different converging disciplines that explored various sides of the problem trying to merge them together. Another important choice was to vary the approaches to avoid the risk of overwriting personal considerations on the outcomes and not to restrict the experience only to one single case study. So the research work involved a preliminary phase of triage and three case studies. The advance of the research proceeded from the general to the specific in the following way.the triage was a qualitative exploration about some ways of manifestation of the urban images on the net. The first case study was about a generic urban image of space and urban environment as expressed by an amateur group of web-users. This overview was tested in comparison between both the German and the Italian side of the contributors in a specific web-site focused on photography. The second case study explored the image of the city no more referring it to a neuter space but organized around a site-specific experience: the city of Milan. The further and final step was based on the so called web-communities that discuss about the present and past urban transformations of Milan. Moreover just in order not to orient the results a priori a common unit of measurement was considered and that is to say the images themselves. The main issue of this social exchange, in which a proper knowledge develops, are in fact urban images. So digitalized images in the form of photos, renderings, drawings, historical paintings, maps, sketches and so on can tell us a lot about the imagery of a connected population. About 5000 images of all kinds were collected and about 1000 paged up on 187 tables. Due to the rhizomatic structure of the web (especially as far as the exploration became more and more specific) all these images were collected from the different sources and re-assembled according to interpretative categories to make them emerge in all their communicative strength. One of the main issue of the research in fact is that images are rhetorical dispositives on the footsteps of Foucault. The overcoming dimension of the web flows, including the images, is so an inevitable part of the on-line experience of the media. Beyond this comments, writings, opinions and discussions about the images of the city contributed to describe emerging sensibilities and ideas on the net. Most of the reported textual evidences are linked with the original web source in order to warrant the possibility for the reader to reconstruct the reasoning as the principle of the falsifiability by Popper requires. About 100 opinions by different people were found with contributions that can extend form a line to half a page in the form of sentences, monologues, dialogues, debates etc. The main outcomes of the first steps could display that on the web both amateur and professional production can find an hospitable reception and can merge together due to the growing autonomy of the digital images. Such images can move in the internet and get into contacts with different audiences and also in different ways of digital collaborations for examples in on-line archives or software platforms. In these complex ways of communication a great part of the urban images wandering on the net reflects an hyper-dense city showing the growth rhetoric also beyond the limits of the different languages. In this direction it was possible to discover, in the first case study, a people of space amateur photographers that can incorporate cultured languages in their production. The meeting point of such population, the on-line platform of Fotocommunity, can be used to detect the Spaces of representation overlapping in some ways with the Representation of spaces that Lefbvre considered in his thought. All these personal and formal experiences as well as communitarian vocations can narrate the urban environments according to various frames: the abstracted space, the growth-myth city and the historical affective places. In the second case study, through personal sites, blogs, and others platforms it was possible to describe an iconic web overlay which covers all the city of Milan. They can be institutional, quarters or amateurs sites and can offer a great amount of digital images: archives with an encyclopaedic aspiration but also innovative forms of mutual collaboration. Especially the ideas of a future technological city based on economical development and of a nostalgic past city can be found here as parallel confirmation of what detected in the first case study. In the third case study the webcommunities, gathered around on-line discussion forums, were taken into consideration as they can express more consciously opinions and expectations about Milan urban transformations. Beyond already known forms of universal mapping or requests for an urban symbolism there is here a great presence of international references and comparisons thanks just to the web dynamics. The typical form of the on-line images consumption can in fact open new territories for the perception of urban spaces, the place identity and the belonging to the city mediated through technological channels. Moreover the image of the city that emerges confirms the rhetoric of the growth and of techno-utopianism as well as the regret for pre-capitalistic city. They are actually symptoms of disappointment for the present urban environment and of ideal projections on alternative visions as well. It is a fact that the letdown for the present space is evaluated with the parameter of the globalized world that can reach the web users through the net.conclusions can be drawn on three levels. On the levels of contents it is clear that neoliberal narrations are spread on the internet through images and are assimilated by a large quota of connected people. On the level of the web environment it is possible to claim that media and the city are composing together and influence each others on the ground of expectations. On the level of resources and opportunities the iconic dimension of communication can suggest new ways to involve common people to meet with technicians and institutions in order to take part in the design and preservation of the city. 759

5 760 Mapping Urban Climate and Air Quality for City Planning, from Multi-Scale Modeling to Real-Time Air Sensing Aldo Treville - Supervisor: Prof. Eugenio Morello Co-supervisor: Prof. Rex Britter - Tutor: Prof. Angela Poletti Problem definition Urban planning is facing the environmental questions posed by climate change and air pollution in urbanized and increasingly crowded areas in both the developed and developing world: how can cities alleviate their responsibility and address proper measures? While current studies are exploring mitigation and particularly adaptation solutions to be applied to target locations, data and urban models are mostly available at the regional/city level, with little information available at the local/ neighborhood level, and the people s level. However, new available sensing technologies are pushing a paradigm shift: from traditional top-down climate/ environmental modeling and scarce governmental monitoring to innovative diffused sensor networks and participatory sensing scenarios. The opportunities for spatial and environmental planning are vast: mapping at a local scale and at a fine-grained resolution can enhance UHI and pollution concentration studies, and allow hotspots spatial and temporal variation studies. In addition, real-time information supports the creation of an urban smart information platform for interdisciplinary communication and collaboration, ultimately used by planners and decision makers for planning more sentient, resilient, and responsive cities. The research aimed to investigate the potential of mapping urban climate and air quality with the help of air sensing; mapping by air sensing can be a way of transferring the climatic and environmental knowledge into planning languages, bridging the gap between urban climatology, meteorology, air studies, city planning and urban design. Limits of air sensing, in its technology and cost, are the biggest barriers for current planning processes. Therefore, exploring air sensing opportunities, obstacles and strategies to overcome them, and providing recommendations for its integration into urban planning, was the final scope of this research. Methodology, case studies and fieldwork Strengths and challenges of modeling were studied in the first research step at Urban Simulation Lab of Politenico di Milano; the research included investigating the relation between microclimate and discomfort and the built environment at the neighborhood level, and the creation of a model for the city of Milan collecting data from various databases. In a second research step a specific project was designed, in order to experiment with air city sensing in the field with its limits, and explore the opportunity of this innovative approach for urban planning to study urban climate and air quality at the people scale. In fact, considering the limits of a stationary sensing network in reaching a proper resolution (MIT-Clairity case study), a mobile sensing campaign in a field experiment was designed and executed, by testing and using sensors and exploring sensing opportunities in mapping air quality and urban climate parameters at Senseable City Lab of MIT. A conclusive contribution is a project proposal that includes the findings of this research, demonstrating the potential for the city of Milan to implement a sensing project integrated into a model, in the final aim of mapping urban climate and air quality in Milan. Data analysis and findings Figure 1 shows a highresolution, local (and potentially real-time) air quality map using data from the mobile sensing fieldwork. The thesis includes temperature, humidity and other pollutants hot-spot analysis from air sensing. Among the opportunities that 1. PM2.5 concentration expressed in μg/m3 unit, as coming from the collected sensor raw readings (May 30th, MIT campus, Cambridge, MA). urban planning should embrace there is the possibility to reduce vulnerability, by both limiting emissions/impact and reducing sensitivity and increasing citizens adaptive capacity. In fact, the potential of such unprecedented fine-grained mapping could allow effective local interventions, such as urban policies for mobility (i.e. modifying car accessibility), energy, and land use (i.e. relocating pollutant urban functions, or target groups from a high polluted areas). Urban design measures could be addressed to targeted areas, in modifying local morphology (i.e. improving ventilation), fabrics (i.e. increasing green areas), and other measures could increase adaptation capacity to UHI and to pollutants accumulation (i.e. barriers from local sources, alert systems). Finally, urban practices can also be affected by such mapping, such as citizens behavior and lifestyle (i.e. reducing private car transportation, increasing awareness in outdoor activities). Overall, the potential of sensing emerged from this work seems to be very high, but more for future elaboration than immediate implementation, given the recent technology and the current challenges experienced. In fact, strong and unexpected findings were underlined, such as data representativeness, communication and transparency issues, data accuracy and calibration (unless machine-learning techniques are used to increase data quality coming from low-cost sensors), and further research is needed in order to explore the realistic possibility of implementation of the next generation sensing in urban climate and air quality mapping. Conclusions A paradigm shift towards more and more air quality attention, measurements, mapping and awareness is likely to occur in the short-term future, and once sensors improve in data quality, thanks to ongoing rapid technology developments, they will be ready to be implemented at a large scale for urban mapping. At the same time it is possible to envision a future urban planning more focused on governing health and well-being at the people s level, and mapping urban climate and air quality can profit from new sensing tools and integrating sectorial knowledge. Urban planning, therefore, should be ready and profit from this opportunity, such as pervasiveness and its scale and resolution improvement, as it will change the future of urban climate and air quality in our cities. In addition, participatory sensing scenarios are beneficial for both increasing data quality and enhancing awareness on environmental and health topics. The spread of personal sensing through wearables and the pervasive sensing might lead to the panoptic ICT top-down concern, familiar to smart city criticism. However, it should be tackled by enhancing bottomup smartness : promoting crowdsourcing and peoplecentric sensing will enhance urban sensing in an integrated perspective, both increasing data quality and citizens participation and awareness. 761