The Educational Processes Between Program and Places

For several years, in particular in the Architectural Design Laboratories of the 3rd year of the 5 years degree course of Architecture in Ferrara, we have worked with students trying to involve, apart from the aspects of disciplines connected to design, differently conjugated, also those of a social, economic and environmental nature. For example, design exercises have been carried out on some places considered as highly "mutational": industrial area of the ZIP in Padua (one of the most important north-east development poles planned in the 1950s and today at the center of profound transformations); Macrolotto 0 in Prato (where the largest Chinese community in Europe resides); Marshal Tito Barracks in Sarajevo (destined to a new university campus and a possible occasion to regenerate a part of the city where the wounds left by the Balkan conflict are still evident). These evocatively significant places played a fundamental role to make students understand the importance and value of operating in problematic places in the city through the use of strategies that can be applied within the contexts they will face once they graduate. The objectives behind the redefinition of these places were: - to define a process in which the program becomes a tool for exploring reality through strategies of knowledge / interpretation / transformation capable of holding together the characters and mutations of the existing reality, new needs expressed by people and social networks, in a perspective of sustainable development; - broaden the concept of recycling, moving it from the traditional one of intervention on the material object to the one of second life and renew life of both places and communities; - to identify adaptive design tools, through which to define a new alphabet, composed of signs and meanings capable of translating into the technical and social intervention the identity values expressed in the communities and the changing differences typical of the contemporary world. The redefinition of these anthropized places in the cities takes on the characteristics of a work of mediation and contamination between preexistence, heritage, identity and new modes of use, organization and participation of local communities in the dynamics of transformation underway.