Landscapes in Motion. Rethinking place making through corridors of social and environmental connectivity: the case of URBiNAT

SOCIETIES AND SPACES IN CONTACT: BETWEEN CONVERGENCE AND DIVERGENCE
16–20 September 2019 Portorož-Portorose, Slovenia
LANDSCAPES IN MOTION. RETHINKING PLACE MAKING THROUGH
CORRIDORS OF SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONNECTIVITY, THE
CASE OF URBINAT
Saša Dobričić
Marco Acri
Univerza v Novi Gorici
Cultural Heritage Studies Programme
The Horizon 2020 URBINAT
Healthy corridors as drivers of social housing neighborhoods for the co-creation of social,
environmental and marketable NBS
Project Number 776783 | urbinat@ces.uc.pt | @URBi_NAT

LANDSCAPES IN MOTION. RETHINKING PLACE MAKING THROUGH CORRIDORS OF SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL
CONNECTIVITY, THE CASE OF URBINAT
The Horizon 2020 URBINAT
Healthy corridors as drivers of social housing neighborhoods for the co-creation of social,
environmental and marketable NBS
Regeneration + integration:
deprived social housing
urban development
an innovative and inclusive
catalogue of Nature-Based
Solutions (NBS)
ensuring sustainability and
mobilizing driving forces for
social cohesion.
public space
FOCUS
co-create with citizens
new urban, social and
nature-based relations
within and between
different
neighborhoods.
HEALTHY
CORRIDORS
URBiNAT aims to co-plan a
healthy corridor as an
innovative and flexible NBS,
which itself integrates a
large number of micro NBS
emerging from community-
driven design processes

HEALTHY CORRIDORS Front Runners
co-design, co-develop, co-implement with an urban plan to built NBS
PORTO
NANTES
SOFIA
LANDSCAPES IN MOTION. RETHINKING PLACE MAKING THROUGH CORRIDORS OF SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONNECTIVITY, THE CASE
OF URBINAT

HEALTHY
CORRIDORS
Followers
co-creation and co-
development, to
replicate and adapte
NBS
to other urban contexts
within an urban plan
HØJE-TAASTRUP BRUXELLES
NOVA GORICA SIENA
OF URBINAT

Nova Gorica with a population of 31,000 is
nowadays facing the problems of young people
moving out of the city since the city lacks suitable
employment and living facilities. Consequently, the
demographics is changing and the percentage of
elderly people is growing.
To increase the quality of life, we would like to
connect the deprived area of the stream Koren
closer to the urban area. For more decades the
stream was cut off from the rest of the city because
it was polluted by waste water. Since we built a
new sewage water cleaning device, the Koren is
now free of pollution.
NOVA GORICA
OF URBINAT

NOVA GORICA
OF URBINAT

LANDSCAPES IN MOTION. RETHINKING PLACE MAKING THROUGH CORRIDORS OF SOCIAL AND
ENVIRONMENTAL CONNECTIVITY, THE CASE OF URBINAT
WIDER THINKING SCENARIO
Working,
Learning and
Producing with
Nature, rather
than against it,
can help in
enhancing
natural, but
most of, also
social capital
(1)
Co-
designing
with
(not merely
for/against)
the
extended
community
of living
beings
Design
practice
should
include
Migratory
and movable
dimension of
environment

Earth as
global
household (1)
Oikos (home),
Ecology (oikos-
logos, knowledge
of our planetary
household),
Economy (oikos-
nomos,
the management
of the household)
Earth is considered as an oikos, as a collective home of a wider and extended set of living
beings. We have always imagined Earth as a home, as a collection of things, as an order where
things have precise position and processes in-between them drive different orders and
hierarchies. (Emanuele Coccia, The life of plants: A metaphysics of mixture,2018)

As well as humans design and produce, also other living beings are active in designing and co producing
this home.
We all built, consume and influence our environments and backwards these environments build,
consume and influence ourselves and the production processess of all living beings.
Working with nature:
From art of building to art of living
(together with the extended community of living beings)
It is exactly this awareness of being just co-producers and co-designers that are in permanent
relation with other beings and their dimension of time and space that further challenges any
linear straight forward dimensions of projects, including Urbinat.

Working with nature

Co-designing process with the rest of the nature, is embedded in the same landscape
dimension of Urbinat projects
relationship with
different dimensions and grammar of time and space
that other beings impose:
1. Cyclical dimension of nature (ex. The cyclical return of Seasons)
2. Cyclical return of tradition (ex. Festivities)
3. Intermittences of time (ex. Awaiting trees to grow)
4. Spatial Disturbances (ex. the traces and pathways left behind by crossing of different
migratory beings often represent the core identification factor of the project)
In landscape projects traces of different multiple biographies that have crossed the territory count much more then
dwellings and are the constitutional part of the landscape design process and to the art of place making.
Thus, the consequent incompleteness and openness of the process radically affects traditional
design practice.

Landscape is an explicit expression of our relationship with

migratory and movable dimension of environment, Landscapes do present the most powerful
and explicit expressions of our culture and art of living
and not only of occupying the soil
(see Ivan Illich, In the mirror of the past: Lectures and Addresses, 1991)
Landscapes represent the broader contexts within which we live and practice our art of inhabiting in
relation with others and their life processes, including plants, animals, that is with the extended
community of living beings.
Landscape is not an immovable and resigned background upon which isolated items move. In landscape
project as a rule, there are many designs and designers (humans, plants, animals),
that design each others and for each other their homes.
Within the shared and common dimension of Landscape each spatial pattern is very powerful since it
consist of actors and “backgrounds” that affect and design each other.
Maybe this is the reason why all our territorial tendencies to build borders, properties, territories,
categories and walls do often fail?

Migrations as core driver of design practice

If Landscape is a relational model to think people ad their environment where no land
results as inert background of permanence, making thus subject and the object of action,
observation and transformation as undistinguishable, then migrations, from the landscape
perspective, should be one of constitutional dimensions of our design, planning and
political reactions to a World in motion

URBiNAT project at its core focuses on the public spaces to:
• co-create with citizens (participatory community driven co-design process)
• new urban, social and nature-based relations (co-design that accepts other
dimension of extended community of living beings)
• within and between different neighborhoods ( it position itself on the threshold, on
the border zones between different radicalizations inherent to specific place
identities).

URBiNAT aims to co-plan corridors as innovative and flexible places where migration
integrates the residentiality, drives NBS co-design processes and as such identifies
omni comprehensive migration phenomena processes that emerge from.
Cooperative
Self management

Corridors

1. Corridors are usually intended as ways for privileged flows of things and/or people
(humanitarian corridor).
2. Corridors are axis that should be users friendly, that should facilitate, safe and
continuous movements of multiple users.
3. Corridors do happen when we have to connect to related but unconnected systems.

Corridors: beyond connection, towards interaction

McArthur’s and Wilson’s theory of “island biogeography:
Their theory holds that the rate of extinction on a given island is determined by that
island’s size and relative degree of isolation.
Build bridges between the “islands.”
To safeguard biodiversity, conservationists said, we would need to provide some sort of safe
pathway for species to travel from one large protected area to another

As in ecosystems also in social spaces isolation erodes the islands diversity

Corridors should not only connect but act as a catalyst for human interaction,
bringing together people and interest groups and enabling ideas to circulate in a
boundless and healthy environment

Ecologically, the movement of organisms is not always desirable, particularly when
considering invasive species.
But returning to people and their transfer, are there the same risks of being invaded
by others by opening a social corridor?
Is exclusion of the exotic always for the sake of preservation of authentic and local ?
CO-DIAGNOSTIC
CO-DESIGN
CO-IMPLEMENT
CO-EVALUATION
CO-CREATION

In-betweenness

Hence, thinking, conceiving, designing, establishing a corridor, when it goes beyond its
mere function of interval between two points, imposes the acceptance of
migration and of the condition of in-betweenness as the constitutional part of life
and of place-making.

It means that these communication means renounce to fulfil the mere requirement of the
“the economy of pathway”, in terms of time efficiency, and passengers stop, hesitate to
proceed, and flows of continuity start to stagnate.

But what does it mean to establish, design and built and inhabit these threshold, to be a
residents on the move of these “passages” or of something that will never come out as a
residence as such?
The establishment of places where there is no excludability but full rivalry in we speak in
terms of property matrix?

1. In other words, since in corridors we are out of property, which rights then for multiple
users?
2. How can we identify the “perfect” corridor—one that might prove equally attractive to a
different people, communities, or even for the extended communities of living beings,
from biking workers, to …families, to nesting birds and migrating mice?
3. More broadly, how might urban managers and landscape conservationists go about
designing healthy, well-balanced ecosystems that, as a rule, Nature and Culture required
ages to refine?
4. If you design a corridor according to the migratory specifications of one focal user,
does it necessarily follow that other users’ that are just as vital to the overall
system—will use it, too?

In URBINAT project we are acknowledging that a truly well designed corridor doesn’t necessarily
represent the best route for any of migrating categories of users (or largerly species), but rather
accepts the fact that the best route for multiple users may mean designing a corridor that’s
slightly sub-optimal for all of them.

Summarizing the findings that we have investigated until now, it becomes apparent that the conceptualization of
something as a “corridor” is not a neutral gesture, for it carries with it many considerable issues:

• Corridors themselves essentially tend to overcome administrative-territorial limitations (often they
overcome even physical morphological limitation s such they include bridges, tunnels)
• They are reticular and changeable systems, whose forms do not depend only on the innovations of the
infrastructural system, but also on the pre-existing urban and environmental fabric
• By their nature, the corridors are open dynamic and vibrant spaces, subject to influences from
different contexts that struggle to compose stable balances. (They are endowed with high accessibility
and high rivalry)
• They are potential deactivators of urban and territorial dichotomies (centre-periphery) but also of the
conception of places as an immovable organism and non-place (as defined by Marc Auge) as mere
means of communication; corridors are trans-functional by their nature

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