Description and Detailing of Proposed Products, Interventions, Interfaces and Policies (2016)

1. LIMITS / URBAN FENCES – as Community Spaces: Spaces for the local community, devices for energy production, purification and oxygenation, communication tools, etc.

  • Fences occupied by the creative industry, with street art, spontaneous or organized through events (illustrated in attached images).
  • Interactive and media fences for public or community information display, creative lighting, facade media urban art.
  • Green fences, living walls, or interpretations thereof, or vertical landscaping, planned or created and maintained by neighborhood communities or local urban planning departments (ADPs).
  • Urban-agricultural fences and walls, for climbing plants (and even food crops).
  • Solar fences or microalgae panels.

2. LOTS – Transforming vacant spaces into architectural interfaces / Providing eco-mobility services on LOT (benefits: awareness, proximity to space, clean air, reduced pollution):

  • Ecological parking with solar (thermal or photovoltaic) or green roofs, lawn cover.
  • Completing voids with urban agriculture / guerrilla gardening.
  • Ecologizing voids, arranging spaces with minimal intervention (grass, stones, improvised furniture, etc.), organizing as a social and event point like Strada Verde (Green Street).
  • Improving bicycle/pedestrian mobility by modifying boundaries and the appearance of the parcel.
  • Urban Hacking – a form of protest or direct action (when a group undertakes an action intending to reflect an existing problem, highlight an alternative, or demonstrate a possible solution to a social problem).

3. NEW URBAN POLICIES for (re)defining the regulation of unused interstitial space and urban boundaries:

  • Regulation of punitive measures for illegal parking through progressive increases in fines based on recidivism.
  • Promotion of the OCCUPY! movement at this urban development level.
  • Reanalysis of land ownership to assign a new purpose or reclaim neglected or harmful land through a set of evaluation criteria to avoid the risk of becoming an instrument of abusive dispossession.
  • Activating residents through this program and associated events.
  • Changing public opinion by promoting public policies, business models, and implemented physical projects as good practices through mass media and online social channels.
  • Changing mentality and urban behavior determined by the broken windows theory.
  • Think globally, act locally – Promoting ecopreneurship and engagement for sustainable development.
  • Listening to the voices of residents and giving them a voice through the creation of historical street corridor presentations with resident names, photo portraits, and anecdotes about people and places for the ultimate goal of reinventing a vacant place.
  • Establishing legal community street and neighborhood associations.
  • Supporting municipal subsidies for initiatives that involve the creation of infrastructure and interfaces that take over the performance of natural ecosystem services.
  • Highlighting urban alternatives through exhibitions and community communications, civic-urban education programs for residents (possibly with students from urban planning, architecture, landscape architecture, public administration, geography, sociology, biology, etc.).
  • Reactivating/revitalizing public space – \”reconquest\” of public space – Correct and legal application of PUG (Urban General Plan) and zoning plans, laws, and regulations; raising public awareness.
  • Objectives: rapid implementation, rapid applicability, expansion of good practices, reduction of production/implementation/resource/time costs.
  • Different levels of impact – local (neighborhood), urban (city/town), regional (territorial), national, transnational, international, different degrees and forms of incentives adapted.
  • Permits for administering temporary activities and simplifying the authorization of public space operation, at least for this type of intervention.
  • Attracting attention to the space increases the possibility of valuing its improvements (increasing land/property value, more profitable sales, business opportunities, image creation, etc.).
  • For unfinished buildings/construction sites or abandoned private property – minimal interventions regarding fences/boundaries should be possible: transforming fences into urban furniture, facilitating connection between eco-entrepreneurs and owners.
  • Regulation by public policy allowing individual users (active resident guerillas), small communities, and eco/entrepreneurs to lobby or publicly pressure for the implementation of civic proposals.
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