Regeneration of the Historic District by Immigrants Integration and Environmental Perception
The project is an effort to increase the sense of belonging and quality of the space by urban design tools such as sensory richness,sense of place, sociability, affordance, and security to create strong behavioral settings as the arabesques in the metamorphosis way to release the infinite interactions among different social layers of Piacenza society in the direction of integration goals by considering socio-economic, legal-political and cultural-religion strategies in a bottom to up way.
Local
Italy
Piacenza
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
Although almost 20% of the population of Piacenza are immigrants, there is a kind of social gap between immigrants and local people that can lead to physical segregation. Government policies in Italy towards immigrants are less flexible than in Northern Europe. Nevertheless, with bottom-up strategies along with the implementation of legal, cultural, economic, and social flows and their integration with urban design tools, it is possible to strengthen multifunctional behavioral settings and physical contexts to increase interactions between different social layers. The tools should interact to increase the sense of belonging and increase the quality of space in the environment, which include the keywords of culture, security, territory, sense of place, sensory richness, sociability, and affordance, which create spaces for all layers and abilities. The mentioned strategies produce multi-thematic circuits in different but related scales from metropolitan to neighborhood scales between different components of the landscape. The strategies are following the future projects of the Piacenza municipality and have been explained according to the physical and social conditions of the context and have strengthened each component and are aimed at influencing the final system that organizes the flows of immigrants and local people. The result of the circuits crystallizes in behavioral settings, and infinite interactions are formed. These strategies try to create spaces designed "with" immigrants, instead of spaces designed "for" immigrants, and they look at immigrants as "potential" to release their capacity to strengthen circuits and spaces in economicو social, physical, and cultural dimensions. In the strategies and designs of this project, the strengthening of transportation systems, the distribution of design within the city instead of focusing on the area of immigrants, and economic, social, and cultural requirements and communication between stakeholders are emphasized.
Sense of Belonging
Immigrants Integration
Environmental Perception
Affordance
Social Interaction
This project emphasizes directly SDG10 in implementing equality between all different social layers and access to physical resources and open spaces on a neighborhood scale. This project seeks to provide infinite interactions between all layers of society with a social and psychological approach through urban design tools, which requires the provision of hard and soft economic, cultural, social, and legal infrastructures.
Also, according to the codified and continuous multi-scale strategies, it has a direct and indirect relationship with other SDGs such as 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, and 11 through the implementation of physical, virtual, or tangible and intangible circuits between the different landscape ecosystems of Piacenza such as agricultural areas, industrial areas, educational systems, urban services, and cultural and historical aspects of the city are created.
These strategies aim to increase economic empowerment and workforce production, strengthen investment, and communicate and interact between effecting stakeholders. Freeing the potential of immigrants through inducing a sense of belonging to carry out activities in urban environments and raising awareness and culture of local people to accept interaction with immigrants is an undeniable thing in the future of Piacenza, to remain sustainable in terms of activity and vitality of urban development.
What is important in this context is that the author's main effort has been to convey the concept that every human being, regardless of race and background, has unique capacities and potentials that can be rooted in Culture has genetic abilities. Also, considering the undeniable challenge of immigration in European cities, it should be noted that ignoring these people not only causes the loss of social capital but can also lead to physical segregation. What makes this project unique is the attempt to respond to a social problem through the psychological approach of urban design. For this purpose, at first, it emphasizes providing different cultural, social, economic, and legal infrastructures and strategies bilaterally between immigrants and local people, and then defining the territory by using the five human senses through Sensory Richness. , increasing sociability to respond to the different tastes of different ages, different races, genders, and different abilities, increasing security, paying attention to cultural and artistic dimensions, and increasing the sense of place in line with the goal of increasing the sense of belonging. When a person has a sense of belonging to a space and the space provides a place for him to see and be seen, he works in the space and releases his potential to interact with the environment or with a person or group. This potential can strengthen the economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the society and ultimately affect the overall strategy in different aspects. In fact, designed spaces are like behavioral physical settings that take different and multi-faceted circulations in their designed interior as input, process it with a sense of belonging, and provide interactions as system output.
In fact, this project has an inclusivity approach and its goal is to connect all different strata of society by reducing inequality and expanding fair access to urban services and open spaces. In this project, by implementing a safe bicycle system and tram line system through the connection between industrial centers, hospitals, services, agricultural lands, and Trebbia river and revitalizing the tram line around the historical wall, an attempt is made to reduce the time from the origin to the destination to increase The speed of urban mobility and the improvement of the urban economy in the long term. Also, the extra and annoying parking lots in the city have been removed and the existing traffic is allocated to the half-empty parking lots of the city and new parking lots. Most of the movement of immigrants in Piacenza is done by bicycle due to legal or economic obstacles. With this method, not only the security and speed of the bicycle system increases but citizens are encouraged to use this system. Also, with the calming of the traffic, the urban dialogue will increase.
On the other hand, with multifunctional spaces, not only attention paid to the interactions between the first generation of immigrants and the local people, but also by strengthening the training centers and the necessary facilities and equipment, it is possible to provide the ground for the interaction between the second generation of immigrants and local children. which urban spaces can be crystallized. Also, these spaces have been strengthened through culture and art. Culture and art are common languages among all people, which can be the basis of interaction between all members of the society, which itself is the basis of interaction and inclusiveness of this project.
The role of people is a key role in this project. In fact, this concept is with the people, not for the people. This means that these are the people who, individually, in groups or the form of institutions, bring their cultural, legal, economic, and social flows into the environment through culture, creativity, art, education, investment, etc. The potentials of people in spaces become urban interactions that can originate from two reference groups, local and immigrant, and then be integrated. These are the people who breathe life into the space with their interactions and increase the sense of belonging to others in the city with the help of the designed urban space. Cultural and economic infrastructures play a very key role in the acceptance of immigrants and the receiving of local people for these interactions to occur. This project is an attempt to produce a self-productive system whose generator is the potential of all members of society to become an efficient integrated social system that also interacts with its urban environment.
In this project, stakeholders are divided into two main groups, affecting and affected, although there is an overlap between these two groups. affected are the stakeholders for whom the project is carried out. That is, in fact, local people and immigrant people, who themselves include a huge group of all ages, all abilities, and all genders, who themselves become affecting stakeholders when they interact with each other or enter the urban behavioral setting. Affecting stakeholders is also a group that provides the necessary fields and infrastructure for affecting stakeholders in an organized and systematic manner and monitors the interactions between them, which can include top to bottom levels. The government and decision-making institutions, local authorities, engineering, architecture and design departments, energy departments, services and information sources, and ICT & data centers, and investment institutions are among the main affecting stakeholders. In this section, what is important is to know the potentials and tasks of each of the stakeholders and to organize and monitor them in an integrated manner in order to strengthen the soft and hard infrastructures, to build capacity for interaction and movement of the system in the direction of forming a self-productive system is necessary.
What is valuable is the multi-disciplinary nature of this project and the inter-systemic connection of various components of the landscape and its interaction with the man-made environment, which can be examined from different scales and different topics and aspects.
But in general, the following sciences are the main elements of this project.
- Spatial planning and analysis through the production and optimization of GIS maps at different scales from metropolitan to neighborhood to understand the different components of the ecosystem and its relationship with economic and social dimensions and the distribution of desirable functions.
-Environmental psychology through improving the quality of urban health, improving the sense of belonging and the quality of space through increasing sensory richness, security, definition of territory, sense of place and cultural elements.
- Urban design, Planning and Architecture in the direction of integrating environmental psychology and spatial planning, implementing the urban transportation system, paying attention to environmental affordances and implementing landuses and functions, paying attention to the dimensions of urban economy, urban sociology and statistics. Paying attention to the basics of aesthetics in the design and communication between systems on a larger scale, paying attention to the political dimensions of the target society and knowing the laws and explaining the policies in the framework of the law.
Innovation in this concept can be related to arabesque. Arabesques are decorative motifs representing endless flows that show plants, geometric shapes, or mythological creatures that can be seen in Italy, in the art of Brocatto, and in Islamic countries such as Iran in the art of Zarbaft. In fact, arabesque is used because the common language of art is Italy as a representative of Receiving Context and Eastern countries as a representative of the Immigrants' Context. In this concept, arabesques in a metaphorical form are the behavioral settings that are formed in physical contexts through the integration of flows arising from the integration model, which includes the economic, social, cultural, legal, and educational flows of the local community and immigrants, combined with urban design tools to increase the quality of the space and induce a sense of belonging. Finally, after processing the flows, the behavioral settings of physical context, crystallize the infinite interactions between these two different social layers.
The formula of this concept can generally be a fixed formula for social integration through urban design for societies where upstream policies do not have enough flexibility to provide interactions between different social layers and are facing the challenge of immigration. In fact, this project includes bottom-up strategies. The ultimate goal is that the social flows of different layers can influence the decision-making process in the long term and that urban design can play its role in the service of this concept as a valuable arm. But what is important is that this formula must be in accordance with the environmental characteristics of the physical, social and cultural affordances of that context and respect the values and culture of the reference context. This concept does not have a fixed formula in its components. This means that, for example, the keywords of security, sensory richness, territory, sociability, and culture, although they appear to be fixed factors, they must be compatible with the environment and society, and urban planners and designers must define their concepts according to the target society. Also, the political and legal, cultural, and economic dimensions of different societies can be different from each other, which determines the limits of the interventions of citizens and city planners.
The major challenge that European, American, and even Asian societies and governments have faced in recent decades is the challenge of immigration. This challenge is related to the religious, cultural, social, and economic policies and backgrounds of each country. In some countries, due to flexible policies caused by economic, political, and social factors, more flexibility has been adopted regarding the acceptance of immigrants and their activities. But in countries like Italy, which faces religious and cultural backgrounds as well as political and economic obstacles, we cannot expect immigrants to be integrated from top to bottom. On the other hand, the economic, cultural, and religious barriers of the immigrants themselves have become another reason for their lack of integration into European countries. Therefore, the need to provide the above-mentioned multi-faceted programs for interaction and recognition between groups of immigrants and the target community can solve this social segregation in the long term through planning, in which urban design can achieve the factor things like increasing the sense of belonging and quality of the space to be effective in this issue.
