The Urban Renaissance is a term attested since the first Bologna Triennale in 1992 in order to emphasize a project culture based on the traditional principles of the urban spaces and the constructive techniques of the European city.
These years of experiences, observation, studies, the images of this book, concur us to assert that we are inside a new age of Urban Renaissance. Sure this “vision” appears clear to people working on it, more uncertain to the common citizens, or the readers of monotone reviews of architecture. Today the city is damaged and, at the same time, a different concept of planning and constructing is asserted. An Urban Renaissance which is introduced in opposition to the sprawl of “modern” periphery left to us in inheritance from the past century.
The images of the Rebirth pass from the extraordinary experience of the reconstruction of Bruxelles capital city of European Union, to the recent experiences of ri-urbanization of the periphery of Paris, of London and Berlin, touching every latitude of the Old Continent: from Saint Pietroburgo to the architectures of the Portugal on the Atlantic sides, to the new cities constructed in Turkey, from Stockholm and Oslo to the Mediterranean architecture of the new villages constructed in the islands of the Aegean. In continuity with the tradition of the occidental city, using local materials, valuing the peculiar aspects of every site, stretching the hand to the styles of the place.
The Urban Renaissance does not want to be a school, a movement or a tendency, but the occasion to regain the heredity of the culture of the European genius.
The aim is not that one to impose a new ideology, but to convince and to demonstrate through projects of evident quality, that an alternative to the functionalist culture exists, as it should be in a tolerant and democratic civilization.
All the modernist planning seemed to forbid, is now used in these pages: the reconstruction, the styles, the buildings aligned on the street-edges, the public realm, that never-ending-variety of complex urban-spaces born from the combination of simple parts typical of “healthy” traditional urban development.
Today the problem of good part of our peripheries and of many modernist buildings is not only on their existing, but rather than various architects and ideologists want to make to believe us that their construction was and is unavoidable, necessary also in the future In democracy also the architecture and the urban planning are a whole of choices, without no obligation. Anyone who refuse the existence of choices is undemocratic, totalitarian and, consequently, “not-modern” (… for how much futuristic and technological his building, his skyscraper, and his mall could seem).
Today a massive return towards solutions of good sense still exists, according to the philosophy of A Vision of Europe network, and with the current of New Urbanism.