Search

This work approaches the phenomenon of the outdoor terraces of bars and restaurants, analysing the role of these privately owned collective elements whose layout has shaped the urban landscape at the pavement level for more than a century, and whose presence has become essential in the streets of many cities after a pandemic. The research highlights the interest of terraces as dynamic elements of urbanity: private domains in the public space where people eat collectively; they are apparently simple units that synthesise complex conflicts between individual behaviours and property boundary conditions. The investigation shows the increasing expansion that outdoor terraces have experienced since 2020, using the cities of Barcelona and Milan as case studies. A series of GIS maps show the image of both cities before and after the pandemic, allowing us to evaluate the amount of public space allocated to terraces, measure their increase in number and surface, establish the proportions of occupation of the street and find the patterns of concentration in the public space. Finally, the article offers some policy and planning recommendations based on the research findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 11 October 1935, the inauguration of the Slussen urban cloverleaf took place in front of the excited citizens of Stockholm. It had the attributes of a pure traffic machine taken from the most advanced traffic engineering publications, and it expressed the optimistic cultural modernism that five years ago the Stockholm International Exhibition had promoted.1 This urban cloverleaf was made of translucent glass, reinforced concrete, metallic handrails, and reflective tiles and was meant to solve, in one single gesture, the complex urban link between the Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea, between Gamla Stan – the historic city centre – and Södermalm – the southern district built on top of the 35-metre-high plateau [1]. The solution made difficult urban compromises between the foothills of the Brunkeberg topography, the smooth water surfaces of the Stockholm archipelago, the architecture of the historic urban tissue, and the demands of a complex articulated mobility. Boats, goods, suburban trains, subways, trams – later buses – pedestrians, cyclists, and automobiles finally converged on this place at different levels, completing the intricacies of a threedimensional geometry which, for the first time in history, was inserted into a compact city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mario Ridolfi's lifelong work in the area around the Corso del Popolo in the city of Terni has merited special attention among researchers because of its sensitiveness towards the historical surroundings, its ability to integrate town-planning and architecture and its capacity to transform the city's skin and structure. The aim of the paper is to shed light on the origins, design strategies and translation into architecture that informed the approval of the Variante al Piano di Ricostruzione Corso del Popolo, piazza del Popolo e zone adiacenti in 1959. A comparative analysis of mainly unpublished, original sketches dating back to 1932 helps to understand the planning precedents that ultimately led to the decision to open the Corso del Popolo (1984–1932), the variations of the specific layout of this urban project from 1932 to its approval in 1959 and the unique application of planning strategies into Ridolfi's buildings for central Terni. The study reveals the persistence of previous planning ideas that were not proposed but accepted by Ridolfi, the depiction of the 'squared street' as a new paradigm of open space, and the intrinsic paradoxes that informed the difficult embedding of the palazzina typology into the fragile urban fabric of the old city centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]