“We are an extraordinary and beautiful country, but at the same time – he says Renzo Piano - very fragile. The landscape is fragile and the cities are fragile, especially the suburbs. But the suburbs are the city of the future, the one where human energy is concentrated and the one we will bequeath to our children. We need a gigantic mending work and we need ideas”.
Transforming the suburbs into the city has always been a goal that is one of the priorities of the creative work of the famous Genoese architect who for some years has also been appointed senator for life. Proof of this is, a stone's throw from Milan, the redevelopment of the former Falck area of Sesto San Giovanni where the ancient blast furnaces and rolling mills, until yesterday gigantic abandoned skeletons in memory of when Sesto had more workers than inhabitants and was called the Italian Stalingrad, are returning to pulsate with new life in an immense space returned to the city. And from these considerations, a sort of manifesto by Renzo Piano, which kicks off the annual appointment of Italcementi Foundation, by calling this Saturday 24 January, which will be attended, among others, by the architect Mario Cucinella, the CEO of Beni Stabili, Aldo Mazzocco, the mayor of Bergamo, Giorgio Gori and the minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Maurizio Lupi. The works will be closed by Carlo Pesenti, CEO of Italcementi.
Mending and urban regeneration for the new Renaissance: this is the title and central theme of the meeting at the Bergamo Fair. Growth and urbanization are closely intertwined phenomena: no country has ever achieved a widespread level of well-being without a significant population shift towards the cities. More than half of the world's population currently lives in cities and further growth in urbanization is expected in the future. In Italian cities, only 10% of the inhabitants live in historic centres: therefore, it is necessary to regenerate and enhance the urban suburbs, fully stitching them back into the city context. In this context, Renzo Piano has created a video manifesto that will be previewed at this year's conference, focused on the concept of mending and urban regeneration, i.e. an intervention in the suburbs that can be inclusive, involving the population of the neighborhoods concerned. For Piano it is a sort of mission of his being an architect to reaffirm the primacy of the humanistic city, a place of exchange and dialogue, where a sense of belonging and participation is created, making visible that happy urbanity that Italo Calvino – a lifelong friend of the famous architect, who had so much influence on his works – he went looking in his invisible cities, among anonymous agglomerations of concrete.
This manifesto is in continuity with Piano's decision to donate his salary as senator to some working groups charged with studying some Italian suburbs. Each study is led by a "tutor", a pupil or collaborator of the architect Piano, in an overall working group called G124, which takes its name from the number of the senator's office in Palazzo Giustiniani, transformed into a laboratory for designing the redevelopment of the suburbs of Italian cities (http://renzopianog124.com).
The theme posed by the "manifesto on mending and regeneration" is also the basis of the Rifo project led by the University of Bergamo, which - focusing on the parts/components of the city to be "redone" - monitored the territory to propose a concrete strategy to restore soil by regenerating cities. Project that will be illustrated at the conference by Emanuela Casti, professor of geography.
At the end of the debate, focus on the "concrete utopias" of the architectural project of Italian pavilion at Expo 2015: from the genesis as an idea of cohesion, understood as a force of attraction that generates a rediscovered sense of community and belonging (a key element of any urban regeneration project), up to the concrete realization, made possible by extraordinary elements of technological innovation and sustainability, together with the know-how and know-how of the Italian companies involved. To illustrate the Expo building will be Michele Mole, founder and creative director of Nemesi & Partners, designer of Italy Pavilion.
