URBAN CHART OF PRINCIPLES_2009
INTRO
Infrastructure must be understood as a broad term, a cluster web, a new, largely invisible type of materiality. It has a critical resonance, a direct reach or extensivity into the adjacent material environment that no architecture alone can approximate. Communication, transmission of energy and information as vital systems have different degrees of visibility: roads, cables and waves. Concentration by means of vertical scheme tries to distribute cables and pipelines as the skyscraper optimizes energy reservoirs, from the electrical power substations, the centre of processing of information, the gas and water tanks to domestic devices. Technical walls will be constructed in that cluster web together with the communication tracks where all the lines will be separated vertically and connected both sides: urban exterior side and domestic interior side.
THE CLUSTER, THE PROJECT SCALE AND THE TERRITORY IDENTITY
The city is a living organism and, as such, the process of analysis and definition of its systems would be impossible without using models that, in spite of their simplicity, allow us to analyze the urban functioning.
With this assumption in mind, we consider the cluster as the basic unit of the city. The cluster is a portion of the urban space defined by the distance that a person can cover without needing public or private transportation: from a quarter to half an hour walking, corresponding approximately to a couple kilometres in distance. A group of clusters forms the urban area. Seen in this way the vision of the city will be double:
- From the big scale to the small scale, in other words "think globally, act locally" which is translated in the town planning language as "think territory to articulate clusters";
- From the small scale to the big scale, from the perception level of the inhabitant, we can affirm "create routes, to form clusters".
The cluster constitutes the micro scale of the city and can be compared to the scale of the neighbourhood where the citizen can find a place where he is identified. It is the level of the daily life: residence, education, health, leisure, trade and sociocultural services. It is based on routes taken by the citizen; these routes allow citizens acess to other clusters, to the road links of the city and to its links with the exterior, the stations of public transport.
The territorial scale (macro), made up by districts, the municipality or the agglomeration, consists of the articulation of the clusters. The above mentioned articulation takes root in the permeability of the urban net: the streets of every cluster connect with those of its environment and try to avoid breaking phenomena. This assumes that communication infrastructures, conceived as a network, have to be treated in a compatible way with the urban net: urban boulevards, routes for cars and pedestrian paths are articulated with the communication routes of the clusters.
The ordination of the clusters is based in five principles: territorial insertion, the fluid city, the organization of multicentrality, the pedestrian scale and the perception identity.