“The Social City”, Capannori

Masterplan for the transformation of the City of Capannori (LU)
Project: Arscape Landscape Atelier, Studio Pagni Tolaini, Giovanni Santi
Third prize

The masterplan restores the vision of a possible active future for a territory that, aware of its marginal position compared to the infrastructural networks and functional polarities of the plain of Lucca, imagines to find a new role in the local context, through the enhancement of existing resources and propensity for its rural dimension.
On a sparse, scattered and morphologically unstable urban fabric, the proposed vision prefigures four functional and social “fuses” (urban farms) that become places that activate an integrated and synergic process of territorial development.

These polarities represent the fusion areas of the physical and productive components, simultaneously linked to the urban and rural dimensions.

The system of urban farms, distributed on the edges of the urban space, generates an inevitable reactivation of the context on several levels:

• transformation of the vacant areas along the peripheral contact of the built-up area with the countryside, into multifunctional green spaces (vegetable gardens and orchards for a living, agricultural gardens, etc);
• hierarchy of routes for access and penetration into the urban environment (pedestrian areas, cycle paths, 30 km/h zones);
• restoring the main public spaces (town hall, church and station) to their original function of aggregation;
• incubation and diffusion of a new urban sociality based on the strengthening of the community ties due to the functions of the urban farms: qualified agricultural productivity linked to the territory, a training place for young people who want to approach the agricultural world, didactics based on the rural world, experimentation of new agricultural technologies in connection with university research centres, cultural and tourist events.

A microcosm working in unison as a system of interconnected gears in which each element is indispensable to the whole engine.A possible utopia of a new-ancient productive system that can repopulate the city by attracting new young residents and recompose the collaborative energy between the 40 municipalities that are part of the territory of Capannori, each with its own peculiarities and strengths.

Typology: Competition of ideas “Masterplan Capannori city, one Community Forty Countries”.

Place/Time: Capannori (Lu), 2016

State: third prize

Municipality of Capannori (Lu)

Landscape, Architecture