Urban Planning & Regeneration in Emerging Countries
Many studies highlight that there is a strong connection between human behaviour and the city areas where people live. It clearly emerged that stuffing human beings into degraded areas resulted in the creation of slums, turning its inhabitants into pariah, and in some cases fomenting diverting behaviours.
Also in the so-called Emerging Countries, it is in cities where crime and violence turned into a major problem. That is not surprising at all, considering many people had to abandon villages and small towns embedded in deeply natural environment for seen themselves dramatically secluded into slums or alienating ghettos made of concrete. The latter were built following the principles of the modernist architecture: inherently based on an engineered atomization of cities, subdivided according functions and social classes as well, those interventions gave birth to a sort of “urban apartheid”. The proposed “solution” worldwide is the creation of other kind of ghettos, this time for well-to-do people: the closed neighbourhoods. A strategy that does not solve anything, but merely put the problem aside, while enhancing social exclusion and social conflicts.
At S.I.D. Consulting we believe that those problems arise not just as an obvious consequence of a high concentration of human beings, but as an unavoidable people’s reaction to a disturbing urban environment. Our solution is radical: we want to get rid of a major “troublemaker”. Following an anthropocentric approach and the “Demolish & Rebuild” strategy, S.I.D. Consulting aim at replacing slums and suburbia with high quality and self-sufficient human-scale villages, built within the core of a city or very close to it, being, in any case, well integrated in the rest of the city. In such a way a problematic neighbourhood would turn into a resource for the whole city, both in a socio-economic way and as a "transition" model, also in terms of climatic change resilience and adaptability.
Our strategy is valid both for social housing and residential areas.
Having a sociological and economic focus, we take advantage of the teachings of traditional urbanism, because such a model proved to be an effective answer – if not for eradicating problems – for dramatically improving people's life quality.
Also in the so-called Emerging Countries, it is in cities where crime and violence turned into a major problem. That is not surprising at all, considering many people had to abandon villages and small towns embedded in deeply natural environment for seen themselves dramatically secluded into slums or alienating ghettos made of concrete. The latter were built following the principles of the modernist architecture: inherently based on an engineered atomization of cities, subdivided according functions and social classes as well, those interventions gave birth to a sort of “urban apartheid”. The proposed “solution” worldwide is the creation of other kind of ghettos, this time for well-to-do people: the closed neighbourhoods. A strategy that does not solve anything, but merely put the problem aside, while enhancing social exclusion and social conflicts.
At S.I.D. Consulting we believe that those problems arise not just as an obvious consequence of a high concentration of human beings, but as an unavoidable people’s reaction to a disturbing urban environment. Our solution is radical: we want to get rid of a major “troublemaker”. Following an anthropocentric approach and the “Demolish & Rebuild” strategy, S.I.D. Consulting aim at replacing slums and suburbia with high quality and self-sufficient human-scale villages, built within the core of a city or very close to it, being, in any case, well integrated in the rest of the city. In such a way a problematic neighbourhood would turn into a resource for the whole city, both in a socio-economic way and as a "transition" model, also in terms of climatic change resilience and adaptability.
Our strategy is valid both for social housing and residential areas.
Having a sociological and economic focus, we take advantage of the teachings of traditional urbanism, because such a model proved to be an effective answer – if not for eradicating problems – for dramatically improving people's life quality.