International Workshop Green Engines
04.07.2010 - 10.07.2010
Universidade da beira Interior, Architectural and Engineering Department, Calcada Fonte do Lameiro, 6200/001 Covilha, Portugal
The rural area of study, in the valley, between the river Zezere and the railway, has the potentiality to become a transition prototype towards a new sustainable and ecological rural urban model of growth. How to create a new sustainable productive landscape taking advantage of the potentialities of this economical transformative power that the city has? In this new vision it is necessary to bet for the experimentation for alternative rural/urban cultures. Agriculture is modernizing and becoming more technological, but at the same time agriculture is part of the cultural heritage and identity of this territory. A new prototype of sustainable growth aims for a multifunctional landscape with the integration of new housing areas, education, facilities, industry, culture, leisure, heritage, the natural and the rural environment. The student groups will work taking in account four different themes inside the planning strategy: economy, society, culture and the environment. The students will be introduced to the methodology of work of Landscape Urbanism.
Inside an interdisciplinary approach, the students have to learn to develop a design proposal that is not a predictable form but an alternative future based on a planning strategy that takes into account flexible dynamics, scenario thinking, and processes in time that relate with changes and readaptation. In the practice of landscape urbanism, the area of study is a strategic platform, with an operational logic, speaking about tactics and how those actions produce changes in the space over time. The students will move through different scales of work simultaneously. We will also insist in the phenomenological qualities of the space that is experienced and perceived, looking at emotions, memories, and identity. The workshop is divided into analysis, strategy, tactics, actions, and evaluation. The analysis searches for the potentials, qualities and problems of the site. The strategy takes into account how the landscape operates now and which parts of it should change in order to arrive to the sustainable model we aim. Different tactics of approach are studied, which involve the middle scale in planning. The groups will choose a specific area inside their strategic planning in order to develop different design actions. It involves the small scale, and the detail of urban, architectural and landscape design.
The students will be divided in multidisciplinary groups. The workshop combines the practical work with daily conferences by experts in town planning, tourism, ecology, geography, landscape, rural development and heritage. The conferences will be open to the general public and will reflect and enlarge the topics developed in the workshop. Guest experts will evaluate the results.
Those students coming with Erasmus must contact their University coordinators.
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July 2010
