COURSE : Field Research and Documentation_Cultural Resources of Urban Environment(II) / PNU

CAMPUS_Asia Plus::SUAE_Asia Program is an intensive international academic exchange program between universities in Asia as the platform for dual degrees between the Architecture Department of Kyushu University(KYU), Tongji University(TJU), and Pusan National University (PNU). This collaboration aims to enhance the education of urban and architectural environments by developing knowledge and skill to achieve sustainable cities and buildings in Asia. The program is also a Korea UNESCO ESD (Education for Sustainable Development)'s Official Project assigned by the Korean National Commission of UNESCO. CAMPUS_Asia Plus::SUAE_Asia Program currently extends the platform covering Asian countries, focusing on present urban and architectural issues and enlarging educational opportunities to promote resiliency and sustainability in architectural design. It also promotes accessibility and inclusive urban design and development, which are being ardently addressed in UNESCO events, outcomes, and publications. The world demands greater cooperation and diversity. Therefore, society, cities, and people need to be adequately responsive to the direction of how the world is moving. Through a wide range of activities, such as Summer and winter school design workshops, CAMPUS_Asia Plus::SUAE_Asia Program promotes opportunities for exploring adequately responsive alternatives to the existing urban and architectural environment through cooperative cooperation between students from various countries.

[Topic of 2023 Summer Workshop]

Valledolmo Paradise 2030 Living the transition in Small Towns in Sicily

The urban framework of reference for an intervention capable of determining new social, energy and ecological balances is increasingly the neighbourhood: a complex urban organism that is still undergoing great phases of change in strong relation to the community and the development of renewable sources.
The definition of Social Housing Community1 refers to those innovative urban projects aimed at improving and enhancing the existing material and cultural heritage that, together with the public space, contribute to the definition of new ways of living in relation to ecological and energy transition issues. The programme of the Social Housing Community in Valledolmo also includes the design of open space for commercial and recreational activities, with the objective of establishing real communities of residents and transient inhabitants.
The programme aims to develop a concrete experience on the possible ways of living starting from a framework of national and international references in order to define a specific methodology on the strategies to be experimented on the issue of temporary residence in Small towns in Sicily. The issue of housing has returned to the forefront of the disciplinary debate after the Covid health emergency; in this sphere, research is directed towards more shared, versatile, and adaptable forms of urbanisation oriented towards a rational use of land and resources, where the inhabitant component is central. Thus, collective residence thus returns to redefining the built environment, relating to the stratified urban fabric and its territory.

The living experience, outside an exclusively individual dimension, promotes a collaborative, solidarity-based, sustainable approach, in order to support social and innovative activities and projects in harmony with the economic and human potential of the territory. It is within this framework that the programme for the transformation of a part of the urban fabric of the Roccafanara district in Valledolmo fits with a project that attempts to respond to the specific issues of the abandonment of Small towns within the Trasversale sicula(Fig. 1) and the renewed environmental and energy issues on a local (Fig. 2) and territorial scale. The launch of new virtuous dynamics with extensive recourse to recycling practices and the production of integrated energy sources (solar, wind and biomass) contribute to defining the priority objectives of the Social Housing Community project in Valledolmo (Fig. 3) as an experimental laboratory for Small towns in Sicily.In a phase of severe energy crisis, aggravated furthermore by the recent wars on Europe's doorstep, national and community policies are increasingly committed to reprogramming the general and local framework of energy supply and to redirecting the intensive development of renewable sources from collective and individual housing. Here, the Energy Community is undoubtedly the legal entity that can provide these social, environmental, energy and economic benefits. The system whereby those who are able to produce, consume and share energy produced from fully renewable sources become producers of monetisable goods, define with the term prosumers, indicates in the same Energy Community the consumer and the producer of goods.
In a recent conference organised by Urbanpromo on the theme of renewable Energy Communities it was pointed out that in Italy there is no shortage of good practices, often experimented precisely in the territories of Small towns. The common goal is to “[...] get to the scale of neighbourhoods and provide the basis and prerequisites for innovative urban design projects, including the participation of the population in order to prevent conflicts”. We are facing a paradigm shift, from spectators the inhabitants can become protagonists of the new ways of living; the energy consumed and produced by individuals can in fact be shared with the Energy Community of reference that are the territorial renewable Energy Communities.
Municipal administrations can thus embark on a virtuous path in this direction, pursuing the collective interest even irrespective of public incentives, with a Social Housing Community programme that envisages the welding of passive systems of low-energy technologies, the exploitation of renewable energy sources, and the recycling of urban waste for biogas2 production.
The priority objective of the programme is to address to social, spatial and energy mixitè, the redevelopment of the Roccafanara district, with the reconfiguration of the existing blocks, many of them now in a state of disrepair, and with the redesigning of public space for pedestrian use.

The study area of the Roccafanara district comprises five existing blocks, in a semi-detached condition and in an obvious state of urban and architectural decay, located along the northern edge of the Fiumara Valley (Fig. 5) and a large open space for new business and community activities to host temporary events (Fig. 6).
In this marginal neighbourhood it is indeed possible to experience the opportunity of ‘good Movida’, a theme dear to Mayor Angelo Conti, in opposition to ‘bad Movida’ as a mass phenomenon that often creates conflict in built-up areas, if left to the free use of public space by users. The ‘good Movida’ recalls the themes of relationality, quality of life, enjoyment of historic centres, the creative force of urban space before the economic ones of income and work production. A significant, transversal component of the vitality of being together, of conviviality, of the desire to live one's relationships and free time, the Movida "is considered as an extraordinary opportunity for communities and cities because it is essential in creating contexts in which the demand for relationships, which is the true vector of the good quality of life, can be met, as well as the flywheel for an attractive, strong, engaging brand"3. A positive phenomenon of the revitalisation of the city and public space, the Movida can in fact be an opportunity to revive and increase the presence of new inhabitants, albeit temporary, attracted by the desire to eat healthy and well in a convivial and respectful atmosphere that can find an offer of minimum spaces adequate to welcome, for short and long periods, temporary inhabitants, such as: young people returning, migrant families, self-sufficient elderly people, travellers passing through.
The theme of minimal space has interested modern designers in their experiments on housing since the 1920s; recently the theme of the ‘flexible house’ has become one of the central topics of contemporary debate. Flexibility of housing space and temporality of use as a function of an increasingly dynamic permanence are the characteristics of temporary living that the Social Housing Community programme intends to address with concrete proposals that can become possible answers to the theme of depopulation and curbing the flight of young people from Small towns.
The new housing requirements therefore highlight the need to confront the spaces of living, with low land consumption, in relation to the characteristics of the city and the landscape in order to restore to the spaces of collective life the tensions of contemporary research, such as: flexibility, the sharing of spaces and their subsequent transformation. If, as Paul Virilio writes in his book Lo spazio critico (1988) “architecture is a measuring instrument, a sum of knowledge capable of organising the time and space of societies”4, the operation of transforming a place must at the outset involve its measurement through redesigning as a learning system for understanding what can be changed. The redesigning of the urban fabric, of the road layouts, of the open spaces, is thus confronted with certain pre-eminent characteristics of the urban fabric, combining with the settlement patterns of the place and with the response to future forms of living.
The Social Housing Community programme thus intends to redefine and increase the depth of Valledolmo's northern edge overlooking the Fiumara Valley and to build in the built-up area through operations of reuse and transformation of the existing urban fabric in clear discontinuity with the recent uncontrolled urban growth, a phenomenon that has affected much of the Sicilian territory in recent decades.

Organization

CAMPUS_Asia::SUAE_Asia Program, Pusan National University (South-Korea)
Palermo University- Architecture’s Department
LabCity Architecture Research Group (DARCH-UNIPA)
Municipality of Valledolmo (PA), Sicily - Mayor Angelo Conti

Director

Prof. Renzo Lecardane, University of Palermo (Italy)
Prof. Inhee Lee, Pusan National University (South-Korea)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Prof. Renzo Lecardane, University of Palermo (Italy) Prof. Zeila Tesoriere, University of Palermo (Italy)
Prof. Mladen Jadric, Vienna University of Technology (Austria)
Prof. Daekwon Park, Syracuse University (USA)
Prof. Li Zhang, Tongji University (China) Prof. Divigalpitiya Prasanna, Kyushu University (Japan)
Prof. Inhee Lee, Pusan National University (South-Korea)
Prof. Shinkoo Woo, Pusan National University (South-Korea) Prof. Jaewoo Yoo, Pusan National University (South-Korea)
Prof. Changbae Park, Pusan National University (South-Korea) Prof. Jaehoon Chung, Pusan National University (South-Korea)
Prof. Keojin Jin, Pusan National University (South-Korea)

SCIENTIFIC SECRETARIAT/ University of Palermo

Arch. Bianca Andaloro (PhD University of Palermo)
Arch. Paola La Scala (PhD University of Palermo)

SCIENTIFIC SECRETARIAT Pusan National University

Prof. Yoonjeong Kim, Pusan National University (South-Korea)
Ms. Yeongin Lee, Pusan National University (South-Korea)

SPONSORSHIPS, COLLABORATIONS AND BUDGETS

CAMPUS Asia Plus Summer School & International Workshop envisages the possibility of receiving sponsorship from public and private entities in order to obtain grants and/or services to support the activities that will take place in the on-line and in-presence modes. The sponsorship of Public Bodies or Institutions will be accompanied by the use of the logo once granted, in the form of a fee, without prejudice, however, to the possibility of the free form. The Pusan National University, Korea will provide for a budget to be set aside for the trips (Palermo<->Valledolmo) of teachers and students from foreign universities. The Municipality of Valledolmo is willing to host, with board and lodging, the participants in the Workshop in Valledolmo on the dates from 11 to 17 September 2023. The educational trip Grand Tour Sicilia open to all participants of the Workshop, is organised by LabCity Architecture (DARCH-UNIPA) with the collaboration of cultural Associations active in the Sicilian territory with a budget to be defined.