Walking like needles in the city. Sewing new activities

If we assume the idea of a city like a giant tissue, we’ll see how the threads won’t be equally disposed into the weft. Some parts – historical centre, financial district, main streets – will be denser, fuller and richly embroidered with lights, activities and pedestrians. Pedestrians are the needles of this giant tissue. More activities in a zone of tissue, more pedestrians; more pedestrians, more relevance for the zone in the urban area. Also, some parts of a city are usually frayed, untied, or, in the worst cases, drilled. Considering pedestrians as needles, we propose a system of new urban functions and assets for them; a system that takes inspiration from Maria Lai’s1 work and vision. We suggest a group of activities widespread in the urban area connected to each other with a grid of parks, public spaces, walking streets and public transport, thought as a common system, where pedestrians are the protagonists, sewing day by day their lives into the urban weft. In the proposed system human figure and his immediate movements, as walk and run, will be basic measures to reach activities and functions. New proposed urban functions will be thought as renewing threads into the weaving, according to the character of different city’s parts, mending voids and rips into the tissue. So, expected result will be a new type of city, not equal in its parts like a real tissue, but enriched and diversified with different needlecraft interrelated into each other, as a plural and common system. In the lecture will be presented a method, the method of ‘urban loom’, to think and design this walking system, in order to propose guidelines for a wellbeing and human scale city, as a beautiful and well-made tissue.