Reti animate: una breve storia del paesaggio urbano in movimento

Pedestrian and bicycle networks are among the most relevant topics of the debate around the contemporary city. Not casually, the European Community has included them within the strategic actions of the new generation of mobility plans (SUMP). In this perspective, we observe an increasing number of ideas, solutions and infrastructures for cycle and pedestrian traffic, differing for size, complexity and typology. While roads and railways development were crucial for the beginning of urban growth during the 20th century, now we have to look at pedestrian and bicycle networks to design the city of future. In this paper we discuss current approaches in network design through five case-studies, being aware that today we are facing a new era of urban infrastructure based on the idea of going slower and closer. While the main purpose of an infrastructure is to connect two places, the reason why we move from one point to another varies according to time and space. This shift in reasons mirrors the evolution of the architecture of networks, and the consequent reformulation of the urban experience. On the one hand, this paper demonstrates how transformations across the 20th century were inspired by a constant search for speed, more precisely, the speed of light, on the other, it questions why, in the last decades, transformations have turned to an opposite aim. The 20th century starts with the capture of light in the first photographic experiments, and it ends with the fiber optic used in households and satellite communications covering all over the world. Railways and highways, but also the aerospace, redesign the experience of landscape until the virtualization occurred with the entrance of the “infosphere”. With the migration of the economy from a classical to a financial and digital model, our lifestyle has completely changed, bringing us into a new dimension where Time and Space tend to match and overlap. Until today, indeed, networks’ design was an organizational exercise to satisfy our primary needs. Now designing networks means to manage the complexity of individual wishes. The High Line in New York is perhaps the most famous redevelopment project for a disused railway line. In 2014, the administration of Chicago transformed an abandoned railroad into a pedestrian and cycle path. In the early 2000s, Atlanta’s administrators forecasted a cycle and pedestrian ring joining several disused places to connect 45 peripheral areas. In 2016, the Barcelona administration decided to link two neighborhoods by embedding a railroad into a new building with a pedestrian garden roof. In 2017, MVRDV designed a network of pedestrian aerials walkways instead of an urban bypass in Seoul. In 2007, the studio GAP designed a cycle path for a total length of 7 kilometers in Lisbon, while In Situ reused the line along the Rhone, in Lyon, with a cycle path that is meant to become the backbone of a new system of public spaces. Taken all together, all these projects work in contrast to a traditional figure-ground approach. Their aim is to create a new active layer representing an additional chance of life for the city of the future. With the transition from physical to digital networks, the experience of the city has to be reinvented. Cycle and pedestrian paths emerge as infrastructures to define a new way of living both locally and geographically, recovering the physical dimension of the urban living.