Redesigning suburban public spaces with the transect theory

According to a parallel between urban morphology and biology, the transect theory has borrowed a sampling technique used by zoologists to repopulate, the linear transect, a method used for the census of wildlife. An axis is traced across a given territory to sample the living species within a specific biotope. These can then be used for restocking, avoiding to introduce specimens that do not comply with the characters of each place. Applying this theory to the urban project, within the analogy between the biological world and the notion of individual building type, has been widely experimented by the New Urbanism school (Bohl, Plater-Zyberk, 2006). We have tested such a method within the city of Rome, next to the L. Quaroni Casilino 23, designing an axis between the main urban polarities, as part of the trident provided by the city plan of 1931 (Strappa ed. 2012). The iugeral grid was used to dimension the urban fabric, hence the prevalence of this measure in the surroundings. Along this axis, used as transect, building types were sampled. This experiment aims to build for each site the prevailing building type, as if it was an animal species. The axis provided a pedestrian path within the new ecomuseum “ad duas lauros” recently approved by the Sixth Municipality of Rome under the influence of local committees. Testing a method to read a suburban area of Rome, proposes a strategy to design contemporary suburbs, where the rules for their transformation are inferred from the morphological analysis. This method allows us to find within a given territory and it's inhabitants the basic information to be used for contemporary renewal.