Portale di Ateneo - En.Unibs.it

After a brief introduction dedicated to the characteristics of urban sociology, the course will be divided into three parts.

The first part will examine the characteristics of contemporary Italian and European city.
This goal requires a reconstruction of urban forms that have occurred in European history: the contemporary city is affected by the stratification of the previous organizational forms. In this perspective, some historical models of cities will be presented, underlining the relationships between society and forms of settlements. Particularly, we will analyze:the pre-Roman city, the Roman city, the Medieval city, the Renaissance City, the Industrial city, the Fordist city.
Finally, we will focus on the continuity / novelty of the contemporary city. We will analyze its morphological, economic, political and social features, focusing on the government’s form (with the shift from government to governance) and urban policies (The “urban renewal projects on a large scale” and the “integrated policies”).

The second part of the course will be dedicated to the analysis of peripheral neighborhoods (suburbs). By studying the Italian most pronounced cases ( Scampia in Naples , Zen in Palermo , Librino in Catania, Barriera Milano in Turin , etc. . ) we will analyze their characteristics and the factors that favor their development.
The last part of the course will cover the methods of the social sciences for a more efficient design, able to correctly address the relationship between the built space and its actual users.
We will present useful techniques to increase both the ex-ante (territorial surveys) and the ex-post knowledge(the analysis of the evidence of use of the space and the techniques of ex-post evaluation) of the architect /engineer .