| CHARTER
OF THE CITY OF THE NEW RENAISSANCEComing from many
countries of Europe, America, and Asia, the participants to the International Conference
"The City of the New Renaissance", held in Bologna Italy on March 28-29-30,
1996, at the initiative of A Vision of Europe and with the collaboration of:
The Prince of Wales' School of Architecture, London
The Archives d'Architecture Moderne, Brussels
The Escuala Técnica Superior Architectura San Sebastian
The Foundation pour l'architecture, Brussels
The Institute for the Study of Classical Achitecture
at New York Academy of Art, New York
The University of Miami School of Architecture, Coral Gables
The University of Notre-Dame School of Architecture, South Bend
The Journal ARCHI & COLONNE INTERNATIONAL, Bologna
have adopted the following resolution:
The participants express their appriciation of the critical works that have been
developed in the last years through writings, projects, built works, and didactic
initiatives at universities and educational institutions by courageous colleagues in every
part of the world, in favor of the recognition, preservation, and continous use of the
authentic values which for more than two millenia, have characterized, at all the scales,
the primary forms of residence and organized community.
Consequently they want to emphasize that:
1.The present-day chaotic and uniform appearance of our urban and suburban environment
is not the consequence of uncontrolled processes, but clearly the result of the ideologies
that have promoted the pursuit of a "mass society," now obsolete.
2.The recent activity of many architects around the world has established a new
architectonic and urbanistic culture, which rejects the anonymous peripheries and the
"melancholic" suburbs of the last fifty years. In contrast, it privileges,
firstly, the creation of villages, neighborhoods, cities and even metropolises, marked by
new structural and formal qualities that will make them comparable to their historic
counterparts, secondly, it advocates a process of "urbanization" of the suburbs
which aims among others, at redimencioning streets, arterles, and squares according to
traditional measurements and characteristics, while enriching them with new functions and
with the structures that they are generally lacking lacking.
3. The emerging element of this new urban renaissance is the reorganization of the
urban conurbations into mixed-use neighborhoods and districts to be constituted of
buildings that have no more than four floors above the street ground level.
4. Through the process of land subvision into parcels of a great diversity of
dimensions and functions, both at the level of the district and the block, it will be
possible to develop an urban economy which shall no longer be based exclusively on
industrial activities, but shall equally rely on a network of productive and merchant
activities at all scales of entrepreneurship, thus including the small and medium-sized
enterprises.
5. As a result, the new urban and rural architecture will no longer be defined by
self-referential "innovative design", but by the imitation of the constructive,
organizational, and astetic archetypes that are deeply rooted in every local culture.
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