CosmopolitanHabitat

The current scenario on a world scale is characterized by an economic, social and cultural condition in which the intensification and the interactions of the flows of intangible goods is opposed to the materialization of borders and barriers.  Inequalities and social conflicts still makes the theme of social inclusion relevant through the demand for an accessible spatial dimension of urban welfare policies.

In this scenario we need to rethink the strategies to design and transform the city into a cosmopolitan optic. 
The cosmopolitan city is a city in which the meaning of everything is enclosed in an orderly system of relations between citizens and the spaces they live. Cosmopolis is an ideal city in which the individual parts make sense with respect to the citizens who live there, guaranteeing their fundamental rights to happiness (citing the Constitution of the United States of America).

The cosmopolitan habitat is alive and animated by elements that contribute from the outside to determine its nature as a city open to the world and from within to offer urban experiences of cosmopolitan type.

Living in a cosmopolitan city means to pursue the happiness of its inhabitants. 

A cosmopolitan city is a city steeped in a complex array of global and local forces that create new visions (and divisions), hierarchies and opportunities, tensions. The most evident relapse of the disruptive force of the tensions generated by the cosmopolitan habitat (interior and exterior, openness and identity, designed spaces and informal spaces) is in the challenge posed by the impacts that planetary-scale migrations entail on the local scale, in welcoming and generating multiple and diverse points of view.

 

The cosmopolitan habitat is characterized by a community often of global origin, with strong multicultural connotations, and an offer of city in terms of services, places and opportunities that can create an urban rank of the highest level contributing to increase and multiply positive tensions.
 

The cosmopolitan city and cosmopolitan citizenship together give life to the cosmopolitan habitat.

A cosmopolitan city is inhabited by a multicultural community open to the possibility of meeting the other and willing to face the sociality of the public space and the new places assigned to the meeting.  

Starting from these reflections, the Urban Planning Studios (Prof. Maurizio Carta, Prof. Angela Badami, Prof. Daniele Ronsivalle) investigated the cosmopolitan habitat, with the aim of designing the city of Palermo in a cosmopolitan perspective. 
The Studio addressed the theme/project of augmented City (@Maurizio Carta, 2017) as a challenge to re-imagine the city, public spaces, communities, relationships, infrastructure, services and landscapes for changing times.

The projects have produced innovative solutions for the city, creating a new balance between urban and urbanizable, reactivating abandoned, disused or declining places and spaces, and re-cycling infrastructure, landscapes and buildings that can accommodate new urban life cycles.
With the specific objective of transforming the spaces of the city into cosmopolitan places, the Studios have applied specific methods of analysis and a process approach, incremental and adaptive to the planning phase of urban regeneration. The definition of strategic objectives has been guided by the paradigms of augmented City, through the application of the Cityforming Protocol (@Maurizio Carta, 2015) for the simulation of a complex and incremental project of new urban metabolisms.