A. Intro. Urban projects: urban, urbanity.
B. Mapping as an attitude
The course Beyond Urban Projects introduces a theoretical framework for understanding and
designing urban projects in complex contemporary conditions.
Urban projects: multiple de nitions, multiple
approaches
Amsterdam 19th century
Amsterdam is used as an example of an early urban project because it responds to the limits of
the city’s nineteenth century expansion. The existing model of concentric growth and jerry
building produced unhealthy and monotonous living conditions, which made a large scale urban
intervention necessary.
Berlage’s plan for Amsterdam Zuid operates at the scale of the city rather than at the scale of
individual buildings. It combines spatial design with administrative, economic and territorial
questions such as land acquisition, density and infrastructure. Urban space is structured through
streets, avenues, squares and axes, while architecture is placed within this larger framework.
The plan integrates di erent dwelling types linked to social strata and emphasises collective life
through perimeter blocks and continuous street walls. At the same time, it balances an ordered
monumental layout with traditional Dutch architectural expression. This positions Amsterdam Zuid
as an urban project in which public space, social organisation and architecture are designed
together within a coherent long term structure.
Helsinki 19th century
In the 1910s, Helsinki faced rapid population growth, which created the need to rethink urban
development at a regional scale. Architects, municipal o cials and businessmen recognised that
the city could no longer be planned in isolated parts and needed to be understood as a single
entity.
Saarinen and his colleagues responded by developing the Munkkiniemi–Haaga plan, which
addressed areas outside the o cial city boundaries while simultaneously proposing a broader
vision for the expansion of Helsinki. The plan positioned the city as a future metropolis and framed
urban growth as a strategic, large scale project rather than a collection of individual
developments.
This example shows how urban projects operate at a territorial scale, combine architectural vision
with planning ambitions, and address the city as a coherent whole rather than as fragmented
zones.
Ljubljana Triple Bridge 1932
In the early 1930s, Plečnik developed plans for the revitalisation of Ljubljana by focusing on key
urban elements such as rivers, arterial roads, squares and bridges. These interventions addressed
the urban core and were part of a broader strategy to renew the city as a whole.
Working closely with the city’s public works department and the municipal engineer, Plečnik was
able to translate conceptual ideas into built urban interventions. His role as de facto city architect
allowed large scale improvements to be realised e ciently.
> making an urban gesture to architecture and vice versa
This example positions urban projects as coordinated interventions at the scale of the city, where
architectural vision, infrastructure and public space are combined through close collaboration with
municipal authorities.
Urban projects: urban, urbanity B. Mapping as an attitude 1 of 6
ff ffi fi ffi ffi
,Giuseppe Campos Venuti
In the context of strong political turmoil, Giuseppe Campos Venuti developed an urban reform
strategy for Bologna in the 1960s that was closely linked to the renewal agenda of the Bolognese
Communist Party. Central to this strategy was the ght against land rent, which guided decisions
on housing, infrastructure and urban development. The planning approach focused on
protecting and recovering the historic centre, strengthening the relationship with the
working class, defending the surrounding hills, and constructing new neighbourhoods close
to the centre for popular classes. These choices reorganised services and transport networks
across the city and extended planning beyond the city boundaries through inter municipal
coordination.
Campos Venuti’s work positions urban projects as politically engaged, administrative and spatial
strategies that operate at the scale of the whole city and region, combining social objectives with
infrastructural and territorial planning.
La tendenza (=trend) movement
In parallel, the Italian movement La Tendenza, led by Aldo Rossi, emerged as a critical reaction to
the burgeoning post war Modernism in Italy. Rejecting utopian and avant garde ideals, it
promoted a political and critical architecture grounded in reality and history.
Rossi tried to reconstruction architecture as a discipline and theory through a dual approach
combining urban analysis, which understands the city as a temporal and evolving structure, and
the architectural project, focused on logical and typological clarity.
Aymonino’s idea of tendency has 2 moments: the need to manifest one’s own cultural position
which is not neutral but di erentiated, and the development of discussions based on the
confrontation of these positions.
La Tendenza emerged as the most in uential Italian architectural movement after World War II and
reached its peak at the 1973 Triennale di Milano curated by Aldo Rossi. Rooted in postwar neo
rationalist political thought and in rational architecture traditions since the eighteenth century, the
movement aimed to restore typological clarity and simplicity in architecture and insisted on the
primacy of urban space.
Through journals such as Casabella and Controspazio, La Tendenza promoted the idea of
autonomous architecture and critically rejected functionalism. Rossi’s urban theories, typological
studies by Rossi and Aymonino, and Giorgio Grassi’s work on architectural logic formed the
intellectual foundation of the movement.
The theses of La Tendenza impacted pedagogical discourse in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Germany
and the United States, amongst other countries, until at least the mid-1980s. Its pedagogical
program fostered collective research on the structural constancies and close dialogue between
the architectures of the city and the building; theoretical notions of urban morphology and
building typology, ideas about analogical form and urban locus, and the analytic and ordered
approach to formal composition all characterized its methodology.
— André Loeckx
“Urban Projects raise issues that matter in the current societal system. They are real and potential.
They engage in the factual realisation of the city. They illustrate both necessity as the possibility to
work on urban space, contribute to the urban functioning and to urban policy making. They do
not need to be discovered but exploited.”
Method:
Research by design on the available space and its spatial potential in urban projects. It
complements analytical planning methods by enabling (inschakelen) practical testing, deeper
evaluation and spatial coherence.
Urban projects: urban, urbanity B. Mapping as an attitude 2 of 6
ff fl fi
, There are 7 conditions for a successful Urban Project, André Loeckx,
2002:
1. The Urban Project is innovative
2. Urban Projects realise strategic interventions with a structuring impact and triggers other
dynamics.
The interventions are sustainable.
3. Urban Projects embody highly valuated spatial planning and design
4. Urban Projects connect, weave, make nodes, add to the existing.
5. An Urban Project is participatory and so-productive
6. Public-Private partnerships guarantee e ective relaisation and qualitative added value
7. An Urban Project gets realised
Henri Lefebvre
In the early 1970s > radical hypothesis of the complete urbanisation of society.
Radical shift from the analysis of urban form > investigation of urbanisation processes.
Lefebvre’s main idea: argued in 1970s that society is becoming completely urbanised.
↓
Lefebvre says we should stop focusing mainly on urban form and instead study urbanisation as a
process.
Traditional urban studies focus on: city shapes, buildings, clear distinctions between city,
suburb and countryside
Urbanisation should be studied as an ongoing process; driven by economic, social and
political forces
Urban Theory Lab: build further on Lefebvre’s ideas how new socio spatial formations emerge
under contemporary capitalism.
Old frameworks of urbanisation doesn’t work anymore: distinctions between city, suburb
and countryside
Instead: planetary urbanisation: urbanisation as a global condition: studying how
economic, political, infrastructure and environmental systems operate together across the
world and beyond the city centres (even natural spaces)
The Urban Project, updated: working de nition:
1. You never start from scratch, there is a context to work with
2. Multi-scalar approach
3. Strategic mission/ambition: impact on surrounding context
(minimum intervention, maximum impact?): clear priorities / focus
4. Certain status of autonomy, within a bigger system
5. Adding complexity and multiple stakeholders, uses/users, complementary nature
6. Strong social, cultural and economic and political engagement with its environment
7. Making process seeks trans-disciplinarity and based on co-authorship
8. Urban refers to a condition, not a geographic location, and needs to be coined by multiple
de nitions
from a broader perspective than the original Western point of view.
9. There needs to be a context-speci c balance between emergent and planned interventions
10. Critical Sustainability: you build only what is necessary with a minimum of materials and
energy
The city as an egg
Urban projects: urban, urbanity B. Mapping as an attitude 3 of 6
fi fi ff fi
, Urban projects: urban form vs urban process
The urban project:
Urban form
Built form: materiality, container of people and activity
Open space, which is not empty
Urban process
Time factor: palimpsest
User factor: multitude of users
Societal changes
Levels of Privacy and Community change constantly
> urban can also change with the context throughout the time > f.eg Detroit
> if we only focus on urban form, we miss a lot of complexity in urban projects
What de nes urbanity? What de nes urban projects?
Complexity
Cities are places where many things happen at the same time.
Urban complexity includes:
Multiple users
Multiple uses
Overlapping activities
Di erent time rhythms
An urban project should never serve only one function or one group.
It should allow coexistence, overlap and simultaneity
Embracing Ambiguity
It does not mean unclear or vague, it means spaces are precisely designed but open to multiple
interpretations.
Urban spaces often lie between categories such as
public and private
inside and outside
formal and informal
Ambiguous spaces allow di erent forms of use and appropriation over time.
Grand gestures, top down interventions
Necessary to restructure cities
They can
reorganise infrastructure
create new spatial frameworks
trigger long term change
> BUT they risk excluding users if they are purely top down.
> Urban projects must balance strategic vision with inclusivity and participation.
The Imaginary
It also exist in imagination, culture and representation
Films, art and literature shape how cities are perceived and desired.
Urban projects are in uenced not only by reality but also by collective imagination.
The imaginary a ects
how we understand urban life
how we project futures
how cities gain symbolic meaning
Urban projects: urban, urbanity B. Mapping as an attitude 4 of 6
ff fiff fl ff fi
B. Mapping as an attitude
The course Beyond Urban Projects introduces a theoretical framework for understanding and
designing urban projects in complex contemporary conditions.
Urban projects: multiple de nitions, multiple
approaches
Amsterdam 19th century
Amsterdam is used as an example of an early urban project because it responds to the limits of
the city’s nineteenth century expansion. The existing model of concentric growth and jerry
building produced unhealthy and monotonous living conditions, which made a large scale urban
intervention necessary.
Berlage’s plan for Amsterdam Zuid operates at the scale of the city rather than at the scale of
individual buildings. It combines spatial design with administrative, economic and territorial
questions such as land acquisition, density and infrastructure. Urban space is structured through
streets, avenues, squares and axes, while architecture is placed within this larger framework.
The plan integrates di erent dwelling types linked to social strata and emphasises collective life
through perimeter blocks and continuous street walls. At the same time, it balances an ordered
monumental layout with traditional Dutch architectural expression. This positions Amsterdam Zuid
as an urban project in which public space, social organisation and architecture are designed
together within a coherent long term structure.
Helsinki 19th century
In the 1910s, Helsinki faced rapid population growth, which created the need to rethink urban
development at a regional scale. Architects, municipal o cials and businessmen recognised that
the city could no longer be planned in isolated parts and needed to be understood as a single
entity.
Saarinen and his colleagues responded by developing the Munkkiniemi–Haaga plan, which
addressed areas outside the o cial city boundaries while simultaneously proposing a broader
vision for the expansion of Helsinki. The plan positioned the city as a future metropolis and framed
urban growth as a strategic, large scale project rather than a collection of individual
developments.
This example shows how urban projects operate at a territorial scale, combine architectural vision
with planning ambitions, and address the city as a coherent whole rather than as fragmented
zones.
Ljubljana Triple Bridge 1932
In the early 1930s, Plečnik developed plans for the revitalisation of Ljubljana by focusing on key
urban elements such as rivers, arterial roads, squares and bridges. These interventions addressed
the urban core and were part of a broader strategy to renew the city as a whole.
Working closely with the city’s public works department and the municipal engineer, Plečnik was
able to translate conceptual ideas into built urban interventions. His role as de facto city architect
allowed large scale improvements to be realised e ciently.
> making an urban gesture to architecture and vice versa
This example positions urban projects as coordinated interventions at the scale of the city, where
architectural vision, infrastructure and public space are combined through close collaboration with
municipal authorities.
Urban projects: urban, urbanity B. Mapping as an attitude 1 of 6
ff ffi fi ffi ffi
,Giuseppe Campos Venuti
In the context of strong political turmoil, Giuseppe Campos Venuti developed an urban reform
strategy for Bologna in the 1960s that was closely linked to the renewal agenda of the Bolognese
Communist Party. Central to this strategy was the ght against land rent, which guided decisions
on housing, infrastructure and urban development. The planning approach focused on
protecting and recovering the historic centre, strengthening the relationship with the
working class, defending the surrounding hills, and constructing new neighbourhoods close
to the centre for popular classes. These choices reorganised services and transport networks
across the city and extended planning beyond the city boundaries through inter municipal
coordination.
Campos Venuti’s work positions urban projects as politically engaged, administrative and spatial
strategies that operate at the scale of the whole city and region, combining social objectives with
infrastructural and territorial planning.
La tendenza (=trend) movement
In parallel, the Italian movement La Tendenza, led by Aldo Rossi, emerged as a critical reaction to
the burgeoning post war Modernism in Italy. Rejecting utopian and avant garde ideals, it
promoted a political and critical architecture grounded in reality and history.
Rossi tried to reconstruction architecture as a discipline and theory through a dual approach
combining urban analysis, which understands the city as a temporal and evolving structure, and
the architectural project, focused on logical and typological clarity.
Aymonino’s idea of tendency has 2 moments: the need to manifest one’s own cultural position
which is not neutral but di erentiated, and the development of discussions based on the
confrontation of these positions.
La Tendenza emerged as the most in uential Italian architectural movement after World War II and
reached its peak at the 1973 Triennale di Milano curated by Aldo Rossi. Rooted in postwar neo
rationalist political thought and in rational architecture traditions since the eighteenth century, the
movement aimed to restore typological clarity and simplicity in architecture and insisted on the
primacy of urban space.
Through journals such as Casabella and Controspazio, La Tendenza promoted the idea of
autonomous architecture and critically rejected functionalism. Rossi’s urban theories, typological
studies by Rossi and Aymonino, and Giorgio Grassi’s work on architectural logic formed the
intellectual foundation of the movement.
The theses of La Tendenza impacted pedagogical discourse in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Germany
and the United States, amongst other countries, until at least the mid-1980s. Its pedagogical
program fostered collective research on the structural constancies and close dialogue between
the architectures of the city and the building; theoretical notions of urban morphology and
building typology, ideas about analogical form and urban locus, and the analytic and ordered
approach to formal composition all characterized its methodology.
— André Loeckx
“Urban Projects raise issues that matter in the current societal system. They are real and potential.
They engage in the factual realisation of the city. They illustrate both necessity as the possibility to
work on urban space, contribute to the urban functioning and to urban policy making. They do
not need to be discovered but exploited.”
Method:
Research by design on the available space and its spatial potential in urban projects. It
complements analytical planning methods by enabling (inschakelen) practical testing, deeper
evaluation and spatial coherence.
Urban projects: urban, urbanity B. Mapping as an attitude 2 of 6
ff fl fi
, There are 7 conditions for a successful Urban Project, André Loeckx,
2002:
1. The Urban Project is innovative
2. Urban Projects realise strategic interventions with a structuring impact and triggers other
dynamics.
The interventions are sustainable.
3. Urban Projects embody highly valuated spatial planning and design
4. Urban Projects connect, weave, make nodes, add to the existing.
5. An Urban Project is participatory and so-productive
6. Public-Private partnerships guarantee e ective relaisation and qualitative added value
7. An Urban Project gets realised
Henri Lefebvre
In the early 1970s > radical hypothesis of the complete urbanisation of society.
Radical shift from the analysis of urban form > investigation of urbanisation processes.
Lefebvre’s main idea: argued in 1970s that society is becoming completely urbanised.
↓
Lefebvre says we should stop focusing mainly on urban form and instead study urbanisation as a
process.
Traditional urban studies focus on: city shapes, buildings, clear distinctions between city,
suburb and countryside
Urbanisation should be studied as an ongoing process; driven by economic, social and
political forces
Urban Theory Lab: build further on Lefebvre’s ideas how new socio spatial formations emerge
under contemporary capitalism.
Old frameworks of urbanisation doesn’t work anymore: distinctions between city, suburb
and countryside
Instead: planetary urbanisation: urbanisation as a global condition: studying how
economic, political, infrastructure and environmental systems operate together across the
world and beyond the city centres (even natural spaces)
The Urban Project, updated: working de nition:
1. You never start from scratch, there is a context to work with
2. Multi-scalar approach
3. Strategic mission/ambition: impact on surrounding context
(minimum intervention, maximum impact?): clear priorities / focus
4. Certain status of autonomy, within a bigger system
5. Adding complexity and multiple stakeholders, uses/users, complementary nature
6. Strong social, cultural and economic and political engagement with its environment
7. Making process seeks trans-disciplinarity and based on co-authorship
8. Urban refers to a condition, not a geographic location, and needs to be coined by multiple
de nitions
from a broader perspective than the original Western point of view.
9. There needs to be a context-speci c balance between emergent and planned interventions
10. Critical Sustainability: you build only what is necessary with a minimum of materials and
energy
The city as an egg
Urban projects: urban, urbanity B. Mapping as an attitude 3 of 6
fi fi ff fi
, Urban projects: urban form vs urban process
The urban project:
Urban form
Built form: materiality, container of people and activity
Open space, which is not empty
Urban process
Time factor: palimpsest
User factor: multitude of users
Societal changes
Levels of Privacy and Community change constantly
> urban can also change with the context throughout the time > f.eg Detroit
> if we only focus on urban form, we miss a lot of complexity in urban projects
What de nes urbanity? What de nes urban projects?
Complexity
Cities are places where many things happen at the same time.
Urban complexity includes:
Multiple users
Multiple uses
Overlapping activities
Di erent time rhythms
An urban project should never serve only one function or one group.
It should allow coexistence, overlap and simultaneity
Embracing Ambiguity
It does not mean unclear or vague, it means spaces are precisely designed but open to multiple
interpretations.
Urban spaces often lie between categories such as
public and private
inside and outside
formal and informal
Ambiguous spaces allow di erent forms of use and appropriation over time.
Grand gestures, top down interventions
Necessary to restructure cities
They can
reorganise infrastructure
create new spatial frameworks
trigger long term change
> BUT they risk excluding users if they are purely top down.
> Urban projects must balance strategic vision with inclusivity and participation.
The Imaginary
It also exist in imagination, culture and representation
Films, art and literature shape how cities are perceived and desired.
Urban projects are in uenced not only by reality but also by collective imagination.
The imaginary a ects
how we understand urban life
how we project futures
how cities gain symbolic meaning
Urban projects: urban, urbanity B. Mapping as an attitude 4 of 6
ff fiff fl ff fi
