No more Masterplan: the Cityforming Protocol

Abstract

In Europe, the season of urban regeneration has produced important effects both in the review of the urban devices and in the rethinking of the settlement forms and their spatial and human relations. But it cannot be denied that certain diseases emerged which often have anaesthetised – if not cancelled – the regenerative effects envisaged. The urban transition, while it has increased the use of regeneration processes from the bottom, has at the same time extended the epidemic of failures derived from a top-down approach. The critical issues of hierarchical urban regeneration cannot be solved by revising the procedures for participation, improving design devices, or innovating implementation processes, but by overturning the view. For the regeneration of urban areas characterised by marginalisation and decline, by the disposal of buildings and infrastructure, and by the functional underuse or weak reactivation cycles (mobility, water, waste), we need a real and effective process that must take an approach that not only refuses the traditional and ineffective top-down strategy, but that will not yield to the, rhetorical and superficially comforting, tactical bottom-up.