Research activity

Temporary Uses

The financial-economic crisis, that has invested the Real Estate market since 2007, has led to a radical re-thinking of the territorial transformation management tools. In particular, the Plan, in its various temporal and scalar declinations, turned out to be totally inadequate to deal with the exceptional conditions that the crisis has generated. It is not, however, the simple need to review the socio-economic values ​​of which each plan, in general terms, is a working representation, but to deeply rethink the logical structure of the Plan itself and its "Modern Legacy" still evident. The Urban Plan, in spite of the continuous adaptation process to the modified "contour conditions", has never questioned its "validity conditions". Through the so-called Salvage Regime, which protects the government instrument's previsions during its revision phase, or in the delicate "vacancy" pause that is established between adopting and approving an appropriate contemporary tool, determines a serious as implicit lien on existing real estate. In particular, we refer to those buildings which, having lost their original functional vocation and the corresponding urban role, first legitimized by the Plan and then de-legitimized by the crisis, could be lend to an integral experimentation, both in forms and behaviors. The quantitative impact of these, as a result of the persistence of the crisis itself, underlines the problem in all its implications. Vacant buildings and areas to be expecting of future improvement, which would become real workshops of new practices' experimentation, in the idea of imagining unusual patterns of city architecture, are thus deprived of the possibility of being temporarily employed for that purpose and, in fact, excluded from any form of active participation of emerging stakeholders, decided to claim a role in this experimentation process. Since 2012, Studio Performa A + U has become increasingly committed to the theme of temporary uses, which has recognized the extraordinary potential, developing all possible implications through project experiences, participation in conferences and seminars, promotion of institutional and editorial activities. This curriculum profile, obviously in progress, is briefly outlined in the following pages, in order to candidate the Studio to support the client in a possible phase of authentic experimentation on the urban field.

Download Portfolio on Temporary Uses (EN)