Temporaneità

In order to deal quickly with security measures during the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, the outdoor urban spaces experienced radical and sudden transformations, often shaping up on a completely renewed way compared to the previous uses, proving that cities have an innate ability to transform with unexpected acceleration. For example, in several European cities the spaces for bicycles and pedestrians increased through rapid interventions, implemented with temporary measures such as barriers, signs, devices and pop-up ground signs. These and other interventions that were carried out with great speed have borrowed approaches, tools and languages from tactical urbanism, experiential marketing and other forms of temporary bottom-up use, that foreshadow, in addition to the possibilities to give rapid responses to the emergency, opportunities for experimentations and empirical fields of observation. The temporary uses introduced during the health emergencies significantly highlight the need to adopt understanding, mapping, programming, and management processes of outdoor spaces that can easily accommodate sudden and changing transformations, which can go beyond these emergency contexts, and involve cities in their natural continuous change, even in ordinary conditions. Hence, the operations launched through the Emilia Romagna Region Temporary Use Hub, or the ones adopted in the port areas of Imperia and Ravenna, aimed at promoting ways to reuse, recovery, enhance and transform unused, abandoned or unsafe open spaces in favor of activities and events managed by local associations, can be used as examples to identify possible roles of the involved actors and the potential for initiating such activities. Approaches that arise from bottom-up participation forms favoring the birth of urban activators in a temporary way and top-down management and planning processes, are the two extremes of a wide range of possibilities to be analyzed and systematized, with the aim of enhancing the possibilities for citizens of using outdoor urban spaces.