Alternative Futures: Envisioning Bolzano, Italy

When we talk about cities, the first thing that pops up in our minds is functional concrete blocks with vehicle-demarcating urban zoning. As humans yearn to be in nature, we could have other choices where citizens and trees demarcate city zoning instead of vehicles, a city that could be beautiful, natural, and sustainable, an alternative to the current polluted, noisy, exclusive, and alienating cities. Many urban dwellers have attempted to make a living in dominant global multicultural, fractured, cosmopolitan, and highly varied environments over the past century, where difference, not homogeneity, is the rule. Yet, mainstream urban planning problematizes the city's increasing heterogeneity and the tensions and conflicts that come with it in an effort to control the urban wilderness through policies and plans. According to this perspective, today's metropolis is "divided," "unsafe," and made up of "the underclass" and "the poor".1 However, many writers, urbanist, and philosophers, talked about the importance of changing the nature of how we approach cities by integrating nature into our urban fabric, and how this could be of a benefit to our ecology, biodiversity, and our personal well-being. Some theorists approached these ideas from a sociological perspective like Lefebvre and the notion of space production. Others approached the concept in a form of a science fiction, like the Canadian novelist Margret Atwood in her 2009 novel “The Year of the Flood”, where it is set in a post-apocalyptic world where most of humanity has been wiped out by a pandemic. The remaining survivors live in a self-sustaining, ecological community called God's Gardeners, who prioritize living in harmony with the natural world. The novel explores themes of environmentalism, genetic engineering, and the relationship between humans and other species.2 This paper looks into alternatives of how we could approach our cities from a speculative design perspective before hindering into policies. In specific, this paper looks at Bolzano-Bozen in Italy and what are the other alternatives that we could have in some specific neighbourhoods. Our research focuses on developing a visual narrative of city streets where citizens gain back their cities by endorsing healthy public spaces and by showing how streets could be safer for all. For this research, we used collages, AI aided technologies, and renderings to imagine a different outcome for our city streets. Moreover, we collect and highlight the main ideas into approach a sustainable eco social utopia collected form wide range of academics and writers.

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