Urban Interior Design

"The suburbs are the big project and the challenge of the coming decades. They are the city that will be. "(R. Piano). When Renzo Piano speaks of the need to "resew" the peripheries, he refers first to those situations to be cured, to places where there are urban fractures but also social and relational fractures. These wounds are often deep and lasting and can be attributed to misplacements of urban planning or to building speculations. But there are also superficial fractures, for example in the presence of large yards over a period of some years, capable of modifying the setting of an urban context and its social and life features.

There are many possible actors and levels of intervention, but certainly an important role can be played by the design of urban interiors, the ability of design to read the behaviours and attitudes of people in space and thus to intercept their needs, its ability to intervene with a project at a small dimensional scale (human, we could say) rather than territorial, and its ability to trigger new setups and new narratives that re-activate and enhance the potential of the sites. Students from the POLI.design Specializing Master in Urban Interior Design experienced it on a suburb in the outskirts of Milan.

A neighbourhood and its main road are seriously interrupted by the construction site for the metro line: project proposals have tried to develop solutions to setup the yard as a temporary set, working on separation devices between work areas and urban spaces so to make them friendly and communicative, expanding them towards the courtyards of buildings, which were put in connection with each other and returning green to public enjoyment, redesigning ground patterns and imagining temporary furniture for collective functions. Interventions of transformation at a temporary scale are able to regenerate places that for a period of time are living with physical fatigue fractures. The POLI.design Specializing Master in Urban Interior Design, joint programme of the Politecnico di Milano and Universidad CEU San Pablo in Madrid, also works on these border issues to prepare professionals in the field of urban interior design and reactivation of urban sites. The 4th edition of the Masters will start in October 2017.

Further information: www.polidesign.net/en/urbaninteriordesign