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OF THE CITY OF THE NEW RENAISSANCE Coming from many countries of Europe, America, and Asia, the participants to the International Conference "The City of the New Renaissance", held in Bologna Italy on March 28-29-30, 1996, at the initiative of A Vision of Europe and with the collaboration of: The Prince of Wales' School of Architecture, London The Archives d'Architecture Moderne, Brussels The Escuala Técnica Superior Architectura San Sebastian The Foundation pour l'architecture, Brussels The Institute for the Study of Classical Achitecture The University of Miami School of Architecture, Coral Gables The University of Notre-Dame School of Architecture, South Bend The Journal ARCHI & COLONNE INTERNATIONAL, Bologna have adopted the following resolution: The participants express their appriciation of the critical works that have been developed in the last years through writings, projects, built works, and didactic initiatives at universities and educational institutions by courageous colleagues in every part of the world, in favor of the recognition, preservation, and continous use of the authentic values which for more than two millenia, have characterized, at all the scales, the primary forms of residence and organized community. Consequently they want to emphasize that: 1.The present-day chaotic and uniform appearance of our urban and suburban environment is not the consequence of uncontrolled processes, but clearly the result of the ideologies that have promoted the pursuit of a "mass society," now obsolete. 2.The recent activity of many architects around the world has established a new architectonic and urbanistic culture, which rejects the anonymous peripheries and the "melancholic" suburbs of the last fifty years. In contrast, it privileges, firstly, the creation of villages, neighborhoods, cities and even metropolises, marked by new structural and formal qualities that will make them comparable to their historic counterparts, secondly, it advocates a process of "urbanization" of the suburbs which aims among others, at redimensioning streets, arterles, and squares according to traditional measurements and characteristics, while enriching them with new functions and with the structures that they are generally lacking lacking. 3. The emerging element of this new urban renaissance is the reorganization of the urban conurbations into mixed-use neighborhoods and districts to be constituted of buildings that have no more than four floors above the street ground level. 4. Through the process of land subvision into parcels of a great diversity of dimensions and functions, both at the level of the district and the block, it will be possible to develop an urban economy which shall no longer be based exclusively on industrial activities, but shall equally rely on a network of productive and merchant activities at all scales of entrepreneurship, thus including the small and medium-sized entreprises. 5. As a result, the new urban and rural architecture will no longer be defined by self-referential "innovative design", but by the imitation of the constructive, organizational, and estetic archetypes that are deeply rooted in every local culture.
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A Vision of Europe |
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