Re-use Architecture/ Two project proposals of commercial interfaces to promote urban regeneration in the cities of Turin and Copenhagen

The “leftover” of the industrial cities are great potential for architects and urban planners to transform and adapt to the existing environment and making the physical spaces meet the needs of the present society. Instead of spread urbanization around in an uncontrolled way just to satisfy the interest of few, and as an alternative of promoting new consumption of land, helping speculation and bad urban design, there’s a strong belief that the discipline should look more into the existing spaces which are not working anymore in a proper way due to the transformation of the society or the political and economic decision has been moved in others directions. Living in a period where the demands are in constant growth while the resources are submitted to the highest pressure that over time will not be able to surpass. The history of cities, independent from their industry, have left behind abandoned objects that are no less than potential. We sustain that part of the success in the appropriation of a place is not only set by a good articulation, but by the remark of character. These architectural objects allow us to reuse primary resources with enormous potential to regenerate a piece of the city by its means. This is the motivation of developing two parallel projects in different cities that had overcome long and still developing processes of urban regeneration since the deindustrialization process began in the 1980s. Turin and Copenhagen are both medium size, post-industrial cities that have developed contemporary plans to redevelop abandoned and disconnected areas of the city with city planning strategies around the 1990s and 1995 (The PRG and the beginning of the Copenhagen City and Port Development Corporation). With the same interest of revitalization in different socio-economic and cultural contexts, as diverse heritage and architectural traditions. Parallel developments of two pieces of the city, both of similar characteristics: large dimensions and analogous urban interactions, as both are located near the railways but well connected to the urban tissue and city center, allowed us to exploit the best of urban integration strategies through public space design that reconnects the urban fabric more cohesively, accordingly to what each context offers. Furthermore, the proposals have both the same base functional program: commerce, each mixed with complementary uses and flexible multi-use spaces, as an engine to encourage human interactions. The proposals aim to support the revitalization of the area nearby with a new commercial interface that aims to create flexible and interactive places the increase the use-value of the space while engaging the public space and the architectural features that each one of the existing buildings and their contexts offers. The project design focused not just on the disposition of spaces, but additionally in the integration between architectonic elements of the design to a flexible program. In the same way, the architectural language chosen for each of the projects seeks to define and stimulate a new sensibility towards the industrial style, looking to new strategies that conceive the industrial as an added value to the design. These by the inputs given from the architecture structural value, its history, and the architectural needs and traditions of each place.