PROJECT

Urban

PJ.95

 

  • Commission.
  • Program: Housing, Commerce, Offices, Open Spaces.
  • Site: Tripoli, Lybia.
  • Surface: 19 ha.
  • Budget: 200.000.000 euros.
  • Client: NCB Lybia.
  • With: Studio Archea project-leader.
  • Chronology: 2011.
  • Preliminary, Definitive and Construction Design.

 

This project addresses the possibility of applying a globally sustainable approach to the redesign of a portion of a city. The three main facets of sustainability: environmental, economic and social, are experienced through the medium of urban design, at the metropolitan scale, at the local scale and the architectural scale of the single building, in the redevelopment project area in the Swehli district of Tripoli in Libya.

Swehli, which extends about 19 hectares, founded in the 1920’s from the plans of Italian engineer Riccardo Simonetti, and developed over nearly a century, thickening the original mesh. This site is configured as a milestone in the city of Tripoli, in terms of location, being close to Medina, as well as for the iconic value of some buildings and squares, for which it will play a key role in the overall revitalization of the Libyan capital. Re-designing this part of the city through a sustainable approach means thinking about the city itself as a complex organism, with respect to which it is possible to intervene activating virtuous processes that can feed themselves and model themselves over time in terms of macro and micro variables, environmental, social and economic, which in turn will insert themselves into the system. The relationship and interconnection between environmental, economic and social potential becomes a crucial tool in securing the application of a sustainable urban project: for every effective action in one of three areas, a potential benefit is generated in the other two, in search of an optimal condition of dynamic balance for the city, the achievement of which is possible only through incessant regenerative processes. The strategic plan that is applied assumes a time zero against which to begin to activate some crucial processes, and a series of progressive steps for the execution of new actions and the eventual adjustment of existing ones, but does not include a final deadline for completion of the process, precisely because the very nature of the concept of urban sustainability is not something that can be crystallized in an ideal condition to hold onto, but rather an expression of a series of always open, dynamic phenomena.