Urban Refugee Integration in Rome of Prof. Hajo Neis Summer Program 2019

In spite of these strict rules, and my partial approval of these
rules, the first exercise in our Design Studio was to determine
how many of the prison buildings we wanted to take down in
order to make enough space for the design of a new inclusive
urban neighborhood. Although, as pointed out, you cannot take
down any building without approval by the city, the argument
that I used in this case goes as follows: An outdated prison in
terms of spatial and social development, may as well be placed
and relocated outside of the Aurelian Walls to make place for
more effective and rich functions and spaces in this very valuable
piece of earth. Prisoners who can neither enjoy the beautiful
environment nor can they enjoy modern progressive prison
development and appropriate design at this location, may as
well be provided with a progressive modern social program at
a much better location and new buildings outside of the'Centro
Storico' (What would Pope Frances think of this argument? He
also loves prisoners and at one public meeting kissed prisoners'
feet inside the Regina Coeli Prison) For historic preferences
we also kept two major prison buildings, only modernizing the
interiors of the buildings and keeping the prison museum in
one of the buildings. One of these two is the mysterious yellow
building.
Before we continue with focus on the design process, we
need to try to understand better what we mean by an inclusive
urban neighborhood, and what we mean by an inclusive urban
neighborhood with 25% to 30% refugee inhabitants. In its best
form an inclusive urban neighborhood with refugees may be
described as the refugees being integrated and do not have to
listen to the word refugee anymore. The process that leads to
such a desirable state then is the focus of our attention:
In order to make progress on the question of the character
of the new neighborhood, it is worthwhile to mention that the
first idea of 'refugee housing in the eternal city' was superseded
by the idea of an inclusive mixed-use urban area that also
serves the refugee population. This was partially done because
of the large size and potential of our site, and also because
of better use of our site in a rather attractive location. While
a housing area can be developed by one developer and one
architecture office with similar designs (we tested one example
based on the San Saba housing complex in Rome), a mixeduse
urban area by character should include a range of different
buildings designed by different architects to create what we may
call variety in unity as we know from many mixed-use urban
areas world-wide, including the mixed-use areas that we see
in Rome such as in the area around Campo de Fiori or Piazza
Cinque Scole. Rather than having one person or one company
design the full urban neighborhood geometry and then develop
one building in more detail architecturally, it seemed more effective
to let the urban structure be designed by the whole
group with 12 architecture student and one urban design and
architectural curator in a communal and dynamic fashion. And
while the pattern language approach would provide such a
process, it seemed more appropriate in this case to apply first
the urban growth method described in A New Theory of Urban
Design ANTUD supported by patterns and pattern language.
A. Regular integrated neighborhood
B. Regular inclusive neighborhood
C. Inclusive neighborhood with refugees
D. Refugee neighborhood
"Gather Round". Photo by Adam Abu-Sukheila