In 2020, despite everything, Torino Stratosferica returns to the Centrale Nuvola Lavazza for the fourth edition of Utopian Hours (Oct. 23-25). In such a complex year, the festival needs to update its way of addressing the public and chooses to offer itself as an in-person & live streaming event, an event that is nonetheless physical, to be attended in person in compliance with the rules, but that for the first time offers live streaming of its meetings.
Utopian Hours confirms itself as the annual reference for all city lovers and, thanks to the new formula, opens up to an increasingly international audience. There will be more than 800 participants at Centrale Nuvola Lavazza, while live streams will exceed 1,600 remote connections, with viewers from all over the world.
The theme of Utopian Hours 2020. Further novelty, the festival of cities proposes an overarching theme for the first time. The city is in danger, reflects Torino Stratosferica: the very idea of the city can no longer be taken for granted, its identity and raison d’être are deeply questioned. The City At Stake is the title that launches the fourth edition of the festival.
Why this reflection? For two decades, a series of dramatic events have been undermining the very concept of the city: terrorism, financial crisis, environmental and biological crisis. And in 2020, dramatically, the pandemic. After a century and a half of accusation and criticism, the city had been reevaluated as the primary place of our evolution, the ideal “insurance” against the great disasters of the twentieth century. Today it is on the plate, poised, contested between different interests. The glorious city, the free city, the exalting city, the city carried in the palm of our hands by the young and urbanites, the tolerant talents and social innovators, the city as a solution to global issues, the city in short that we all love and dream of improving, is at a crossroads. What will become of the city if the very essence of the city is at risk?
The festival seeks to answer this and other fundamental questions, with its usual open, multidisciplinary, provocative, passionate formula. With its references to the great urban visionaries of the past, and with first-rate international guests to help us understand the meaning of the near future.
Friday 23rd October.
Utopian Hours 2020 restarts from city imaging, with a workshop open to the public in which to create new visions for the city together. The location, Villa Charbonnier, is particularly inspiring: in the 18th-century villa on the hill of Moncalieri, the Torino Stratosferica team led the 30 participants in a lively workshop, from which emerged provocative ideas, bold insights and utopian scenarios for a Torino at its best.
The doors of the Centrale Nuvola Lavazza opened in the afternoon with a reflection on the Future Urban Trends of 2020, ten emerging phenomena related to ways of living and perceiving cities (consumption, mobility, technology, culture), the result of the research activity on urban development that the association has been carrying out over the years. We discuss them with Nolan Giles, design editor of Monocle magazine, on the Centrale Nuvola Lavazza’s stage, and a series of international guests, each linked to a trend under discussion. Joining us are Aaron Bolzle of Tulsa Remote, a U.S. city with an ambitious citizen recruitment program; Igor Moiseev of Standard, which is among the digital companies moving toward an idea of contactless retail; designer Jip van Leeuwenstein, creator of a mask capable of inhibiting facial recognition systems (surveillance avoidance); and finally Agnese Riccetti and Francesco Marchet of Connected Catapult Places, with whom we discuss new means of civic gamification.
The next meeting is devoted to the topic of Utopian Hours. Word to two Italian experts: Maurizio Carta and Davide Ponzini question the idea of a city at risk and how urbanism can respond to the crisis of cities. On the one hand, the responsibilities of the current international architecture, on the other hand, the proposal of new solutions and approaches to return to imagine, act and make a paradigm shift to face the present and future challenges.
Before moving on to the institutional panel, the program grants a space to Precollinear Park, the first placemaking intervention by Torino Stratosferica, which affects an unused green strip along the route of a suspended tramline and transforms it into a linear park open to neighborhood life. The festival dedicates part of the installations at the Centrale to the project: a short story in which to retrace the evolution of the park, from the initial idea and the first interventions in Piazza Hermada, to the arrival of street furniture in Corso Gabetti and the “conquest” of the bridge.
This was followed by a panel bringing together the festival’s main sponsors and partners, with Alberto Anfossi of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Luca Angelantoni of Fondazione CRT, Guido Bolatto of Camera di Commercio and Gian Carlo Magnoli Bocchi of Edison. Together with them, Torino Stratosferica discusses its ten proposals for the city included in the exhibition A Menu for Torino: ten actions, as visionary, and provocative, as they are achievable, on the major issues that the association has always felt most urgent, from a new waterfront on the river Po to a gathering place on the hills, from the regeneration of parks to a truly polycentric city.
The first international guest of the evening is Karen Rosenkranz from the Netherlands, author of City Quitters (Frame), among the first books to study the phenomenon of city flight by the creative industry and to bring city quitting among the new expressions of these times. With testimonies and images from multiple countries, City Quitters shows the possibility of pursuing a contemporary, dynamic and creative lifestyle away from the pressures of cities. Rosenkranz’s talk traces some of these stories to help us understand how much and why the “call of the countryside” is so strong in the world.
Closing the first day of the festival is the headliner of the 2020 program: Richard Florida, the most influential urban scholar of recent decades, virtually joins the Centrale Nuvola Lavazza from Toronto to share his perspective on today’s urban challenges. For Richard Florida, the pandemic will not spell the end of the city, but it will abruptly accelerate change: centers with a younger population, with fewer offices and more homes, thus likely to be more accessible and creative. Florida’s message was clear: more equitable development is not an opportunity, “it’s an obligation.” With this exhortation to conscious change, the first, intense day of the festival closed.
Saturday 24th October.
The second day of Utopian Hours begins with a workshop outside the Centrale. Carles Baiges of the Lacol collective (Barcelona), leads a workshop dedicated to co-housing and housing experimentation. An opportunity to learn how to design, together and in a convivial way, the possible shared spaces of a collective residence. The workshop was curated by Silvia Cafora of Homers.
The doors of the Centrale meanwhile open to China. The guest speaker is Juan Du, an architect based in Hong Kong, who presents the Italian premiere of The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City. A fascinating account of the urbanization process that led Shenzhen, a small village in southern China, to become one of the country’s most populous megacities. Juan Du’s talk is an ideal opportunity to give space to China Goes Urban. The New Age of the City, an exhibition at the Museum of Oriental Art dedicated to the theme of urban transformations in China: a project of Politecnico di Torino and Prospekt Photographers, with Tsinghua University in Beijing, narrated at the festival by architect Michele Bonino.
The next talk is a journey through the sounds and faces of five emerging metropolises in Asia, South America and Africa. Dutch author Stephanie Bakker‘s Future Cities reportage takes us on a discovery of Addis Ababa, Kinshasa, Medellín and Lima, revealing the ambitions and talents that animate the creative and cultural realities of these cities. A compelling constructive storytelling project to reveal the virtuous side of what could be the cities of the future.
The afternoon of the second day opens with a multi-voice discussion moderated by Greg Lindsay, director of NewCities, a Canadian nonprofit dedicated to tomorrow’s cities. Together with him, Gabriella Gomez-Mont (Mexico City), Júlia Miralles de Imperial (Barcelona) and designer Thomas Ermacora (London) discuss urban well-being and how to organize our cities more justly, putting health and movement at the center to ensure that people have a greater sense of freedom.
After the first workshop in the morning, the program includes a second workshop dedicated to shared living, again curated by Silvia Cafora of Homers, in this case with the participation of James Binning, a member of the architects, planners and designers collective Assemble (London). Participants worked on-site, in one of Homers’ active construction sites, designing tools of hospitality and moments of sociability through design.
Also returning in this special edition are the Visiting Urban Explorers. The first to introduce himself is Luìs Aniceto, a Portuguese photographer: an unconventional “VUE” who knows the city well. Aniceto moved to Turin close to the first lockdown and immediately became particularly interested in the suburbs. Through his images he chronicles the city’s marginal and lesser-known neighborhoods, revealing the full potential of these “minor” places. In his video interview he proposes a reflection for the Trincerone that cuts through Barriera di Milano: a moat between houses, reclaimed by nature, that has been waiting for new use for a long time.
Utopian Hours 2020 also touches on the issue of gender balance, integrating it into the debate on city making. Featuring Leslie Kern, author of Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World, the festival addresses inequality in the experiences women and men have in living a space designed and made from a masculine perspective. The talk, among the most anticipated of this edition, is a call to build more inclusive and equitable cities. How? By starting from bodies, from the interaction between citizens, structuring communities that are more responsible and aware of the collective importance of gender inclusiveness.
Music in urban development is the next theme of the festival, which has always been attentive since the first edition to the culture of the night and the idea of a 24-hour city. Danny Keir is the founder of Enki Music. A consultant in London, Keir shows how music can interact with the urban environment, improving its livability and thus having a positive impact on communities. Music placemaking becomes a celebration of place identity and a lever for a unique urban experience-a reflection even more important at such a difficult time for the live music industry.
Water and urban rivers have always been among the priorities of Torino Stratosferica. Addressing them in this edition, and in a truly remarkable way, is Andreas Ruby, director of the Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM) in Basel, where he curated the exhibition Swim City. In Switzerland, the habit of swimming in rivers in the city is a shared culture: Zurich, Basel, and Geneva are for all intents and purposes “swim cities.” How is this possible? Clean water and a sharing of risks are the key factors in ensuring a level of safety. In this scenario, rivers and lakes become great public spaces, for physical activity and meeting, as well as natural resources. Who knows that in the future it may be the same for our city of four rivers?
In the late afternoon it is the turn of the sincere, passionate and magnetic testimony of Marcus Fairs, founder and editor-in-chief of Dezeen, among the most popular media in the world for those who follow architecture and design. His talk traces the last few months he lived, interweaving personal and professional experience. Fairs tells us how the editorial staff adapted in the new situation: Dezeen went on to tell the story of how architecture and design responded to the pandemic, realizing that it is much more than a news site. Fairs talked about the social value of its work, the ability to aggregate and make designers and audiences gathered over the years feel part of a community.
The evening opens with one of the most visionary projects ever presented at the festival. It is Oceanix, the floating, modular, sustainable settlement model designed to extend the housing capacity of any coastal center and ensure a community model in balance with its surroundings. Presenting the project is Marc Collins Chen, who heads the company that is building these cities on the ocean. It may sound like utopia, a feat bordering on science fiction. But the path to the construction of Oceanix City, the first “pilot” case, has begun – and with a project by renowned architecture firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group).
The second day of the festival closes with Samir Bantal, director of AMO, research task force of the renowned OMA studio founded by Rem Koolhaas. Bantal presents Countryside, The Future, an exhibition curated by Bantal with Koolhaas for the Guggenheim in New York. Beginning with extensive research work, Countryside investigates on several fronts the interaction between humans and that 98 percent of emerged land to which we attribute the name “countryside”: from a place of contemplation to fertile ground for the wellness industry, from a construction site for the visionary plans of the great political leaders of the twentieth century to a laboratory in which to experiment with new production models. Today, rural areas around the world are experiencing the devastating effects of climate change with greater intensity, which is why Bantal’s talk concludes with a call for preservation: we have only to save nature to save ourselves.
Sunday 25th October.
The final day of Utopian Hours 2020 opens by returning to the theme of shared living, with a panel led by Matteo Robiglio of Homers. On stage are the two realities, from Barcelona and London respectively, protagonists of the previous day’s workshops: Carles Baiges of the architects’ cooperative Lacol and James Binning of the British collective Assemble Architects. The workshops and the meeting, dedicated to building a better urban community from housing, complement the narrative presented on the second floor by the Utopian Housing exhibition, also created with Homers, which traces the evolution of housing models from utopian socialism in the mid-19th century to the most innovative projects of today.
The next talk draws Turin’s skateboarding community to the Centrale Nuvola Lavazza. The guest speaker is Léo Valls, pioneer of skate urbanism, an approach in which city making and skateboarding coexist. Valls brings from Bordeaux the experience of his group, Dedication, a French reality that offers advice to policy makers and administrators who want to rethink public space by integrating the street sport par excellence. A creative and concrete project to improve our cities.
The afternoon continues with Ewan Anderson, invited to talk about What If?, a side-project of 7N Architects, an architectural firm based in Edinburgh. The project, similar in some respects to Torino Stratosferica, starts with a simple question: how to involve citizens in thinking about a better use of city spaces. Parking lots repurposed into art galleries, bike lanes for an electric road system, creating new neighborhoods in uninhabited port areas: what if these imaginative regeneration ideas became possible?
Sunday is the day of the second and final Visiting Urban Explorer of this edition. Dutchman Jeroen Beekmans of the urban transformation agency Pop-Up City shares with the festival audience the account of his free exploration in the city. For the future of Turin he envisions a capital of the Alps, a historic city that needs to find a balance between the urban environment and the surrounding landscape elements. Among the discoveries of his urban walks walking along the river is Precollinear Park, the new urban park resulting from the association’s first placemaking project.
The moments of meeting imagination and concreteness are not over. The Copenhagen Islands are a fun project to create temporary spaces in the city’s canals and harbor area that can potentially be replicated anywhere. The creators, the danish Magnus Maarbjerg and the australian Marshall Blecher (live from the night in Melbourne), show the advantages and possibilities of their small islands: simple, elemental but incredibly effective creations. When asked about the possibilities of doing the same on the Po, the two promise to return to Turin to think together about a pilot project in Italy.
Utopian Hours is also about mobility. The festival gives space to Swiss startup Komma, the brainchild of Petter Neby (former founder of Punkt.), which will bring a newly developed electric vehicle to the market in the next few years. Neby presents it together with Lowie Vermeersch, the designer at the helm of Granstudio, the Turin-based company that designed the model: in order to overcome the problems of current traffic, Komma proposes a two-seater vehicle halfway between a car and a motorcycle. An anticipation capable of arousing curiosity and igniting discussion about how we will move in the future.
The last day is the time when the festival offers its “brilliant Torinese“: an hour of utopia and belonging, in which to launch ideas and proposals for the city of tomorrow. The protagonists of this edition are sports entrepreneur Fabrizio Rostagno, who presents his project for the recovery of Turin’s motovelodromo; gastronomic journalist Luca Iaccarino, who relaunches the idea of a food commission for a Turin that is truly the capital of taste; and educator Valentina Sacchetto, who brings attention back to the energies of the youngest and the stories of those who arrived in Turin as migrants. Closing out the series is architect and thinker Carlo Ratti live from Rio de Janeiro, who fires up the audience with a series of sharp reflections on the relationship and collaboration with Milan (“the future of Turin is Milan.”)
The next talk features a new international guest, but one with strong ties to the city. Victoria Thornton is the creator in London of the Open House format: more than just an event format, a movement spread to over forty cities on all continents, including Turin. Openness, encounter and inclusion have always been the values at the heart of Thornton’s work. An experience that today, with its new reality Urban Dialogue, it wants to make available to other organizations committed to the same issues. Architecture for all, collective participation, education to create an “urban sense” in new generations: building dialogue is the only way to make our cities vibrant and more livable places.
On the final evening of Utopian Hours 2020 we talk about data with Sanne van der Burgh, the director of MVRDV Next – the research and technology development task force of the celebrated firm founded in 1993. From Bangkok to New Delhi to Rotterdam, MVRDV’s base city, a series of case studies have shown us how data can provide the tools to best address challenges such as nutrition, access to clean water, and energy consumption for more sustainable, connected, healthy cities.
The fourth edition of the “festival of cities” closes with a name that stands on its own: Guardian Cities, the city section of the British newspaper, a now-concluded project that Torino Stratospherica has always looked forward to. Editor-in-chief, Chris Michael, traces six years of the best of urban journalism, from the original intuition to devote himself to reporting on an increasingly urbanized world, to the latest reports on divided cities. An invitation to awareness of the many unresolved challenges and growing inequalities that are questioning us. Guardian Cities leaves us with the most incisive question possible, “Who are our cities for?”
Exhibitions. Also for the 2020 edition, Torino Stratosferica takes advantage of the spaces of the Centrale Nuvola Lavazza to show the public its content production work: four exhibitions that in a transversal way reread the most recent urban phenomena and propose new solutions for the city of tomorrow.
After the first selection in 2017, Torino Stratosferica conducts a new research on the urban trends of the future. Between trend reversals and new scenarios, anticipating the future means providing answers to unprecedented questions, but also being ready to change shape, structure and behavior. The festival presents 10 ideas destined to rewrite the rules of city living. Technology, activism, new work and social demands, spaces that empty and others that repopulate. With the exhibition Future Urban Trends Torino Stratosferica offers a contemporary look at the new dimensions of urban living.
The fourth edition of the festival dedicated to city making could not fail to grant a space to Precollinear Park, the first placemaking intervention by Torino Stratosferica. In the exhibition Precollinear Park. Il parco che fa pendenza we collected the evolutions of the project, highlighting the need -now more than ever- to create rich green spaces in our cities.
Exhibitions set up inside the Centrale Nuvola Lavazza also included A Menu for Turin. 10 courses to change the city. Torino Stratosferica proposes to revitalize the city’s image through actions that are feasible, powerful and immediately understandable. Conceived as a list of ambitious actions to promote the city at the most important real estate fairs, the menu is aimed at international investors, who would be spoiled for choice among appetizers, first courses, main courses and desserts. The projects, imagined together with GMZN creatives, translate proposals for a Turin at its best into impactful images.
