Responsive Urban Environments: the Case of Porta Genova in Milan

The intensive course abroad, Responsive Urban Environments (RUE), brings students from the United States and Italy together to discuss why designers and engineers need to consider relationships between the built environment and nature to solve global challenges. In the fall of 2018 and 2019, Drexel University students met with students from the Politecnico di Milano for two weeks in Lecco, Italy to develop RUE solutions for the Porta Genova district in Milan. The Responsive Urban Environment looks at the city through the lens of ecosystem management. RUE considers the city as a complex network of interrelated systems that rely on each other to maintain system balance. A dialogue of hardscape to landscape, city infrastructure is comprised of buildings, roads and bridges with respect to green public space, waterways and food access – home to humans, plants and animals, the glue of its ecosystem crossed by issues related to public health, the watershed and biodiversity. Ecosystems themselves are complex adaptive systems that require flexibility and the capacity to respond to environmental feedback to cope with change and uncertainty. The well-tempered RUE is a low-energy sustainable city. Given the global sustainability objectives and commitments to the decarbonization of different sectors of the economy by 2050, understanding environmental processes and systems helps to develop design strategies that inherently aim at optimizing resource use, reducing waste and limiting impacts on the environment. Developing strategies for the RUE is critical to ensure a low-carbon future for our planet. The proportion of the world’s population living in cities has steadily increased over the past century from 14 percent in the year 1900 to 50/50 in 2007. While more people are living in cities than in the countryside today, an estimated 70 percent of people are expected to be urbanites by the year 2050 – which is why RUE research is imperative today.