DAR SMART THE CITY TERRITORY.TOWARDS A NEW DIMENSION

Our research goes into how cities balance the macro/micro-economic factors and the spatial structure of cities with the cultural factors: the underlying form of residential/public areas and landscapes. It goes on to discuss the relationship between new settlement, activity and space and how this relationship is formed by the way different cultures and their activities make different demands on movement, new settlement of formality gradients an co-presence. Finally we have to determine the manner in which patterns of infrastructure/space integration influence the location of different settlements, classes and social groups in the city and contribute to solve the pathology of housing and public realm estates. The spatial form needs to be understood as a contributing factor in forming the patterns of sustainable urban metabolism, integration or segregation in the city. The starting point of the present work is coming from the necessity to define the contemporary city within its territory, through a clarification of a new scale of intervention. The framework of our research coincides with the formal and structural dimensioning of the city territory. The need for a cultural "jump" should identify a range of elements and relations in the urban context, rather then simply upgrade the instruments of intervention and investigation. This means a better definition of the structural pattern and backbone of this reality, in order to show the discontinuity occurred in the urban development and in the cultural awareness of such phenomena. Our incoming research on Dar es Salaam follows the strategic modelling document by World Bank Senior Urbanist Pedro Ortiz, as a methodological indication for the development of a settlement. Its design, in the urban context of Dar es Salaam will follow the idea of a variable formality gradient, conveniently located as proposed by the metropolitan spatial strategy suggested by Ortiz. Such a scheme guarantees the connection of every settlement to the bus rapid transit system (BRT) and the integration with the surrounding peri-urban agriculture through a local form-typology specificity. Such an approach may envisage a sustainable relation between green and grey infrastructure, when green is intended as the hydro-geological system of the territory. A strong economic attractor related to the infrastructure system should foster the reversal of spontaneous settlements back into legality, providing them with services that could improve the sustainable level of the entire city.To cope with the historical structural transformation of the type of settlements, some guidelines on methodology and scale will be suggested, in order to structure the basis for an intervention and thus of a specific form of the city-territory. We promote the appearance of a new scale of the types of settlement and their interrelations, and a change in the urban/rural relation. A formality-gradient type, able to capitalize on its city-centre proximity its advanced services, will be determined in relation to mobility structures. Such device should also be able to communicate with the agricultural landscape that not only has the potential to provide products for consumption and sale to local communities (urban agriculture), but also becomes an element of urban regeneration as it has always been i.e. in the tradition of the Italian landscape.