Reformation at the limit of Restoration
Ptolemaida, Greece
Competition: Regeneration and Reuse
of former coal mining areas in Ptolemaida
February 2016
In collaboration with:
Micheal Papavarnavas, Constantinos Petrakos
Tina Marinaki, Kalliopi Sakelaropoulou
“For urbanization form is nothing, the adequate satisfaction of human need is everything”
Ildefons Cerdà, General Theory of Urbanization
In the early 1970s, Henri Lefèvre put forward the radical hypothesis of the complete urbanization of society, which required, in his view, a radical shift from the analysis of urban form to the investigation of urbanization processes. Building upon this idea, the site is approached not as an unbuilt, natural environmental, but as an urban landscape.
The main objective appears as an alternative of the contemporary urban condition that emphasizes the inclusion of different realities. The design synthesis provides a flexible framework, rather than a final solution, aiming to trigger productive negotiations between the political, social, cultural and environmental territories of the future city where primary guide is the continuously changing society.
The premise is about proposing the project site as a holistic system where humans and landscape interact within a flexible three-dimensional urban framework which creates patterns of habitation within the city form. The conceptual method shows the potential of the grid as a tool in which the development of the landscape activates future possibilities.
