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Domenico Maria Caprioli, University of Naples, Italy
As Michael Batty wrote – cities grow and develop upwards from the bottom – especially modern cities. All the attempts to plan a city in its complexity are destined to change heavily under the requests of all the people who pass through its streets every day (Batty, 2006). Actually, the bottom-up enterprises are some of the most interesting phenomena of our times. In many cases to define them as “processes of self-organisation” is reductionist because they are actual generative activities.
As the LEADER Approach, defined by the EU, has recognised, a bottom-up approach proceeds, on the contrary, exactly from reversing the perspective, by producing solutions that fit with the context, along a direction apparently similar to the one that was defined by Patsy Healey as a “communicative approach” (Healey, 1997).
Bottom-up initiatives generate urban space too, along directions that Chih-Hung Chen has recognised in the indicators of heterogeneity and flexibility (Chen, 2013). Batty, when suggesting a new approach in urban planning, underlines that we have to recognise the evidence of an overturned genesis of hierarchies, which proceeds organically from the bottom upwards (Batty, 2006). Of course, this means there is a requirement to face the important matter of how to manage complexity, which is maximal at the urban scale (Raban presents the city as a series of nearly individual stages of self-representation), but intense at the scale of architectural planning at the same time (Yagod, 2013).
The choices, elaborated at a central level, must be applied to heterogeneous contexts subsequently, with two likely outcomes:
- A weakening of the measures, diluted in order to become more neutral and flexible.
- A conflict, in the form of a contrast between the requests that come from the context as well as the ones that are supported by the intervention.
The limits we attribute traditionally to this method are linked to the matter of scale: spontaneous and self-managed initiatives are better conceived the more that the community that generates them is restrained, and they work well in a small spatial setting, because they are generated in connection with a specific context (Pissourios, 2014). Actually, the matter of scale being small is only one – and not the most significant – of the problems related to the application of this principle, and we have to consider two issues in addition:
- Often, the communities that use some solutions lack specific expertise, and the fulfilment of the ideas may be affected by this deficiency, bringing inadequate outcomes.
- Sometimes the bottom-up solutions are chosen by closed communities where they must be harmonised with the initiatives on an urban or regional scale. Otherwise, they might contribute to isolating and separating the context that generated them.
ICT – provided that we understand their evolution – play a focal role in reducing the effects of these critical aspec