ENCLOSING SPACES OF URBAN NATURE.
SPATIALITY AND MATERIALITY OF BORDERS AND THRESHOLDS OF URBAN PARKS IN REDEVELOPMENT PROJECTS IN PARIS, BERLIN AND ROME AT THE LATE 20TH CENTURY.

Whereas the planning paradigms of modernism (Athens Charter) tended to see the city and landscape primarily as quantitative and fluid entities, various shifts in the 1970s - most notably a growing ecological consciousness, increased socio-political attention to the built environment, the emergence of the discipline of landscape architecture, and a growing interest in historic urban morphologies - have given rise to a new spatial and material form of public space at a European level. It is the Parc de la Villette in Paris that marks the revival of the urban park as a landscape architecture project and as a distinct element in public space.

The PhD project is interested in how the following development projects of the Rénovation urbaine in Paris – taking the example of the ZAC Citroën Cévennes - negotiate the interface between the natural elements (the park) and built elements (the block, the street, the square) in public space. Investigations of the competition program, of the design entries and observations in situ show a re-emergence and a variety of the structural enclosing of these spaces of urban nature in the form of fences, walls and ditches.

An analysis of the spatial and material design of these boundaries and threshold spaces is therefore the focus of interest. The enclosing’s functional and symbolic role will be investigated in order to put this design practice in a longue durée (Braudel 1958). Further, are these barriers the manifestation of an underlying human-nature relationship and representations of deeper epistemic perspectives?

In order to clarify the hypothesis of a paradigm shift regarding the role of the urban park in public space on an European level, in a second step, a comparative study on urban parks in development projects in Berlin (Internationale Bauausstellung) and Rome (Secondo PEEP) is conducted.