Water and Asphalt

• Venice is an exemplary metropolitan area with regard to the increasing separation of residential and industrial neighbourhoods
• Presents solutions for the design of isotropy urban spaces
• Contributions by international experts
• The latest volume in the renowned UFO: Explorations of Urbanism series

Water and Asphalt proposes a project of extended requalification for the territories of settlement dispersion and diffusion; a project on a territorial scale and imagined in a context of economic, social, and environmental crisis. To indicate its principal characteristics, the research study uses the term Project of Isotropy. The metropolitan area of Venice, criss-crossed by dense networks of roads and waterways, is the test case for imagining the concept.

The Project of Isotropy is the acknowledgement of a territorial specificity, a scenario to be investigated in its manifold consequences, and a design hypothesis that can be concretely devised in terms of intervention regarding the water system, roads and public transport, alternative mobility, forms of diffused welfare, innovative agriculture, and the decentralised production of energy. The hypothesis is that new conditions now exist for re-devising the isotropic space in the Metropolitan area of Venice.