For CRP 4160: Rome Workshop during Spring 2019 in Rome, Italy with Emily Grace and Oliver Goldberg-Lewis.
Our semester project involved in depth research on a neighborhood on the periphery of Rome, specifically looking at its urban agricultural spaces and eventually providing a recommendation for improvement based on our findings. Our final recommendations seek to better pedestrian connection between neighborhoods, centering these connections on the market and the promising but underutilized urban gardens.
Casal de’ Pazzi is in the northwest of Rome, sitting just north of the Aniene River between two large urban parks. The neighborhood rotates around a central market place, around which are several important community centers like schools, libraries, museums, gardens, and churches.
After completing a number of on-the-street interviews and analyzing public spaces in the area, one of the key issues we found with Casal de’ Pazzi was a lack of social cohesion. When we asked various citizens for hand drawn maps of their neighborhood, we received sketches of what one would think are completely different towns.
Our proposal was to create a connection between the gardens and the market by implementing a program that would bring the local senior center and schools together through gardening. This group would take ownership of a garden plot together, learning how to garden in a sustainable way, while building ties between generations. This partnership could be extended to the market, too, where they could host social events with the food that they have grown together, such as a cooking class.
We also identified the need for an increase in the number of pedestrian friendly, physical connections between the parts of the neighborhood. We therefore recommended the addition of more access points to the Aniene and Aguzzano parks, as well as a pedestrian bridge that would connect these two parks and the market.
The overarching goal of our two recommendations was to connect the residents of Casal de’ Pazzi with each other and with their environment. We believe that these two recommendations, the implementation of both a social bridge and a physical bridge, would effectively satisfy this goal. While the market already functioned as a good community hub, these interventions would take full advantage of its potential.