Le projet urbain
by Patrizia Ingallina
Presse Universitaires de France Place, Paris, 2001
Collection: "Que je sais"
128 pages, size 11,5 x 17,6 cm
ISBN 2130511376
Web: http://puf.ornis.fr/livres/22416183a.html; http://www.quesais-je.com

Book review

What does " urban project " really mean?
According to Patrizia Ingallina the multiple meanings of the urban project notion reveal how difficult is to understand the real potentiality of the concept and its global character.
The "urban project" is a concept and a way of doing that marks this period of transition, between the traditional way of planning and a new approach less fixed and more opened to transformations and to debates. This involves a vision of planning as a process: a complex process that is characterised by continuity and changes .
The urban project conception transforms the city concept, the city become the place of a collective project construction characterized by a long length. The process can't answer to the administration urgency usually invocated by mayors. A partnership among public institutions, multiple competences, a specific knowledge about the city, trying to integrate at the same time the three dimensions (economical, social, spatial), all these things are necessary.
The urban project involves all the problems of a territory and his population. Its sense come from the interaction of lots of disciplines, and involves directly the day life of people living in the city, in suburb or in rural zone.

About the author

Patrizia Ingallina is an architect and planner, "maître de conférences " at the Institut d'Urbanisme de Paris (Université de Paris XII), and is in charge of a DESS on urban projects.