Recycling Strategies for Volos

Many abandoned or underutilized buildings of the recent past, as well as inefficient buildings that have completed their life cycle could be considered as opportunities to produce new architecture and to convert to new life underused parts laying inside the city: industrial buildings, among the settlement fabrics, residential scopes neighbourhoods, once outlying but now time inconsistently incorporated into the urban fabric, peri-urban spaces characterized by low-density buildings, without an adequate accessibility to urban functions, mobility infrastructures -roads, bridges and viaducts producing "scraps" of city and landscape, are all elements to reconsider in a recycling policy. Some of these cases we find also in Volos, neglected urban areas highlighted by the Thessaly University research group. Changing Landscape International Workshop 2011 proposed a wide range of issues of urban and landscape design relate to five cases, very complicated for the quantity and variety of implications. The sites, very different each other, they may find their common point in a strategy of recycling: recycling of human landscapes, of industrial works and artifacts, or places of memory, which is currently being abandoned or neglected. Among these cases, three relate to the urban area territory in which they are included: the city Waterfront, the Boundaries of Xerias River, The Excavated landscape of the cement factory, while two of them are, or may return to being, a kind of extension of the city, as territories of countryside or sea: the rebirth of Lake Karla and the Reinvigoration of the Trikeri Island. All the five study-case proposed at the Changing Landscape International Workshop, they are real problems to solve for the city of Volos, but they also offer paradigmatic examples that can be compared to many European medium-sized cities. These “unproductive” areas, because of weak or improper function, are "cut-out" of territories someway compressed among efficient urban neighbourhoods. Inside those urban grey holes we find the traces of an exhausted human landscape nowadays looking like waste, buildings no longer maintained in work or, contrariwise, industrial activities consuming urban areas and producing more wasted landscape. In this sense the territory, no longer used in the habitual way and hard to be recycled into a new system, can be considered as the rejection of a productive cycle; we evaluate buildings insisting in such areas comparable to waste production. They are architectures of a concluded productive activity no more useful, often maintaining a close tie with their specific area and so they define a landscaped unit whose abandonment produces places of degradation within a wider evolving geographic sector. Various projects proposed by groups are a possible image of redeveloping Volos and they aim to promote the most inventive use and forms for the compromises sites to include them in a plan of: "Landscape management from a perspective of sustainable development, to ensure the regular upkeep of a landscape, so as to guide and harmonise changes which are brought about by social, economic and environmental processes”.