Urban strategies for the future development of Turin and Skopje: economic crisis and effectiveness of urban design

This paper focuses on the issues of effectiveness of the urban plans in the context of the contemporary European cities, considering mainly the subject of physical transformation of public space connected with building development. The comparison between Turin and Skopje aims to highlight the possible role of the urban design tools and planning (especially diachronic visioning), in the future of a sustainable growth of the urban European systems. The strategies of visioning of the urban plans require, to become effective, a strong liability coming from the political power and the economic feasibility: how can we consider the production of plans when this liability is going to lack? The crisis of the building sector in recent years along Europe has underlined some weaknesses of this approach to plans which had been a good instrument in a perspective of economic and physical growth. This paper assumes that the urban plan will continue to be a fundamental instrument for managing the future transformations of our cities, if we will be capable of rethinking it as a device for reassembling and including many other implications, beyond those which are usually considered by drawing the material shape of things. The paper will finally attempt to describe some strategies for rethinking the urban plan visioning from a methodological point of view.