The Laboratory of Regional Design with Ecology, Hosei University is holding its first International Symposium for 2005:
" The Form of Italian 'Water City' and its reconstruction-Mainly Milan and Pisa"

Date： 13 April 2005 (Wednesday) 13:00 - 17:00
Place：Sky Hall, 26th Floor, Boissonade Tower, Ichigaya Campus, Hosei University, Tokyo

"Is Milan a City of Water? Reflections on Canals and the Changing Landscape of Lombardy"
Professor Antonello Boatti (Department of Architecture, Milan Institute University/Urban Planning)
Through a comparison of Tokyo and Milan, it is possible to clarify the similarities and dissimilarities in the city structures of the two cities. Similar to Tokyo, Milan is located on a alluvial plain and lies at the center of Lombardy. Tokyo has 23 wards and an area of 598 square kilometers where 15 million people live (25000/sq km). The population of Tokyo's suburban area is roughly equal to that of Tokyo's 23 wards. On the other hand, Milan has 187.1 square kilometers and is home to 1.3 million people (7100/sq km), but its suburban population density is 14,000 people per kilometer.
Western Europe's Space Agency, Envista 2004 has measured the condition of global pollution and, as a result, shown that Lombardy and Tokyo Prefecture are included together in the world's polluted urban areas. In order to escape from this situation, it is an urgent matter to make various plans related to city development and form that focus on the environment and region.
When thinking about planning for the water environment in modern cities, it is essential and indispensable to survey the historical factors related to that environment. Therefore, to understand the landscape of its agriculture and the city, it is necessary to think about waterside spaces of Lombardy. In the mid-nineteenth century, statesman and economist Count Stefano Jacini of Cremonese expressed is admiration of the garden like landscape of southern Milan in the following words: "An artificial embankment made of dirt draws the water for irrigation over a prescribed interval. This system harmonizes the expansive canal system and is most economical. Moreover, this system is a complex conduit of that directs, diverts, taps, drains, and catches water. This conduit system tries to distribute water over as wide an area as possible through locks, drainage pipes, splices, drainage ditches, canal bridges, and siphons."
In this way, Lombardy and its landscape shows the success of human intervention in nature. This manmade canal called Naviglio was built for navigation, Naviglio Grande and Naviglio Martesana and used for the purpose of shipping raw materials, agricultural goods, and also passengers. This nineteenth-century system of transport by boat came to envelop Milan. The Naviglio Martesana flows into Milan from the north, curves around the eastern surrounding city wall, and flows southward out of the city. At Darsena near the present national university, a water transport terminal to shape over many centuries of trade and restoration work on the Duomo. With these Naviglio, a transport network was created for ships to move from Switzerland, to the Como Lake, down the Po River, and onto the Adriatic Ocean. At the end of the nineteenth century, the first Integration Adjustment Plan for Milan ignored the city's waterways and on both paper and in construction by building a street atop the Naviglio where it curved around the eastern city wall. Within a few decades (1930) appeared a new plan to bury and put the Naviglio in a pipe. Then, in the twentieth century, transport by boats on the waterways of Lombardy came to an end, but the whole system of waterways has been kept and continued in the city's suburban areas as evidence of its history.
From this point on, the goal of Milan's city plan for water is as follows:
1. To revitalize existing waterways by reducing polluting substances
2. To reduce the problem of flooding with the aim of resolving the problem in the future by constructing a reservoir system for the river
3. To improve the Naviglio and other rivers' value by restoring newly found historical remains
4. To reduce the pollution of groundwater in the first soil stratum in order to realize a merged system of the waters in the artificial lake to the surface waters of the canal
By highlighting the purpose of these plans, I believe it is possible once again restore Milan as a water city.

From Construction to Deconstruction of a Water City: The Case of Pisa
Professor Lucia Nuti (Department of Literature, Pisa University/History of Architecture and Cities)
Pisa is a city of about 100. 000 inhabitants, located in Western Tuscany, at the end of the alluvial plain of the river Arno, as far as eleven kilometres from its mouth and the Mediterranean Sea. It would be very difficult today to perceive it as a "city of water", since we are aware of the presence of the water just while crossing one of the four bridges and seeing the river flowing low, not crowded with boats. However, at a closer glance, the still legible shell of the ancient settlement and archives documents help us in rediscovering the city as the centre of a very sophisticated system, where the sea, rivers, canals and roads were deeply integrated.
This process takes us back to the Etruscan and Roman times when the coastline lay at a distance of about four kilometres from the point where the settlement was founded. It was in the middle of a lagoon environment, at the right of the confluence of one branch of the now vanished river Auser into the river Arno and in that location the settlement flourished as a well protected naval base: it was the main reference for a constantly changing net of minor landing bases on the coast and the hinterland, where Mediterranean products were discovered and dug up. Two harbours were probably used: one south of the mouth of the Arno (the most ancient near S. Piero a Grado and the more recent in the large inlet named Porto Pisano) and the other north of the town, at the mouth of another branch of the river Auser. In the early Middle Ages the settlement contracted and large areas of the old Roman colony were abandoned.
When commercial activities flourished again, there is evidence that three settlements -the ancient Pisa, the suburb Foriporta on the left-hand side, and the more recent village of Chinzica were growing closely but independently from one another, just sharing the opportunities of the river as an inside port, while the actual sea port was located on the coast in the inlet of Porto Pisano. They are recorded as separated, until they joined together to constitute the great Pisa, the Maritime Republic, and a new urban wall was built to surround the three of them. It was then 1155 and the urban wall, that is still standing especially in the northern part, was sufficient to contain the town development until last century and this makes it clear how large Pisa was and how great its decay was in the following centuries. The Maritime republic enjoyed naval and military authority, being a thriving port, crucial to Mediterranean commerce.
Yet the end of the thirteenth century marked the beginning of its decline. Crushed by Genoa in the battle of Meloria and weakened by the silting up of its harbour, Pisa was defeated and lost political independence. Overcame by Florence in 1406, the city changed from a free city state to a dominion. When the Medici came to take possession of Pisa after a century of collapse, the town was on its knees. Most of the houses collapsed or were abandoned, the draining system was out of order; stagnant waters everywhere caused chronic diseases and a very high mortality.
Two centuries of Medici government in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany did not mean a substantial change in the overall urban shape, nor an expansion. A new fortress with ramparts was built to prevent rebellions, palaces and statues embellished public spaces. Despite of this apparent recovering -it was still the second most important town of the State-Pisa, living a very quiet, maybe sleepy life, lost contact with its origins. It gradually changed from a "city of water" to "a city of land". The medieval florescence, totally depending on sea commerce, where the river was the terminal for overseas goods, was over. The price for the recovery was the deconstruction of the water based system and the slow transformation in an ordinary town where the river played the role of a component in a setting of historical beauty. One after the other, the stores and the markets were removed from the river to inner areas, the infrastructures destroyed, the original pattern altered and the river separated from the town more and more. Until during the nineteenth century this long-term process came to a conclusion and was ratified by drastic decisions that managed to change definitely the waterfront landscape.
At the first glance, it is quite evident that Pisa's medieval urban pattern is not dependent on the Roman orthogonal layout, but is clearly river-centred. The inhabited and densely built part spreads like a belt along the river on both sides, while the urban area gets reduced as it recedes from it. A host of very narrow alleys like the teeth of a comb literally run towards the embankment, where, at the time, they found stone stairs to reach the river and the boats. Wooden platforms on pile works were also built by private peoples on the banks of the Arno to widen the surface of the street. By the conclusion of the nineteenth century, however, the net of the narrow alleys running to the embankment began to be altered: some of them were sold to private peoples who incorporated them in their properties, some were closed by gates to avoid hygienic problem.
Today the feeling of living in a city of water seems to have been completely vanished. The river is just regarded as the component of an extraordinary urban landscape, a beautiful object to admire from above. This potential can be exploited for extraordinary and even ordinary recreational activities, like walking, or seating at a caf_. The river and the Lungarni, with their still impressive historical architectures, seem to be the perfect scene for events that try to recover elements of folklore, like Regattas, historical boat races, that occasionally take place in the river.
Two traditional spectacles are played yearly. The Gioco del Ponte (literally the bridge game) is a historical game dating back to the 16th century. The warriors met on the central bridge and engaged a combat for the possession of the bridge. It seemed to keep alive the historical opposition between the two parties, the northern older town and the southern and more recent one. Suppressed in 1782, after a lengthy interruption the event returns today in a new formula: the warriors push a mobile structure, like a huge trolley, set on the central bridge for the occasion. The Luminara (Illumination) is another historical event, that takes place on the eve of the patron feast day (the 16th of June). Thousands of small glass lamps burning wax are fixed on wooden frames hanging on the facades of the palaces, emphasizing or altering their architectural features. Some of the candles flow in the river, while the parapets and the bridges glow in this reflected lights.
During this magic night, the waterfront is revived by the hustle and bustle of joyful citizen and seem to be living in the past, but the following morning it is all over again.
Thus, in this presentation, I trace the history of Pisa as a water city through the ancient, medieval, Medici periods, and into the modern period. In doing so, I touch on the changing role water has played in the development of the city's structure and architecture as well as its commerce and culture.