New forms for urban space: utopia? Creative leisure time in an experience for the 10th Biennial of architecture of Venice: Living at Vema

This study is related to the utopia of a new town to be built in 2006 following the design of Franco Purini, who proposed a master plan for an ideal town between Verona and Mantova: Vema. The group, led by Santo Giunta - as Francois Burckhardt and Burghart Schmidt write – proposed strategies concentrating on the cultural needs of the inhabitants, with new ideas for entertainment spaces. It is a project which addresses creative leisure time, a prospect which should affect a vast section of society in the future as a result of new structures in the distribution of work time and leisure time, being an inevitable consequence of the progress of automation (Burckhardt, F., Schmidt, B., 2010. Utopia nell’architettura XXI Secolo, «Treccani online» : http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/utopia-nell-architettura_%28XXI-Secolo%29/). The priority given to the cultural needs of the residents was the basis for our project, The gartens of crative sloth. Bearing this in mind, the design study is based on the space we live in and on the idea that we can arrange the transformation of reality into a necessary dialogue between human freedom and the foreshadowing of a form to characterize new landscapes. The themes dealt with in this paper, which discuss the design for a possible new town, are tools for grasping the complexity of the phenomenon of urban sprawl. There are basically two themes in all their articulations and variables. The first one concerns the need to elaborate a new design for the land, the attaching to the ground of the buildings, both for the green areas as well as those intended for mobility and public space; the second one deals with reconciling the demands of environmental sustainability and the role of urban open space. In conclusion, in the design for Vema a structure is proposed, within a traditional framework, which is based on a vision of the city orientated towards the future and perhaps an attempt at a genuine utopia.