New European Urbanity
Urban development framework for the regeneration of Nowa Huta
- Category
- Urbanism
- Year
- 2012
- Location
- Nowa Huta, Krakow [PL]
- Size
- 50km2
- Role
- Urban Planner
- Program
- mix-use
- Collaboration
- Matteo Bettoni, mo.st and Felixx landscape
- Remark
- Second prize at international competition “Nowa Huta of the Future”
In order to develop successfully and contribute to the enhancement of the quality of the Krakow metropolitan area, Nowa Huta must be understood as a relatively independent multi-layered urban system with its own inherent qualities, not only as a sheer extension to Krakow, nor as an area dependent on a nearby large industrial complex.
While compatibility and synchronization with its neighbors and big assets are absolutely necessary, recognition and articulation of many more local potentials seem to be equally important for the formation of a wide base of backbones for the sustainable urban development resistant to the volatility of the socioeconomic conditions.
It’s big relative size, spatial composition of scattered mono-functional urban areas and large agricultural areas offer many qualities, currently hidden behind often stereotypical views, ranging from understanding Nowa Huta as a mere periphery, to being reserved towards the presence of a large industrial complex, air pollution and land contamination in the area.
In this situation, our task and goal becomes to recognize and employ all Nowa Huta’s comparative advantages, connect them into a functional Nowa Huta forerunner of advanced urban regeneration spatial framework that secures its long-term development.
Proposed spatial development framework articulates the (re)engagement of all the available resources through time, from human to infrastructure and natural. It helps to rethink the leftover industrial space, employing the redundant work force, reusing the unattended infrastructure, feasibly remediateing the polluted land and fine-tuning the relation between built land, nature and agriculture.
Through the proposed framework, Nowa Huta becomes a unique urban condition that offers all at once: urban ambient, proximity of the genuine nature, production landscape, active and healthy lifestyle, intensity and emptiness. It is fine and robust at the same time. Urban and rural.
The first one of the kind. Forerunner and the ultimate model for the transformation of similar urban conditions in Europe.