21st Century (2000–present)

Turin Spina 3/4

2000s · Italy · Southern Europe · Post-industrial regeneration and waterfront urbanism · Planned by City of Turin

Map of Turin urban redevelopments, context for the Spina Centrale corridor (Spina 3/4) · CC BY-SA

Core idea

Rail yard redevelopment corridors

Why it matters

Industrial city reinvention

Description

Turin's Spina 3 and Spina 4 are redevelopment corridors created along the Spina Centrale, the boulevard built over the buried cross-city railway, on land vacated by large steel and manufacturing works. Guided by the City of Turin under its 1995 master plan framework, the schemes replaced plants such as the former Teksid and Michelin sites with housing, parks including Parco Dora, commercial uses and cultural facilities through the 2000s.

Significance

The Spina projects are central to Turin's reinvention from a Fordist company town dominated by Fiat into a diversified post-industrial city. They are studied as a European example of using rail undergrounding to stitch together a divided urban fabric and of retaining industrial relics as monumental elements within new parks.

What shaped it

The Architecture of the City (1966)
The master plan (early 20th c.)
Containerised-logistics scale-up (1970s–1990s)
Postmodernism in architecture & planning (1977)

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →

hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.