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Postgraduate Level

PHD EXCELLENCE COURSE
International viewpoints on Urban Resilience
Torino - June/July 2022

The sustainability paradigm dominated urban policy and practice for the last two decades, but in recent years resilience has become a major focus for cities. A growing number of communities are developing resilience plans and even hiring Chief Resilience Officers in addition to, or in place of, sustainability plans. In essence, urban resilience is about the ability of communities to cope with disruptions and change, but definitions and models for urban resilience are highly contested. What does this concept mean in theory and practice? What is the relationship between sustainability and resilience? How can we operationalize these fuzzy concepts? And how would we recognize whether or not a city is sustainable or resilient? This course will introduce Ph.D. students to current debates on urban resilience theory and practice, as well as its intersections with urban sustainability, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and disaster risk reduction. We will discuss how resilience concepts are applied in specific urban domains including the built environment, transportation and mobility, social justice, public health and safety, green infrastructure and urban agriculture, housing, community, and economic development, and governance. The course drew on the latest research on these topics as well as practical examples.

The course was planned to start on June 20th until July 5th (see brochure). It introduced Ph.D. students to current debates on urban resilience theory and practice, as well as its intersections with urban sustainability, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and disaster risk reduction.The workshop lasted 15 hours. PhD Students explored the opportunity to enrich their PhD curriculum.

 

TEACHING STAFF
Sara Meerow (Instructor, Arizona State University), Ombretta Caldarice (coordinator, Politecnico di Torino)

LANGUAGE
English

PHD EXCELLENCE COURSE
Resilience and Ecology: Discovery and Experimentation
ONLINE - October 2021

The program is based on the principle that transdisciplinarity is an essential tool for understanding environmental crises and the implications deriving from feedback phenomena.
Technological innovation, physics (with a focus on fluid dynamics), biology, philosophy, literature, planning, architecture and the creative and industrial arts will be taken into account with the hypothesis of overcoming the current planning and design approach.
In addition, this program will enable students to build on the notions and principles on urban planning, environmental and landscape design in order to learn planning and design methods and techniques, from a practice-based research perspective. A part of the lectures will be dedicated to international case studies dealing with three key research:
“Zombie City”, “Lezioni dalla Fine del Mondo” and the recent activities on resilient communities’ actions related to the Italian Pavilion at the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture 2021.

TEACHING STAFF
Angioletta Voghera (coordinator, Politecnico di Torino), Alessandro Melis (Instructor, The University of Portsmouth)

LANGUAGE
Italian

PHD EXCELLENCE COURSE
Challenges in the preservation of the architectural heritage of the 20th century: themes and experiences
ONLINE - 22 February 2021 - 01 March 2021

The Excellence course of the Doctoral School of Politecnico di Torino is offering a course titled: "Challenges in the preservation of the architectural heritage of the 20th century: themes and experiences"

The course aims to present and discuss experiences and current challenges related to the conservation of 20th-century architectural heritage. This legacy is constantly threatened not only by natural hazards but also by abandonment and poor maintenance, and needs to be brought back to life while respecting the spirit of its original characters and maintaining an adequate level of structural and seismic performance. Moreover, the materials and construction techniques employed present serious durability issues. In fact, concrete was extensively used during the 20th-century, together with other experimental or new construction materials that, in most cases, did not age well. The definition of protocols about condition assessment, repair and conservation of 20th-century structures and buildings is in progress and periodically updated, also based on the first-hand experience by researchers, practitioners, and institutions. However, many challenges and issues are still open. The comparison between different views and interdisciplinary collaborations will enrich the framework of possible research and communication scenarios.

 

TEACHING STAFF
Rosario Ceravolo (coordinator), Erica Lenticchia (scientific secretary), Susan Macdonald (The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles, USA), Antoine Wilmering (The Getty Foundation, Los Angeles, USA), Fabio Grementieri (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires), Francesco Romeo (Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza), Claudio Chesi (Politecnico di Milano), Mario A. Chiorino (Politecnico di Torino), Giulia Sammartano, Antonia Spanò, & Francesco Tondolo (Politecnico di Torino), Cristiana Chiorino (Pier Luigi Nervi Project Association), Paolo Faccio (Università Iuav di Venezia), Antonio Nanni (University of Miami,USA).

LANGUAGE
English
 

PHD EXCELLENCE COURSE
Can Urban Resilience be Redeemed? Theories, Models and Tactics for Contemporary Cities organised by the PhD Programme in Urban and Regional Development
Torino, 28-30 October 2020

What is resilience? From a physical and natural sciences perspective, it implies the ‘capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks’.
But for planners and geographers dealing with space - who are more interested in transformative potentials rather than vulnerabilities management- resilience must bring about something more than ‘reworking’ and ‘resistance’. Resilience captures ‘the ability of an urban system - and all its constituent socio-ecological and socio-technical networks across temporal and spatial scales - to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity’.
Using this interrogation as a point of departure, the Ph.D. Excellence Course “Can Urban Resilience be Redeemed? Theories, Models and Tactics for Contemporary Cities” aims at revisiting the concept of resilience along the lines of critical consideration questioning if it is a useful paradigm which allows us to think in new ways about planning theory.

TEACHING STAFF
Ombretta Caldarice (coordinator), Stefano Cozzolino (ILS), Sara Meerow (ASU), Roberto Rocco (TUDELFT), Nicola Tollin (SDU)


PARTNERS
ILS – Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development Dortmund (Germany), Arizona State University - School of Geographical Science & Urban Planning (SGSUP) TU Delft - Department of Urbanism, Faculty, University of Southern Denmark - Civil and Architectural Engineering Department

LANGUAGE
English

PHD COURSE
Legal culture, cultural heritage and society. Normative, historical and social interpretations of religious heritage policies organised by the PhD Programme in Architectural and Landscape Heritage
Torino, January-February 2020

The PhD course deals with the juridical and social complexity of cultural heritage policies in an interdisciplinary perspective strongly oriented to understand the regulatory dimension.
The main objective of the course is to train PhD students in dealing with the patrimonial issue regarding the legal and social aspects. From this point of view, religious heritage is one of the most complex types of patrimony, implying canonical, ecclesiastical, administrative and covenant law matters.
The didactic objective will be pursued with lectures and interdisciplinary debates, which will consider the historical-architectural and historical-landscape themes (with attention to the themes of historical knowledge and the conservation of religious heritage), with particular attention to the disciplines of administrative law, law canon and religious sociology, with the direct voice of stakeholder representatives and holders of the objects being studied. Ongoing research projects will be presented critically to doctoral students.

More info

TEACHING STAFF
Andrea Longhi (coordinator), Rosario Ceravolo, Carla Bartolozzi, Chiara Calderini

PARTNERS
Centro Conservazione e Restauro di Venaria, CEI – Conferenza Episcopale Italiana

LANGUAGE
Italian

R3C PHD THESIS LAB
R3C Phd Thesis Lab on Urban Resilience
Torino, I edition February - July 2019

The R3C PhD Thesis Lab on Urban Resilience aims at supporting PhD students in better understanding and addressing different needs and interests of their research in terms of mentoring, lab environment, and research project design

R3C PhD Thesis Lab would help PhD students in three main directions:

  • Find the right fit for their research projects in an interdisciplinary environment. In the R3C PhD Thesis Lab, the PhD students can meet Responsible Risk Resilience Centre – R3C research group, discuss about their challenges, and identify a direct scientific responsible to whom they can refer to. 
  • Be prepared and skilled on resilience. Framing and implementing resilience in the broad realm of urban studies is a challenge which few research groups are poised to accomplish through PhD tutoring as resilience studies require a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives that disciplinary research silos cannot support. The R3C PhD Thesis Lab can help PhD students to take on interdisciplinary research methodology to design resilient cities.
  • Seek a supportive and complementary lab environment. It is important that PhD students are comfortable with the people in the R3C group as research is hard and PhD students don’t want to compound that difficulty by entering a challenging situation. A research environment in which PhD students are able to bounce ideas off others is what makes great science. Ideally, PhD students should find an environment and a set of colleagues that they will learn from and enjoy professionally.

TEACHING STAFF
Grazia Brunetta (coordinator), Angioletta Voghera, Gilles Novarina (ENSAG), Ombretta Caldarice, Benedetta Giudice

LANGUAGE
English

PH.D. FELLOWSHIP
R3C Ph.D. Fellowship
2020 - ONGOING

R3C provides the opportunity to apply for Ph.D. scolarhips in order to mainstream resilience by the best scientific evidence available for candidates with strong background in research. The current Phd positions include the following topics:

Ph.D. positions of 2020:

  • Architectural Heritage Resilience: Toolkit, Scenarios and Evaluation Processes (Ph.D. in Architectural and Landscape Heritage)
  • Modelling industrial risks within a multihazard framework for the resilience of the territories (Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering)
  • Strategic Planning for Energy-Resilient Territories and Cities (Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Development)

Ph.D. position of 2021:

  • Knowledge Approaches for Transformative Resilience. Adaptation Strategies and Projects for Urban Regeneration (National Doctoral School in Sustainable Development and Climate Change)