The research project on which PROXIMACITY is based started by Joseph di Pasquale supported by a panel of manufacturing companies at Politecnico di Milano in 2015. The international competition Reinventing Cities has been an application of the research pilot project prototype.

The basic approach of PROXIMACITY is based on considering behaviors as the key factor in a truly effective strategy to achieve resilience and elimination of CO2 emissions.

The coronavirus emergency has incontrovertibly highlighted the centrality of individual conscious behaviors in determining the change in urban life, the economic model and technological development. This process has boosted behavioral trends already emerging before the emergency. In fact in recent years the evolution of housing behavior was already moving to overcome the paradigm of functionalist city based on the combination of specialized zooning and transport systems. A city organized by functional areas connected by daily commuting movements tends to be replaced by a functionally “hybrid” city in which the urban fabric gradually and spontaneously reconfigures itself as an aggregation of “proximity housing campuses”. This campuses could be considered as basic “units of resilience” of the city, self-sufficient also from a functional point of view. The commuting movements will be reduced thanks to the presence of physical and digital functional premise for work, education and health services. This will cause a significative reduction of CO2 emissions, but more then that it will greatly change the dynamics of relationships and micro-social structures. A higher permanence of citizens in the surroundings of their houses will induce an extation for the living dimension to the proximity urban space. Social proximity, however, will also mean greater need to protect the individual sphere and space. Based on this ongoing metamorphosis trend of housing behaviours the research in architecture in recent years has defined frameworks of innovation for construction systems based on the combination of hybrid modular technologies and native integrated digital platforms. The Covid emergency will accelerate research and innovation in this direction.

PROXIMACITY is the latest application phase of these researche stream, applyied to urban design in the horizon of next hybrid city.



Urban design, Architecture, Interior design: JDP ARCHITECTS (Joseph di Pasquale, Diana Ranghetti, Paolo Labbadini, Andrei Teodorescu)

Environmental expert: Andrea Tartaglia

Urban desgin: Elena Mussinelli

Landscape design: BALMORI ASSOCIATES

Technology design: SIEMENS S.p.A.

Administrative law consultancy: Studio Legale Bertacco Recla

Social and cultural promotion: Urban Curator TAT