San Polo. Laboratory or
District model? | 1986
(English Version)

This interesting movie wanted and realized by Michele Sernini in 1986 is dedicated "to the last and most significant" intervention unit in Italy’s public housing: the San Polo district, in Brescia, designed by Leonardo Benevolo around 1980 and realized in a long period of time, after a first initial acceleration.
 

For Sernini, at the time in which he made the documentary, there are several reasons to consider San Polo the "last" public integrated neighbourhood and in doing so, almost a prophetic intuition, he recognized the beginning of what than happened since the early nineties; the investment on housing public definitively take its waning phase. San Polo is the last one occasion because it represents the culmination of the modernist urban planning tradition and at the same time because it is the end of the practice that wants the new residential public areas placed at a distance from town center. 

Thought as potentially autonomous and able to produce a town character - or to exist without it - the new districts are confident, in fact, orthodoxy of well designed and properly sized in the quantitative and functional way. Finally, it is the last because it is a political and disciplinary "extreme" of a period in which the development of plans of housing districts, in Italy, have had encountered favourable policies and a developing social and economic condition, and because it came across with an unquestionable competence of the designer. The project is in fact representative of the most advanced national disciplinary culture; synthesis of design figures borrowed and reinterpreted from a careful evaluation of the most significant and well-established experience of northern Europe and North America. The project of San Polo realization may be considered an effect of veritable distillate solutions rationally and technically relevant, theoretically referred to well known models. From the point of view of building types, architectural solutions, local distribution, budget planning, they are models already tested in other contexts. Its actual effect, however, on the level of living, of the prospect of creating a sense of community, of the comfort of daily practices, given the good conditions and the considerable amounts of soil and inhabitants brought into play, make it a case very "significant ", final sunset of a disciplinary tradition of which it aspired to be a preferred interpreter.

The representation of it that Michele Sernini makes with his movie, despite the traditional language used for this documentary film and the limits of technical equipment then available, it seems, even today, effective in restoring the sense of the places perceived by the inhabitants, the sense of the limits of requirements of the project and of its paradoxical effects: architectural refined spaces produce discomfort to the users, routes designed to connect provoke an involuntary tool highly effective for separations, common spaces deliberately become a manifesto of the depletion of social interaction. Observed by the eye of the camera throw the narrative of the author who is drawn into place in a sort of participatory observation - as if it were a new design practice - and discussed together with its inhabitants, the district and its spaces make it self-evident as critical to use both in the private housing, public and community services.

The title of this documentary is evocative, suggestive and deliberately ambiguous of what drives the author experience in the filmed interpretation of a neighbourhood: San Polo district, laboratory or model?
The documentary opens with a narrator who, accompanied by panoramic views of the neighbourhood (almost air view), immediately makes explicit the theory of alienation of spatial solutions with respect to the place and the lives of its inhabitants. 

Description for images and narrative continues almost in the form of analytical card, but with continuous "chiasmus" highlighting the '"apparent contradiction" between a sense of what you can watch and listen from the voice of some inhabitant and direction of the project. The aim is obviously didactic. The course of Analysis of Urban Structures and Urban Planning is the horizon within which to place such intent, but only temporarily. Soon after, the possible referents are expanding to designers, lovers of discipline, local authorities and the inhabitants. The practice of filmed description becomes itself a communication project on the risks in social terms, we would say also in economic terms, of a disciplinary attitude that tends to associate on paper, in a drawing, constructed reality and reality of social interactions, taking its easy overlap as granted. No negotiation on typological choices, the extreme definition of connective spaces and the location of community services and certain nonchalance on selecting materials for housing then emerged as problems claimed by new residents. That makes Sernini say: "living is such an important thing that you can not be left exclusively to professionals or to insiders, but you really need [start thinking] to involved inhabitants and “common people". We were in 1986.
In this case, where the discussion on the project is done looking backwards, the film narrative it is chosen as the right tool for awareness, combining respect for different opinions, the ability to show the "truth" - even if filmic - the experience of private, public, and community places, the show of actual condition for aggregation and behavioural constraints; all shades - nuances - that a draft drawn on a sketch or written in a paper can hardly contain. Contradictions, inconsistencies, chiasmus, different interpretations of the physical and social space, can co-inhabit the film version - as if this could prove that is just film that can produce that kind of result - restoring a sense of reality more acceptable just because more open to discussion and to the construction of a discourse which is not all-encompassing.

In this regard, it is worth paying attention to the unique mode in which the voiceover narration build up his argumentation and the role that is assigned to the film in terms of research on the "language" of the future town design "speech". The strictly disciplinary language that closely accompanies the images in movement, although calibrated for effective, not self-determined, communication of the relevant and significant technical description of the neighbourhood, is well boosted and grants hospitality, within its own narrative and in order to make it more inclusive, phrases, seemingly unorthodox but actually essential, referring to the perception of living spaces and to the experience that in the new satellite settlement is possible. 

The district, in the light of this audio-visual interpretation, it is an unsurpassed and "unique" synthesis of an abstract and rational "model" for development of the city.  At the same time it represent the criticality - if not of the actual sunset – of a certain planning practice that does not find its legitimacy in the light of the effect it has on people's lives. It is also a "laboratory", because perhaps it is the fate of urbanism to be tied to his experiments and his failures. 
A project carried out is still a place in which using new means of representation, interpretation and communication between the parties involved, it can be reborn hope, never predictable, of a viable prospect for inclusion in the design process of its users and for energy aimed toward socialization of which they are nevertheless bearers. That is what seems to suggest the closing frame: girls and boys who, instead of being placed in the appropriate areas for relationships, hanging out in front of the garages on the ground floor of the residential units, making the space much more alive and shared than it could have been imagined by the designer. It was 1986, this is only one of the possible interpretations: it is left to us to wonder what we could find, returning today in San Polo. In any case, this is a good vision. 

Ruben Baiocco 
Università IUAV di Venezia, Venezia, Italy
E-mail: baiocco@iuav.it