The role of historical streets in the urban development of the city of Piacenza

Abstract

The role of the street has witnessed, over time, its progressive reduction as a urban structure capable in the past of generating forms of the inhabited space. The functional assumption of the modern city has transformed the street into an artefact of the exclusive domain of engineering, and for many decades urban plans have been drawn on categories of functional taxonomy of the street. In this regard, the essay develops a critical reflection on the case study represented by the city of Piacenza, intended as a paradigmatic case, through three different street layouts that have profoundly affected the urban morphological structure of the city: • the ancient consular street of the Via Emilia; • the old medieval route of the Via Francigena; • and finally, the modern viaduct of the A21 (TO-BS) motorway. The theoretical reflection is methodologically structured through a critical reading, both on a urban and territorial scale, of the strategic role that the three different roads have played over time in defining the morphological configuration of the Emilian city, and how it has become today not only a junction city for the entire Po Valley region, but also a crossroads and logistic centre for the commercial flow of Cisalpine Europe. The objective, of the case study examined, is to investigate the relationship of cause and effect played by the road in the urban evolution of the city and its different temporal rhythms scanned.