The Bellaria Igea Marina Town Idea Plan was prepared on the occasion of the preliminary meetings for the drafting of one of the new urban planning tools, that is in the study phase of the Municipal Structural Plan.
It was commissioned in 2008 by the financial categories grouped under the acronym Emisfero Associazioni (Confartigianato, Federalberghi, Coop. Bagnini, Confcommercio) who approximately represent 80% of the overall economic power of the town.
In the concept of “Bellaria Igea Marina Town Idea Plan”, the objective identifies the intention of promoting, primarily, a thought of the town on which afterwards reflecting and developing an urban plan.
It means creating an operational method that can bring out the expressive character and role of the town, both on the urban scale and the territorial one, by analyzing the values and meaning of individual sites and the way these places are experienced by the citizens.
It’s essential to reflect on a conceptual model of town and then develop a dynamic and flexible General Organizational Design working on physical and relational nodes and connections with the purpose of building a system as a "matrix tissue".
After this phase, the urban project will become the key instrument for the composition of urban areas. The first objective emerging from the plan contents is the natural vocation of Bellaria Igea Marina to become more and more important as a tourist town on a cultural, social and economic level. Simultaneously, we will promote other forms of social and economic development like handicraft and the local trade, rural and cultural activities, as additional and necessary components (currently suffering or non-existent) for a general development of the town that will soon have 20.000 inhabitants.
This means the ability to reason:
- on a geographic level, assigning Bellaria I.M. the role of “hinge” between the touristic system on the Riviera and the inland; this way the touristic and economic system will be combined with the commercial one on a rural and handcrafting level concerning the inland, in order to “create a territorial system”.
- on an urban level, in order to meet two needs which are identified as goals “welding” Bellaria and Igea Marina together and giving life to an organic unity between the various parts of the urbanized area.
The short and medium term interventions that we are designing will be compatible with long term projects, within a holistic vision that can build the idea of future town in a coordinated way. The guidelines of the Idea Plan are set up on the "systems of qualities" (meaning by ‘quality’ the ratio between the needs of the town and the services provided by the urban elements) through which a network of relationship systems will be configured:
- mobility system
- macro area system
- centre expansion system
- rural area enhancing system
We will then focus on the relevant subsystems concerning specific aspects of the urban and territorial reality, with the knowledge that there is no dichotomy between the global and the local but there is one only global dimension representing the field of existence where a city can establish itself in different ways and forms. By interpreting the local as a moldable dimension (especially in a tourist reality) to be structured on historical and environmental resources and on the ability to offer interests, we aim at letting people feel experiences and emotions that cannot be reproduced anywhere else.
We are aware that, in the future, the main towns like Rimini, Ravenna and Cesena, will not be the only ones to play a fundamental role; municipal towns, like Bellaria Igea Marina, will get more and more important if they are able to develop their own focus and become significant centres in the territorial system.
Using the example given by Ludovico Quaroni, this Idea Plan tries to promote, within the next urban plan, a project method that can combine formal ideas with legislative assumptions in a synergic way.
