Urban Morphology & Environmental Performance: A Masterplan of Farini’s Disused Railways via IMM
Channel: IMMdesignlab
Date: 15/06/2021

Current policies to mitigate the climate change caused by human activities are oriented toward sustainable urban transformations to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. The urban settlement forms could have a disproportionately large effect over the environmental performance and consequently on any effective long-term strategy for reducing C02 emission in atmosphere. Hence, this video demonstrates how to transform an existing neighbourhood region into a better performing system, using IMM (Integrated Modification Methodology) a rigours scientific method to understand what the city really needs is vital. 
Complexity is the concept of this study, the case of Farini in Milan has been considered as a complex system which includes subsystems (volume, void, types of uses and transportation). The project titled ‘Urban Morphology & Environmental Performance: A Masterplan of Farini’s Disused Railways in Milan via IMM Methodology’ is based on IMM methodology a multi-scale, holistic, model-based approach. Regarding to scales, three main scale is interested: city scale of Milan, intermediate scale which includes surrounding and the local scale which interventions will be proposed. 
According to the methodology four phases has been applied: Diagnostic, Formulation, Transformation and Retrofitting. In the first phase, it is tried to be understood how the subsystem in the whole system interacts with each other. In the second phase, the most problematic and weakest part of the system is defined. This weak part is called ‘Catalyst’. In Farini case, it is links horizontally and permeability in vertical plane. After the decision of catalyst, it is tried to transform to a sustainable city by relevant interventions. 
However, even the interventions are mainly based on catalyst, there is a chain reaction since everything in the system is connected with each other and if one change, all system is going to be affected by this action. Last phase, which is retrofitting, is to understand how the new complex adaptive system is organized and evaluate the environmental performance, compare it with the previous CAS’ performance.