This study analyzes the process of the development of the Viale dei Colli residential district in a hilly area in the late 19th century as part of an urban expansion project conducted when Florence was the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. The previous section examined the details of the regulations governing the buildings and gardens of this district during the contracting procedure and after their construction. It further ascertained the intentions and methods of the architect Giuseppe Poggi, who led the creation of these regulations. This paper analyzes the manners in which the diagrams devised by Poggi to indicate site classifications and building positions differ from the villas that were actually built. Particularly, it compares the zoning classifications and building sizes of each villa and ascertains the aspects of the land sale and villa building processes in which Poggi’s wishes were followed and the areas in which they were not. The paper will also discuss whether or not the conditions stipulated with regard to the buildings and gardens before their construction sufficiently controlled the site classifications and building sizes.
The following three points were ascertained:
１. In terms of the road plan and block arrangement, areas where the incline of the newly built road was the gentlest were chosen. Hence, the plan understood and considered the hilly terrain. Moreover, it took existing buildings to be the standard, and the block arrangement was such that every site would be in contact with the newly-built road.
2. With regard to the site classification and building positions, classifications pertaining to large and small are present in the instructional diagrams. However, the large ones became larger because of the consolidation of multiple sites, whereas the small ones encompassed both small- and medium-sized building sites. Thus, three categories of site sizes appeared overall. However, the positioning of the buildings generally followed the positions laid down in the instruction diagrams.
3. The scrutiny of the distribution of the building sizes and sites by area size category revealed that the large-sized constructions followed the instructional diagram, whereas the small- and medium-sized ones were not arranged separately. Instead, they were ordered in a manner that no building touches another of the same size and density. Hence, a uniform density is achieved in the district as a whole.
Therefore, the investigation revealed that there was actually a qualitative difference between the small and large-scale villas imagined in the instructional diagram. Further, although the building density of each site was higher in reality than imagined in the district as a whole, the mixing of small- and medium-sized villas and equivalence of measures in all areas in the relaxation of area requirements, same-sized sites, and villas were not lined up in rows together. Rather, the distance between them was maintained, accomplishing the regulation of building density in visual terms.
