The Territorial Future.pdf

(1)

(2)

Volume 3

Series Editor Giovanni Maciocco

Editorial Board

Abdul Khakee, Faculty of Social Sciences, Ume˚a University Norman Krumholz, Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Ohio

Ali Madanipour, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University

Leonie Sandercock, School of Community and Regional Planning, Vancouver Frederick Steiner, School of Architecture, University of Texas, Austin Erik Swyngedouw, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester

Rui Yang, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Department of Landscape Architecture, Peking

For other titles published in this series, go to http://www.springer.com/series/7906

(3)

Editorial Staff Isabelle Doucet Paola Pittaluga Silvia Serreli Project Assistants Monica Johansson Giovanna Sanna Translation Christine Tilley

Aims and Scope

Urban and Landscape Perspectives is a series which aims at nurturing theoretic reflection on the city and the territory and working out and applying methods and techniques for improving our physical and social landscapes.

The main issue in the series is developed around the projectual dimension, with the objective of visualising both the city and the territory from a particular viewpoint, which singles out the territorial dimension as the city’s space of communication and negotiation.

The series will face emerging problems that characterise the dynamics of city development, like the new, fresh relations between urban societies and physical space, the right to the city, urban equity, the project for the physical city as a means to reveal civitas, signs of new social cohesiveness, the sense of contemporary public space and the sustainability of urban development.

Concerned with advancing theories on the city, the series resolves to welcome articles that feature a pluralism of disciplinary contributions studying formal and informal practices on the project for the city and seeking conceptual and opera-tive categories capable of understanding and facing the problems inherent in the profound transformations of contemporary urban landscapes.

(4)

The Territorial Future

of the City

Giovanni Maciocco

Editor

(5)

Editor

Giovanni Maciocco

Department of Architecture and Planning Faculty of Architecture, Alghero University of Sassari

Palazzo del Pou Salit Piazza Duomo 6 07041 Alghero Italy

[email protected]

ISBN: 978-3-540-77513-3 e-ISBN: 978-3-540-77514-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008928691

c

2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception

of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered

and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

Cover Image: ‘Tenerife: la citt`a dei nomadi’ by Maroun El-Daccache, 2006

Printed on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com

(6)

(7)

Contributors

Kaat Boon

KULeuven, Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1 3001 Heverlee, Belgium, [email protected]

Bruno De Meulder

KULeuven, Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1 3001 Heverlee, Belgium, [email protected] Isabelle Doucet

Department of Architectural Theory, Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, Berlageweg 1/PO Box 5043, 2628 CR/2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands, [email protected]

Nel Janssens

Department of Architecture, Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Brussels, Hogeschool voor Wetenschap & Kunst, Paleizenstraat 65, 1030 Brussels, Belgium, [email protected]

Giovanni Maciocco

Department of Architecture and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazza Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero, Italy, [email protected]

Alfredo Mela

Department of Human Settlements Science and Technology, Turin Polytechnic, Viale Mattioli 39, 10125 Torino, Italy, [email protected]

Paola Pittaluga

Department of Architectural and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazza Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero, Italy, [email protected]

Silvia Serreli

(8)

Silvano Tagliagambe

Liesl Vanautgaerden

KULeuven Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1 3001 Heverlee, Belgium, [email protected]

(9)

The Territorial Future of the City

Giovanni Maciocco

1 Rediscovery of an Anchorage to the Earth

The “territorial future of the city” seems first of all to bring to mind the rediscovery of an anchorage to the earth. The city rediscovering the earth can be recognised in a scene in the Wim Wenders film Lisbon Story, which has an important metaphorical meaning. Along the route leading Winter, the sound technician, to Lisbon, a series of accidents put his car out of action and it betrays him, leaving him stranded just outside the city. Abandoned by technology, he becomes conscious of his limits in adapting to unusual situations – an example is the clumsy way he loses his spare wheel, which rolls down the slope and falls into the water – and discovers, not without effort, his material existence, which reminds us of the unframeable reality of our natural condition, the fact that however immaterial or abstract the manifold relations city-dwellers mutually engage in across the planet, they are, we are, in spite of ourselves, thrown into space and forced to live there and settle there somewhere (Choay 1994, p. 33).

Through Lisbon, shimmering “in the blue of an Atlantic breeze” (Tabucchi 1994, p. 10), Winter leads us to discover, as he heavily drags his leg in plaster through the alleys of Alfama, that the city demands direct experience of three-dimensionality, a whole-body investment that no simulation can replace, for the body thrown into spaces establishes “intersomaticity” (Formaggio 1976), which, in its turn, estab-lishes urbanity.

In another situation, as he analyses some aspects of the relationship between the aborigines and their land, Wenders observes that they “believed in something essential: they believed they belonged to that region and felt responsible for those places, each for a precise zone. They were actually a part of the territory. The op-posite thought, i.e. that someone could possess a piece of land, was unimaginable for them. In their eyes the land was the owner of men, never vice-versa. The land

G. Maciocco

Department of Architecture and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazza Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero

e-mail: [email protected]

G. Maciocco (ed.), The Territorial Future of the City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives 3, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77514-0 1

C

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

(11)

had authority”. He continues “But our civilisation has completely extinguished or removed the idea of belonging to the earth, and urban images are the proof. Cities have made the earth invisible, almost as if to hide their sense of guilt. The rock of New York or the sand of Berlin are warnings. In many cities it is no longer possible to touch the land, to feel the hardness of the stone”. Moreover, “Cities are so full of all kinds of things that they have cancelled out the essential, namely, they are empty. The desert, on the contrary, is so empty that it overflows with the essential” (Wenders 1992, p. 93).

Among the essential features, one is that men are “a part of the territory”, that “the land is the owner of men”, as is the case, for example, of the small islands of La Maddalena archipelago in Sardinia, which have for some time been considered by the inhabitants as patrimony for collective fruition, territory that is a free good,1

the private destination of which, thus limiting the social dimension of fruition, is unthinkable. The territory as a free good belongs to that group of spatial concepts that are at the base of the sense of human territoriality; they have to inform the urban course in that they are structural to what Pareyson defines as the “forming form” (Pareyson 1988, p. 75) of the city.

But the urban makes this very difficult; it has in a certain sense hidden the essen-tial, cutting off temporal relations between past and future, while cities have a role in this sense, in that they create a temporal relationship for their inhabitants, and somehow place them in a “no-man’s-land between past and future” (Wenders 1992, p. 106).

In this situation, to describe the city in the urban is a very rare art because – as Wenders keenly observes – cities elude description. “They can be perceived so easily by the senses, by smelling the odours, listening to the noises, with direct experience, through sight, obviously most of all through the eyes”. He adds “in a film with a historic nature it is depressing to see the city unencumbered, with antennas dismantled, everything cleared away [. . .] the idea of history on which it is based has completely filtered through. And I get the same impression when they try in a city to unearth the past with the same taste: I feel like I am watching a historic film”. Wenders observes “With these methods, instead of creating a tie with the past, the past is turned into a stereotype. It happened in Berlin, too, both in the east and the west, at the time of the city jubilee: they cleaned and adorned so many places that suddenly they no longer had any history but were just a stereotype of the past. Restoration is an exercise of balance, like tight-rope walking, and with the slightest exaggeration it is destroyed; it only needs excessive cleaning, making a fac¸ade too beautiful, and you end up with a Disneyland city” (Wenders 1992, pp. 106–107).

Urban cosmetics, urbanistic make-up, indeed hide the essential, disguising the city with large shopping malls and recreation centres, which constitute the sign of our incapacity to “touch” the city. But it is perhaps our nature that is changing. Ac-cording to Pierre Restany, “what we are discovering, both in Europe and the U.S.A., is a new sense of nature, of our contemporary, industrial, mechanical, commercial nature” (Restany 1994, p. 387).

Ignasi de Sol`a-Morales draws attention to the subversion of what architects have always considered their exclusive domain, both material and for their studies, and

(12)

which becomes more and more an “obscure object of desire”: “the form of the contemporary metropolis is, moreover, soft and malleable. It does not have a pdetermined structure, but seems to model itself on the grounds of actions and re-actions that different operations present it with. In other words, it is not fossilised once and for all in time, nor defined by someone, the Authorities, to use the name Le Corbusier would have used”.

He maintains “The organic metaphors to describe these situations multiply and in recent years we have seen an authentic return to organic terminology and iconog-raphy for visualising these phenomena. How can what is happening in Singapore, Tokyo, Canberra, Teheran, Mexico or Atlanta be explained? The global nature of these processes no longer enables us to escape, using the alibi of regional cultures or past-inspired nostalgia”. De Sol`a-Morales concludes “We are again faced with phenomena, the potent, wild reality of which is beyond our knowledge. We find ourselves faced with facts that make an issue of the capacity of architects to accom-plish architecture with this form of perpetually active city, expanding and unfolding blindly. The metropolis, the city of present times, rises like a new ‘dark object of desire’ for architecture and architects” (de Sol`a-Morales 1994, p. 401).

In the picture being created, the territory emerges as a deposit of differences, in that it contains this “unlimited potential for discovery” of urban history and the future of the city. But at the same time it is exposed to the dangers of uniform “attraction” of contemporary urban flows, in the same way as the languages of small communities are subjected to the danger of acceleration in the disappearance of languages all over the earth, with the destructive hegemony of languages called “major” that owe their dynamic efficacy to planetary diffusion of mass marketing, technocracy and the media (Steiner 1975).

The prodigality of the historical atlas of the territory favours innovation; it is precious material for significant urban innovation, for singling out possible worlds of space organisation. The possibility of an innovation materialising seems, that is, all the stronger the richer the history of the places producing it, which – recalling Wittgenstein – is what happens in language.2 To define the process of “recapit-ulation” of previous historic and social events, which is at the base of the inno-vation of meaning, Steiner coined the expression “dynamic traditionality”, refer-ring as support for this thesis to some of the artistic biographies among the most innovative of the modernist movement. He enquires “Is this ‘dynamic tradition-ality’ so characteristic of western culture destined to last? The symptoms make us think that we now have acute awareness of this problem. We now know that the modernist movement that dominated art, music and literature in the first half of the century was, due to certain decisive moments of inspiration, a strategy for conservation and protection”. He gives the following example: “Stravinsky’s ge-nius developed through various phases of recapitulation. He drew on Machaut, Gesualdo, Monteverdi. He imitated Tchaikowski and Gounod, Beethoven’s piano sonatas, Haydn’s symphonies, the operas of Pergolesi and Glinka. He incorporated Debussy and Webern in his own idiom. In each case it was presumed that the listener knew the source, grasped the intention to transform which left salient aspects of the original intact”.

(13)

Steiner comments: “Those who seemed to be iconoclasts revealed themselves to be somewhat anguished custodians, intent on running round the museum of civili-sation, seeking order and refuge for its treasures before closing time. In modernism, collage was the representative expedient. . .” (Steiner 1975).

2 Researching the Urban Essential

The city is called upon by the territory to reflect on the meaning of man’s home, to seek the primary elements of its construction, a search for the urban essential, to be found again also in contexts of visual exaltation which tend to “normalise” all points of view.

This capacity to reflect on the essential in these contexts is found emblematically in the Sardinian artist Costantino Nivola. A sculptor known in the United States, where he had systematically collaborated with Le Corbusier and had actively fre-quented the world of American architecture, Nivola continued to look, on Ameri-can soil, for “landscapes at the lowest level of chromatic parsimony” (Nivola 1993, p. 85), taking with him a specific point of view innate from birth: the desire to listen to silence, to orient the glance to take in from the great environment–landscape spaces of the island the essence and sense of his path of research.

Thinking of Nivola, we recall his capacity to maintain a point of view innate from birth when he describes the first day of sketches in New York “starting from the ground – the first level”, which makes him feel inadequate for the purpose due to the visual exaltation produced by Eighth Avenue: “Too much to see, too much to choose from” (Nivola 1993, p. 115), or when he portrays winter in the Vermont countryside, where “the snow, the trees without leaves,. . . reduce landscape poly-chromy to the lowest level of chromatic parsimony”, where it is possible to draw trees “with great attention and humility” (Nivola 1993, p. 85).

In these words there is an attitude inherent in an interpretation of the environment– landscape of Sardinia, that is almost familiar. See a little to try to understand a lot, to gather the founding, primary elements of human settlement (Maciocco 1995b).

In Berlin, where I live, notes Wenders – it is precisely the open spaces that enable men to create themselves an image of the city. Not just because they allow us to embrace in our glance entire areas (sometimes as far as the horizon, a thing in itself that is a pleasure in a city), but also because through these gaps time can be seen which, in general terms, is the element that spells out history

(Wenders 1992, p. 90). The void enables things to be seen that have remained “out” of the space we are in, but that may be just as important for the story being told, like the Tago, rather than the city, is the witness of Lisbon life, like the sand of Berlin – in the “emptiest square of the city”, like the cemetery of Tokio-ga3_{: emptiness, rest and}

peace. For this we need to know how to describe empty space, as it means describing peace, from today on we need to know how to sing an “epos of peace”.4 _{“I love}

cities, but sometimes you have to leave them, observe them from afar to understand their value. The desert offers the best detachment for observing urban life; I know

(14)

the American and Australian deserts, where every so often you bump into some remains of civilisation: a house, a street in ruins, an abandoned railway line, even an abandoned petrol station or motel”, whereas “in a certain sense these are opposite experiences to those we have in the city when we go into an open space. A no-man’s-land inside the metropolis has, as a prerogative, the presence of urban no-man’s-landscape all around, and it shows us it in a different perspective, in another light. While the appearance in the desert of the remains of civilisation makes the landscape all the more empty” (Wenders 1992, p. 92).

In the void there is time, history, memory and the essential. The contemporary dilation of the concept of city on the territory is the search for the void to find history, the essence. . . “. . . when the land was the owner of men . . .” to touch the earth, the hardness of the stone, and discover a thread, a story to link up with other stories, discover relations between stories to discover the relations between men, aiming each action at “opening the eyes”, the senses and the mind.

The void is important material for the project for the city also on the level of controllability of urban shape, a concept effectively emphasised by Rem Koolhaas during the competition for the design of the Melun-S´eart ville nouvelle: “Void. The Melun-S´eart site is too beautiful for it to be possible to imagine a new city with innocence and impunity. The breadth of the landscape, the beauty of the forests and woods, the serenity of the farms, have a presence that makes one shy, initially hostile to any idea of development. A second form of innocence consists of believing, at this end of century, that urban development and the built-up area can be designed and then controlled in a reasonable manner. Too many architects’ ‘visions’ have bitten the dust for it to be possible to dream of new additions to this chimerical army.

The built-up area, the fullness is now uncontrollable with all the azimuths at the mercy of political, financial and cultural forces, that immerse it in perpetual transformation. The same cannot be said of the void; it is perhaps the last subject where certainties are still plausible” (Koolhaas 1994, p. 460). And, as he goes on to describe the competition project, Koolhaas shows how these concepts can be applied: “The essential thing in this project is a system of empty spaces – of bands – inscribed on the land like a Chinese ideogram. We propose that the maximum en-ergy indispensable for the Melun-S´enart development be consecrated to maintaining and protecting these empty spaces. Some of these are partly areas of protection of existing landscape, localised in a way as to unite maximum beauty and fragments of history. Other empty spaces accompany the tracks of fast roads making them arterial urban elements. Yet others are justified by planning: they serve to distribute the major components of the programme on the site.

Our thesis is that if this system of bands is fixed, the qualities of beauty, serenity, of access and urban facilities pursued for the city of Melun-S´enart will be guaran-teed, whoever the architects of the future be” (Koolhaas 1994, p. 460).

And the built-up area? What will happen to the blocks in this model city? “In this proposal the bands define an archipelago of residual blocks, the ‘inter-bands’, different in size, form, position and relations with the bands. Each of these blocks may be developed in almost total independence. They will be able to create an an-thology of competition projects. The ‘archipelago’ model means that their extreme

(15)

individuality in the end strengthens the coherence of the system”. He continues “Each island will be designed with great care, because this proposal does not mean that islands are neglected but that they are left great freedom of conception depend-ing on their scale, which gives them the chance to concentrate on their installations and their relationships with the bands and the city” (Koolhaas 1994, p. 460).

In a certain sense Koolhaas’ reflections confirm the concept, which August En-dell expresses in his book entitled The beauty of the big city, when he maintains that for the project for the city two possibilities exist: either to modify the style of our cities, which would be a long-term project, or to compensate each inadequacy with other pleasures, discover the beauties we have not yet discovered (Endell 1908; Wenders 1992, pp. 102–103),5_{for example, in the empty urban spaces, in the free}

spaces of the city territory, promoting new fruition of what we already possess. This discovery of the “beautiful things we have not yet discovered” was one of Jean Nouvel’s guiding ideas for “Berlin Morgen”, the 1991 consultation on the Berlin of tomorrow (Nouvel 1994, p. 461).

With the purpose of translating the overthrow of a situation long considered fa-tal, to express the will that such horror never again be reproduced, to ward off the existence of “no-man’s-land sous mirador”, Nouvel proposed the creation of The Meeting Line along this wound, a line crossed by all the roads that had been closed for a long time and by others still, “a snake of green, authentic green equipped with little optimistic, coloured lights, with the image of the overlapping in relief of a sweater and a tidying thread. [. . .] On Friedrichstra␤e it is clearly not a matter of painstakingly filling in the free spaces obtained. It is better to use and abuse all abnormalities and surprises – in the Endell sense, precisely – that characterise the place” (Nouvel 1994, p. 461). The abnormalities include the free land on both sides, the beginnings of squares more residual than intentional, the blind, rather sad walls

. . . The surprises include the perspective down to the bottom of the roads crossing

over and the appearance between two buildings of a communications tower or a dome. . . Nouvel’s programme has in this sense, as one of its key points, to make public all free land on one side and the other of the road and tidy it up in various ways so that the surface, the flat area, is strongly expressed.

The attention to free spaces, the placing of the voids of the city at the centre of the city project, expresses renewed interest for differences, for the differential quality of the territory that the free spaces emblematically represent with respect to the urban flood. It is a case of selective attention, typical of the contemporary condition as a reaction to the deluge of visual flows that sweep the ways of life along in the city and banalise the perceptive worlds of the inhabitants.

Selective attention in respect of city territory is a concept that has undergone significant variations in the course of time.6_{In the historical maps of the late 1800s,}

for the cartographer the world was pervasive geography that looked equally atten-tively at the whole territory, while in the post-war and 1950s series the territory was represented almost as a geometric entity, with few features: the world was the city core with its links with other cities, a point of view around which a disciplinary tradition was built and has been reinforced up until recent years. Whereas in the current series,7 attention has been given again to the differential features of the

(16)

territory, an opening of the city towards the territory: the world is a set of places to which value is strongly attributed, of “places that count”, places that are highly selective.8

It is perhaps the need for urban ethics in the new forms of settlement that urges inhabitants to relate selectively with these places that reveal to the human condition the possibility of understanding the territory of urban life, that show constancy in filling the gaps of our spatial experience.

3 Urban Potential of the Territory

To imagine a “territorial future of the city” means to state that the territory has urban potential. That it is possible to assign an urban perspective to the territory is not a novelty in planning disciplinary tradition. We have authoritative precursors in the re-gional planning of European and North American matrices. First with Geddes, then with the development of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), with Lewis Mumford in the front line – and in a certain sense Howard himself – the region9is discovered as a reference unit for planning and the community is adopted as the civitas of an urbs enlarged on the territory.

This is a case – as we know – of a naturalist type of conception of territory and society, which entails the tendency to conceive moral life as an expression of biological needs and instincts and thus to establish in ethics the positive method belonging to the natural sciences.

Organicism10_{is adopted as a pattern for order, and disciplinary codification takes}

place with the post-war American organicist culture. It is a critical position of ratio-nalist mechanicism, which cultivates a social opening, an opening to (teleological, developmental and linear) history and to economics. The concept of region as the reference unit for planning was a cardinal point of the organicist conception that de-veloped mainly in the United States, thanks to the work of the Regional Planners.11

In the background of RPAA activity, there was the weakening of conservationist environmental policy due to the effects of the First World War, the results of the 1920 Census, which registered how city inhabitants for the first time exceeded the number of inhabitants of rural areas, the collapse of Jefferson’s dream of a nation based on family farms, small widespread agricultural communities, urban concentration and metropolitan explosion, recalling the need for planned forms of growth.

It was in this scenario that the RPAA proposed Thomas Adams’ well-known counter-proposal to the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs (between 1921 and 1929) which, presuming spatial impacts of the metropolis to be unavoid-able, considered the growth and expansion of New York incurable. The counter-proposal plan corresponded to the idea of a widespread city region that would be created after the “Fourth Migration”, the metaphor created by Mumford to fuel the operative sense of the project with an effective vision abounding in images: the hoped-for exodus from the city metropolises towards the surrounding region.12_The

RPAA members intended to propose an alternative to centralised, profit-oriented metropolitan society, with a territorial one that was less centralised, more

(17)

concen-trated on social values and grafted onto regions that were balanced in terms of their environmental profile. But the ironic and scornful use of the expression metropoli-tan planning that the RPAA used through their spokesman Henry Wright to fail the New York plan proposed by Thomas Adams in 1926, and the use of the term pudding attributed by Mumford in 1932 to the said plan, underpinned the general meaning of a radical alternative to the existing city and, in this sense, bore the mark of a utopia. The city that hopes to move out onto the territory is a different city, as the close relationship between the RPAA and the garden city figure shows, by projectual exploration and the practice of garden cities linked with Howard (the Garden City plan adapted to the “Fourth Migration” principles). Not by chance the comprehensive regional plan, which included many garden cities (the polycentric model of small and medium cities) and which was Mumford’s objective, could not be realised due to the lack of interest of the political class and business people. This was an issue that lead to a professional breach between Stein and Wright and which – according to Peter Hall – had repercussions on the disintegration of the RPAA.

In the world of the metropolis, it does not seem possible to envisage the involve-ment of the existing in the construction of a new urban perspective. Two worlds, the real one and a possible one interacting with it, are not envisaged. The proposal is for a single world, radically alternative, that targets the territory as the platform for a radical utopia of the city being displaced onto it as it decentralises.

Mumford is well aware of the weakness of the utopia due to its maturing outside the diversity and complexity of the environment in which men live, as he wrote in The Story of Utopias of 1922, where the concept of regional balance and interre-lation appears. He advises us to see society as a whole, to understand interactions between people, space and work, to see the relations between social functions, insti-tutions and the purposes of men, to take our utopia from inside the world of ideas and put it in contact with the real world, to put the arts and sciences in a relationship with the problems and conditions of specific regions and communities and to construct a method to put together the pieces of our fragmented world, on the basis of which to build liveable communities.

4 The Phenomenon of Extended Urban Quality

The Regional Planning movement may be taken as the basic matrix for the following positions that are based on the hypothesis that “urban quality is not an exclusive attribute of the central place, but can become a phenomenon of the field” (Armen 1972). Positions on which the urban geographers who have given life to research with the concept of urban region as their reference nucleus concur, a concept that adopts the territory as the unitary space of the city. In spite of the attempts of the Regional Planners and their eponyms, reality shows itself in different forms.

The dynamics of virtual and physical technical networks thus tend to replace the statics of built-up places in conditioning urban behaviour and mentality. A physical and mental reference system is becoming established, made up of material and im-material networks as well as technical objects, the manipulation of which brings

(18)

into play a stock of images and information that echo round a circuit encircling the relationships our societies entertain with space, time and men.

This operative system is valid for, and may be developed in, any place, be it city or country, village or suburb, and may be called the urban (Choay 1994). The arrival of the urban breaks down the ancient solidarity between urbs and civitas. Interaction between individuals is now both de-multiplied and delocalised. It seems that belong-ing to communities with different interests is no longer founded on proximity, nor on local demographic density (ethics of proximity).

Transport and telecommunications involve us in increasingly numerous and di-verse relations, members of abstract collectivities or collectivities whose spatial in-stallations no longer coincide or show stability over time.

The American economist Melvin Webber succeeded in describing with a lapidary formula – “the non-place urban realm” – the delocalisation of the ancestral civitas, and in analysing in an exemplary way the possible, explorable repercussions, in par-ticular tele-work. In 1968 he proposed the “post-city age” concept (Webber 1967), which it would be ambiguous to translate as the post-urban age, as it is better to give the name urban to the new planetary culture and its way, simultaneously unique and polymorphous, of impacting on habitable space.

A study of the lexis reveals the hegemony of the urban. The expression urban region no longer has the meaning regionalism assigned to it, but “urban” is the ad-jective of new entities, like urban region, indeed, urban community, urban district, which say quite a lot about the eclipse of the city and the anachronistic nature of many terms that will no longer return except in history or nostalgic moments (Choay 1994). The urban is “all that is of interest”, this being a point of view around which many planning paradigms have been constructed and reinforced in recent years. The background to the Regional Planners was the geographical world shown in the historic maps of the end of the 1800s, where, as already stated, for the cartographer, the world was a pervasive form of geography that looked equally attentively at the whole territory, which precisely for this reason offered the city project the quality of its differences. But from the second half of the post-war period onwards, the territory was represented almost as a geometric entity, with few features: the world was the city core with its real and virtual links with other cities, which excludes all that may be considered waste from the “normality” of the pervasive urban ma-chine. In the contemporary city there is no longer an inside and an outside. Even urban science fiction literature has been recording this perception of space for some time. If sociological science fiction of the 1940s–1950s was characterised by the inside–outside spatial dichotomy, from the 1980s onwards this distinction no longer appeared to work. In metropolitan post-civilisation the experience of “outside” rep-resented by the non-urban, by nature, seems simply to disappear and leave room for urban structures which expand and swallow up all that is available of the world. The only physical experience that can be had is the experience of the city, i.e. the limits that compose it internally, the barriers. In the current imagination freedom, deviation from rules will thus no longer be a physical space, but a synthetic space – virtual reality: “There’s no place there, it was said to children, when cyberspace was explained” (Gibson 1988).

(19)

So, how can we speak of “the territorial future of the city”? Why – to refer back to Mumford – is it still possible “to construct a method to put together the pieces of our fragmented world”, as a base on which to build liveable communi-ties? Why can city and territory still enter into relations to constitute “our world” in forms and modalities that are different from regionalism and more consistent with postmodernity?

As we have emphasised, the expression “territory” brings to mind an operative weakness recurring in the paths of tradition of the discipline, which, in glorious dreams of leaders and eponyms of regionalism, wearily sought in it the utopia of a new concept of city. “The city is of the country”, Mumford asserted, to under-line the ancestral bond of the belonging of the pre-industrial European city to the country (Mumford 1938, p. 306). If, in the contemporary city, on the one hand, “the country is of the city”, the territory belongs to the city for periurbanisation processes, for setting up infrastructures and for the new technological content re-quired by the world of flows, then, on the other, “the city is of the country” (Mumford 1938), the city belongs to the territory for the environmental interdepen-dence characterising its relations, on which the environmental quality of urban life is founded.

But, in our tradition, an alternative figure to the region is also present – be it in the sense of space of city relations, be it in that of city extended onto the territory – which enables us to consider city and territory as a pair of opposites, like space and counter-space, as a dialectal figure that renders a new concept of urbanity for contemporary societies thinkable.

5 The Territory as Counter-Space

The category of counter-space refers to past time. Just as the introduction of public parks in capital cities in the nineteenth century aimed at bringing nature into the city as counter-space at the moment when the cities of the first industrial revolution were built, as an antidote to the new industrial city, so our post-industrial culture calls for spaces of freedom, undefined, unproductive, but this time not linked with the myth-ical notion of nature but with the experience of memory, of romantic enchantment with the absent past as a critical arm in the face of the banal productivist present (de Sol`a-Morales 1995; de Sol`a-Morales et al. 1996).

The theme of counter-space is nowadays connected with disenchantment for the modern city, characterising a critical tradition always in search of alternative spaces outside or within the city, real and acceptable compared with the daily reality of aggressive, anonymous, ugly metropolises – a disenchantment inherent in the urban pessimism that characterises the tradition of disciplines dealing with the city and considers the city of the present a foretaste of a better life (Mumford 1938).

We can connect this theme with the figure of the “dualised city” that Saskia Sassen adopts to explain the “grasp” the city has on globalisation processes (Sassen 2006). Global cities are more and more infrastructures inhabited by functions and specialised actors, but are also linked to territories with smaller cities, rich in

(20)

complexity and specialisation. These situations have, on their part, produced a variety of responses, to begin with the renewed enthusiasm for aesthetisation of the city, for its conservation, for maintaining its public space aspect. The enormous dimensions of current urban systems have brought with them a reappraisal of terrain vague and more modest spaces, where people’s habits can contribute to the creation of public space, beyond the monumentalised public spaces of the State.

The type of complexity that has ensued may, in its turn, involve various types of temporary public, that come to life in cities in particular spaces at particular times of the day and the night, in the sense that the city “naturally” urges people to seek public space (Hajer and Reijndorp 2001; Smith 2006; Barnett and Low 2004).

The cities of today constitute the terrain on which people from all over the world cross paths with modalities not possible in any other place. In these complex cities, diversity may pass through the routine of everyday life, work, public transport and urban events such as demonstrations and festivals. In addition, as powerful global actors put forward growing requests for urban space, thus removing from it less potent users, urban space is politicised in the act of constructing itself (Sassen 2006). It is a case of a policy inserted in the physical fabric of the city. The emerging global movement for the rights of the city is one of the emblematic examples of this struggle.

Contemporary public space is in a certain sense “external” to the homologated space of the contemporary city. Saskia Sassen emphasises an aspect of fundamental importance of the urban situation, both in the past and in our times: the juxtaposition of very large dimensions and interstitial spaces. The cities we are concentrating on in their emerging “intercity geographies” are spaces with impressive structures, markets and capacities. The problem, in the case in question, does not concern so much the few designers, exceptional and fortunate, who are successful on the global stage in their specific field; the attention is, if anything, directed at a more widespread urban landscape and opportunities to “do” something within urban spaces dominated by impressive structures and powerful actors. What is this land-scape within which the project has to operate nowadays? Growing speeds mean that an ever greater range of urban experiences is a reality of flows rather than of things, in spite of the great quantity of materiality surrounding us (Mongin 2005; Drainville 2004).

One of the objectives of research on globalisation and digitalisation is indeed that of recognising the fixedness and materiality underpinning a large part of the global and digital realms, overshadowed by the dominant conviction that all is becoming a flow (Sassen 2006). Things and materiality are fundamental for digitalisation and globalisation, and places are important for global flows. At the same time as im-pressive projects proliferate in these cities, they enclose, however, many under-used spaces, often characterised more by memory than by a current meaning. Spaces are part of the interior nature of the city but remain external to its spatial schemes and its organising logic based on the principle of utility. It is a case of terrain vague that en-ables many residents to connect with cities in rapid transformation in which they live and to subjectively bypass the impressive infrastructures which, in such a city, have ended up dominating an ever-increasing number of spaces (Van Houtum et al. 2005).

(21)

These spaces are also the external territories of dense metropolises, the small and medium cities of low-density territories. To throw oneself onto such terrain vague to maximise property development would be a mistake from this point of view. To maintain part of this opening might have more sense in terms of capitalisation of fu-ture options at a moment in which utility logics are changing with such rapidity. It is in this perspective that the role should be considered, for example, of external territo-ries with respect to the central European urban nebula. This pervasive “urban realm” (Choay 1994) that has affected the central band of the European area from south to north is characterised in many parts by very low environmental quality of urban life (Maciocco 1999). Notwithstanding the reassuring images of spatial economy, some numbers are pitiless: 100 billion Ecus to reclaim 200,000 ha of discarded industrial areas.13 _{Although an underestimation of the entity of European wastelands and of}

the energy necessary to recuperate contaminated lands is evident, these numbers put up a wall of impossibility against the prospect of city worlds that would be nothing more than the current ones “recuperated”. A reflection comparing the entities of the phenomena and the energy to be employed reveals that efforts for recuperation in European urban areas are actually oriented in a selective way, depending on urban marketing requisites.14_{Away from the enchanted urban islands, subjected to}

make-up by marketing demands, the city, in effect, shows its real face deformed by excess pollution of places and ideas.15 _{On this urban horizon, promising perspectives for}

constructing possible worlds seem perhaps to open up for spaces external to the European nebula, for the vast territories of nature and history, perspectives in which the environmental quality of the city is sustained on the grounds of a much vaster context than organised life. This does not mean temporary support while waiting for “recuperation”, but rather the beginning of the construction of a new urban world that entrusts its possible perspectives to the involvement of “territories without a voice”. It is a case of a process of deep change in aesthetic sensitivity (Shepheard 1997) which will enable the world to be seen with different eyes16and the positive ambiguity of marginality to be recognised in the differential quality of territories,17a different territorial subjectivity, recalling continuous experience of otherness in that it is a constituent part of the city project (Guattari 1991). Possible prospects may be taking shape on European city territory for the vast territories, a new experience of their otherness in which the reasons for the territory may be experienced for the construction of possible worlds of settlement. A projectual perspective that creates a relationship between different forms and processes that vary in a range between two extremes.

On the one hand, the spaces of the contemporary city, corresponding to forms and processes in intensive urban situations, the management of which has the character-istics of a form of action bound to the functioning of a consolidated urban machine, in which redevelopment actions that are still typical of urban marketing demands and do not open up important perspectives, in the short and medium term, for urban refounding in the environmental sense, attempt to orient themselves in certain key directions – towards low energy consumption mobility, towards the fight against all forms of pollution, towards waste disposal as a project for each form of deterioration to face the theme of refuse and waste in the life of men and city – which open up

(22)

in the long term a field of possibilities for the environmental quality of spatial life. There infrastructure creation is wearily aimed at rendering, in the medium period, the technological content of cities once again superior to that of individuals, families and businesses, and single cities have difficulty in dealing with renewed attention to improving the quality of the dimensions of community life, to facilities for people, to civitas, the indivisible link of which with the urbs is a constituent part of the actual meaning of city. On the other hand, there are the counter-spaces of the Euro-pean city which correspond to forms and processes in situations rich in nature and history, whose management has characteristics – of process organisation, reversibil-ity, self-reproducibilreversibil-ity, of opening up possibilities – that are part of a form of action placing the environment, as strategic potential of the territory, as the central nucleus of a territorial policy opening up promising perspectives to territories external to the European urban nebula; infrastructure creation will be prevalently light, economies are now marginal, but will need to progressively become structural, the generative process is built on the local capacity to internally redevelop and unfold the energy external to the metropolis in the various components of the economic, cultural and social system, trying out new citizenships, economies and cultures.

6 The Territory as Contemporary Public Space

We must nevertheless acknowledge that if the contemporary city can be considered the “covering for a series of flows” (Kaijima and Tsukamoto 2006, p. 238), the territory appears in some ways subjected to processes of “ruination”. But this gives the territory itself a denotative essential nature, which is not just structural, but also pictorial, typological and symbolic (Manieri Elia 2006, p. 156), and which estab-lishes a difference compared with the sometimes excessive connotations of the city, its representational dimensions. Mario Manieri Elia reminds us that the ruin – in its most typical and obvious form – as well as, in the Mediterranean area, its most usual – lives in the collective imagination as a familiar presence. In many cases it is part of a context within which its own meaning reverberates, making clear relations that are historic but also structural and systemic (Manieri Elia 2006, p. 156). Also in the cases where it constitutes an isolated presence, its image arouses a serene, historic relationship, strong and at the same alluding to a detachment that has in-tervened in the temporal sequence – a detachment that is anything but unfillable, in that it does not imply also a spatial distance, due to that particular familiarity that the ruin, precisely for what it is, arouses and confirms. If we accept this analogy as a metaphor of work, the territory, too, just like the ruin, as well as constituting a generally serene and a-conflictive presence, might, in a general sense, qualify as a transitional object, a testimony and channel referring back to something different from itself. A heterotopia, therefore, that expresses above all a “lack” that cannot be compensated, as such, precisely in that it is substantiated by a deep signifying capacity that testifies to the absence of use, the living relationship with men, partic-ipation in the world and life. It is the territory itself, for being such, that will narrate all this; and so it becomes its primary sense as well as its value, at least as “historic

(23)

appeal”. But, as we know, there is no historic appeal that is not accompanied not only by aesthetic appeal but also by every other sort of appeal, the first among these being the semantic: attention to sense (Manieri Elia 2006, p. 156). Sense that, as has been proposed, lies in the peculiar quality of the suggestive image of a “lack”, soothed by the long temporal distance and charged with identity value for the essentiality of the message that has taken on particular denotative strength in the long process of confirmation of its contextual presence and the symbolic investment attributed to it gradually by human society.

In this anatomic evidence that the territory offers us, we find a cognitive value that undoubtedly exists, but this is an aspect, the cognitive breadth of which proves reductive at the outset, compared with semantic complexity and the richness of sense that the territory offers. Cognitive attention that is only archaeological cannot but require and aim at protective purposes, at the conservation of the territory. This, however, leaves in the background that quality which can be defined as the “genetic code” of the territory, its symbolic and collective endowment.

In this integrated cognitive picture, which confronts the territory “not intended as a mass of relics but as history that includes us” (Aug´e 2003), we can try to sound out some points of agreement.

The territory cannot be understood a priori as an archaeological object, above all for its constant integration in past evolution that its ruination has not prevented nor prevents, indeed bears witness to. The territory is a “built-up entity” that, dur-ing its “becomdur-ing” so, experienced a long phase of abandonment due to a gradual weakening of its relations with men, with an obvious fall in maintenance and use, with degradation that usually took on particular gradual features. The slow loss of integritas of the relationship between city and territory marks a historical process of great cultural significance with regard to relational dynamics between men and the built-up entity. If it is true that we live in a “detemporalised” present “not equipped to access the great category of the past” (Aug´e 2003), this sensation derives from a confessed relationship with pre-existing entities perceived as “relics”, as residual “ruins”. But this happens due to persistent lack of acceptance of “becoming”. The territory, as a general rule, tends to put up resistance against the dynamics of the present – resistance, though, that is not devoid of sense but, if anything, “too full” of meanings, which is an integrating part of our present and comes into play in the processes of retrieval of sense. The re-insertion of the territory in the context of urban and social life, therefore, should not cancel out its polysemous quality. The event that can reawaken it has to be complex and integrated, coherent with its past development (which is our past). This event is already present and it is the low-density city, a perspective of environmental city that recuperates the historical depth and the sense of its message of a “lack” and relaunches it in current terms.

This dialectic between the connotative character of the contemporary city and the denotative character of the territory alludes to two conceptual worlds. The first underpins a representational conception of the city as an “environmental image”, that has impressed on it the separability of contemplation of an urban landscape from living within it, a notion of landscape-object constructed and established by modernity, from which we feel excluded, and with which a relationship of equality

(24)

is never established. The second refers to an eminently projectual conception, like the willingness to take on new urban meanings. Understood in this way, the territory is the place where ethos is recuperated, all that which has not been at the centre, which was not in the polis. In this perspective, the project for the territory may be imagined as a complex process towards understanding contemporary public space, a new concept of public space as a space for reflection, far from habitual circuits, to escape from the hegemony of communication flows which produce standardisation of spatial experiences, a modality of public spaces in which we can move without feeling ourselves manipulated.

The project for the territory is the project for contemporary public space. In this sense, the project for the territory is the project for the city, and this is why we speak of the “territorial future of the city”.

This new concept of contemporary public space reveals itself on territories in a certain sense “external” to the processes of commercialisation, privatisation and theme-parking of the contemporary city. These territories, in which the new modal-ities of public space may be experimented, are the counter-spaces of the metropolis. Utility logics will be of no use. We cannot help but think that artists will be a part of the answer, whichever form of art they give us: fleeting installations and public performances or more lasting types of public sculpture, site-specific art referring to the local community or nomadic sculptures that move from place to place (Sassen 2006). Urban practices of constructing public space use improbable spaces. There are a whole variety of spaces like this. An example is that of the numerous intersec-tions of transport and communication networks, where the bare eye or engineer’s perception can discern no other form, no possibility of form, but just see pure in-frastructures and their necessary use. Another example is the space in which an effort is essential to manage to make out possible architecture where now there is simply formal silence, a non-existence, a space like modest terrain vague, not a grand environment that becomes magnificent due to the vast proportions of its deterioration, as can happen in the case of an old industrial harbour no longer in use. At the present moment we are experiencing a sort of crisis of public space, de-riving indeed from its commercialisation. The grand monumentalised State spaces, especially in cities that were once imperial, dominate our experience of public space. Those who use them make them public precisely on the grounds of this practice of theirs. But what can be said of the effective creation of public space in these complex cities, be it by architectural interventions or user practices? The space accessible to the public is an enormous resource and we need this space in a greater quantity. But let us not confuse the space accessible to the public with public space. The latter needs to be created by practices and subjectivity of individuals; with their practices space users end up creating various types of “public dimension” on the border of the city, in its counter-spaces. But what is the relationship between the territory and contemporary public space? The environmental dimension comes to our aid, measuring our capacity to reconstruct urban ethics even in a condition of distance from the place, outside the condition of proximity (Lagendijk and Oinas 2005). Difficulties emerge, in effect, when the spatial forms of urban alter and dif-ferent ways of imagining space for settlement open up. The change is characterised

(25)

by the dilation – above all mental – of the urban onto the territory, which causes what Massimo Cacciari (Cacciari 1990) defines as the contemporary contradiction between the need for maintaining a relationship with places, and the demand for mobility, that is indifferent to it: an “extended use of the territory” (Secchi 1994) which produces important shifts in the area of urbanistics,18_{pushing towards}

over-coming disciplinary paradigms that have the compact city at their centre, a refusal of the current assumption that it is indeed “all that is of interest”, in a bitterly selec-tive way.

In this scenario should be placed the disciplinary tendency that looks again at these instruments and abandons a kind of holistic reductionism, where “the city is all that is of interest”, to move towards a position in a certain sense characterised by the “idea of the synecdoche” (Benvenuto 1994), in which the environment is a part from which to begin to recapitulate and reorder the whole. This extension of the “myth of the mother city to the myth of mother earth” (Choay 1991), which the environmental dimension makes present in the contemporary urban condition, is also the sign that the city is losing its conceptual unity, that it is becoming a simulacrum of a city (de Azua 2003), a park, or perhaps a group of theme-parks, islands without an archipelago, enclosed and self-sufficient, that are often the background to urban segregation phenomena where the public sphere is more and more absent. It is indeed the environmental dimension that, attracting a “wider use of the territory”, opens up perspectives for a new public sphere as the adop-tion of collective awareness of the “environmental dominants” present in the life of the men inhabiting a territory, which constitute “an idea that unites places and spatial concepts rich in nature and history” (Maciocco 1995a). Here places are not necessarily meant as physical entities, but indeed, as expressed by Massimo Cacciari, as “single, specific complexes of relations” (Cacciari 1990), single, spe-cific “notional worlds” of communities. Their differences are tied to transformation and communication processes on different scales, which influence the sense com-munities grant to places and to differences. But some of these places – using the word as suggested above – with regard to processes of selection inherent in the contemporary condition, are – in that they remain – more than others, significant of space organisation; they represent the “environmental dominants” of human set-tlement (Maciocco 1991). This encourages us to interpret all places, understand their meanings, decode them as representative of a thread of relations that grants sense to the integrity of the urban and territorial palimpsest, so that each projec-tual experience at each operative scale, even the tiniest, may be converted into an action making the relevant, important sense of this thread of relations emerge. For this, facilities for creative encounters between men living on this territory need to be activated, enabling them to bring out their creativity, their perceptive worlds, since the sense of territoriality, before expressing itself by attachment to a particular place, is, first of all, the relationship between men and – as M. Roncayolo observes – “derives from the diffusion of mental images, tales, more or less abstract rep-resentations [. . .], it is mythological [. . .] The individual, rather than perceive the territory, assimilates it and creates it through his practices and beliefs of a social nature” (Roncayolo 1980, p. 225). As Franc¸oise Choay writes, these are the places

(26)

that differentiate the future of the European city from the “collage city” (Rowe and Koetter 1978), in that its future can never be one of juxtaposition of modern and ancient but, due to the way it has been formed and taken apart, will be an “urban realm” in which places rich in nature and history will emerge as reference to an urban path for a city to be invented (Choay 1994). These are the places where the territory reveals itself as a new modality of contemporary public space, where, as individuals, we can stay without feeling manipulated and at the same time be part of a whole.

7 The Territorial Future of the City: About this Book

The reinsertion of the territory in the context of urban life is investigated in this book with contributions by architects, urbanists, sociologists and philosophers whose re-flections explore low-density urban situations, an environmental city perspective that recuperates the historic depth and sense of the territory and relaunches them in current terms, hence the “territorial future of the city”.

The article “The dilation of the concept of ‘inhabit’ and the city/territory rela-tionship” by Silvano Tagliagambe begins with a theoretical analysis of the concept of space and the difference between space and “spatiality”, with the purpose of focussing on the problem of the spreading of the city onto the territory within the theoretical sphere most suitable to this specific experience.

On the basis of the strong interweaving of perception, action and project, which emerges from the most significant results of recent studies on cerebral mecha-nisms and processes, it is emphasised that the city’s relationship with the territory surrounding it needs to be focussed on from the point of view not of spatiality generically meant, but of space whose structure refers back to the primary hori-zon of action and of the project underlying it, i.e. to those capacities for mov-ing and orientmov-ing ourselves in the space surroundmov-ing us, as well as for graspmov-ing the actions and intentions of others, which contribute to constituting a habitable world.

Beginning with this premise, it is proposed that the matter of the dilation of inhabiting and the spreading of the city onto the territory be placed in a suitable, appropriate space, the intermediate space between the two extremes at play, that of their boundary, adopted not as a clear, insurmountable demarcation line but as an interface, i.e. a two-sided buffer zone, one oriented towards the urban dimension and the other towards the territorial.

With this aim, the ideas proposed by Pavel Florenskij in a study of his of 1919 entitled Organoproekcija (The projection of the organs) are re-examined and de-veloped. When adapted to the problem analysed, they can be translated into the pinpointing of what might be considered the crucial challenge territorial planning has to face today: to stimulate the capacity on the part of communities to recog-nise themselves as a unit with respect to “notable places” with which their iden-tity is bound and which therefore define the borders of their natural, social and cultural environment sphere, and to shift these borders, projecting themselves into

(27)

supra-local scenarios, to build new urban solidarities and new, vaster and more complex forms of identity.

In “Planning in search of ground: committed muddling through or a critical view from above?”, Isabelle Doucet explores the knowledge processes we enhance to un-derstand our (changing) spatial environments. By means of five “experiences” from within planning and architecture – Cities without Cities (Thomas Sieverts 2003) and Switzerland: An Urban Portrait (Diener et al. 2006) – and from the borders of these disciplines – the Micronomics projects by City Mine(d), Political Typographies by Ursula Biemann, Angela Melitopoulos and Lisa Parks, and the [Negotiating Space] Interactive Mapping in 2D/3D workshop – she explores the interdisciplinary and inter-experiential grey zones, such as between the university, activism and the field. She explores the relations created by these studies between theory and practice and between conceptual innovation, fieldwork and research outcomes. The five “experi-ences” are explored through their functioning as “laboratories” in which knowledge is produced according to certain rules, conventions, methods and constraints. She explores the position of the researcher towards his/her object of research (e.g. the city) but also the outcome generated by the “laboratories”: a text, book, map or design. She also explores the practical consequences of extending our architectural and planning research to other, more hybrid experiences. Using the five selected “experiences” and interdisciplinary and inter-knowledge challenges, she addresses the role of ground precisely by unravelling three major components of knowledge production: the position of the researcher, the functioning of his/her laboratory and the production of output.

In “The polycentric city and environmental resources”, Alfredo Mela explores one of the most important processes transforming the set-up of the territory in the current phase: the tendency towards modification in a polycentric sense of metropolitan areas. In effect, territorial organisation previously based on a tendency towards localisation of the rarer functions and services in central areas and on a clear contrast between centre and periphery now appears to be becoming old-fashioned in the metropolises of the more developed countries. It is being substituted by a much more complex structure envisaging, on the one hand, the division of the central space itself into thematic polarities and, on the other, the emergence of decentred poles in peripheral space and peri-urban crowns, especially in spots characterised by greater motor vehicle accessibility.

This essay intends, first of all, to supply departure points for a description of this phenomenon and for an analysis that will enable different types of metropolitan pole to be distinguished, throwing light on the positive and negative effects this transformation entails. In order to do so, it takes a cue, in particular, from a re-cent paper by Harvey, which proposes a distinction between three dimensions of space (absolute, relative and relational space); on the strength of this, corresponding dimensions of metropolitan polycentrism are pinpointed. Moreover, a reflection is made on possible paths of intervention with a plan directed both at promoting the positive aspects of the phenomenon of city transformation in a polycentric sense and at neutralising at the same time the negative effects, especially as regards possible fragmentation of urban space and accentuation of the social imbalances between the

(28)

various parts of the city. Furthermore, light is thrown on how each intervention needs to aim at inducing the reorganisation of spatial functions with a view to increasing sustainability of the territorial development model.

In her paper “Images of local societies and projects for space”, Paola Pittaluga describes how the coherence between the spatial images of local societies and the images produced by knowledge is becoming a constituent requisite of the project for space organisation. Indeed, one of the reasons for the inefficacy of projectual activity may be acknowledged in the divergence between the project and the im-plementation of it and, as underlined, in the ever-increasing difficulty of producing and promoting a sense of belonging and rootedness towards the urban territorial contexts concerned, which translates into a principle of responsibility with respect to the future of our own space of life. This leads us to hypothesise that the gap ensuing might indeed constitute a cause of inefficacy, in the sense that when the image with which the project is represented does not contain elements deriving from the “perceptive worlds” of a settled society, created by a process of “territorial hysteresis” in which environmental dominants emerge – the significant places, the non-negotiable values, the long-lasting elements that have always been at the head of space organisation of the society and above all the relations between the latter – it may often happen that the outcome is not effective and shared, precisely because it concerns elements alienated from the local population and because it derives from exogenous models of development indifferent to the actual vocations of the context.

The article “Critical Design – The implementation of ‘designerly’ thinking to ex-plore the futurity of our physical environment” by Nel Janssens critically addresses the importance of designerly thinking in exploring the futurity of our physical en-vironment. Acknowledging the important role of design in participation and com-munication processes, as occurs in urban planning projects, the author nevertheless criticises the way “research by design” is currently adopted. The concern is that design is nowadays too often reduced to its communicative, decision-facilitating and programme-tuning capacities, whereas the more critical capacities of design-erly thinking get much less attention and appraisal. The alternative approach that is proposed here is to develop “research by Critical Design” in a kind of analogy and complementarity with the already existing term “critical theory”. The text then explores how utopian thinking can be considered as a breeding ground for “Critical Design” by beginning with the statement that “Critical Design” is in fact “tentative design”, a type of designerly thinking that can be characterised by the capacity of prefiguration, hence making prospective alternatives the subject of anticipative reflection. The possibilities for such “tentative design” are explored in this chapter by means of two major cases. The Unadapted City (T.O.P. Office/Luc Deleu) is not merely a radical project for the city, but a specific way of thinking about the city through design. As a second case study, “Mare Meum” is explored: a project in which the designerly approach of FLC extended (free associating designers) exem-plifies how an alternative future can be conceptualised by speculating on a differ-ent – though latdiffer-ently presdiffer-ent – reality, hence surpassing the given situation. These projects show that their unconventional or non-conformist thinking is essential to

The Territorial Future.pdf

Volume 3

The Territorial Future

of the City

Giovanni Maciocco

Editor

Contributors

Contents

The Territorial Future of the City

1 Rediscovery of an Anchorage to the Earth

2 Researching the Urban Essential

3 Urban Potential of the Territory

4 The Phenomenon of Extended Urban Quality

5 The Territory as Counter-Space

6 The Territory as Contemporary Public Space

7 The Territorial Future of the City: About this Book