Il Progetto dei territori urbani: la dimensione ambientale nel progetto della città

The research develops from the assumption that “the urban” can be identified and extended to encompass an entire territory.Considering the complexity which challenges the consolidated idea of city, what type of approach can we use to read, know and design the city and the contemporary territory? What meanings does the territory take on in the urban life? What new forms of cities are emerging?Urban contexts and their representation have changed considerably during the last decades. The contemporary city manifests itself in many forms and on various scales. Numerous large urban concentrations characterized by continuous transformation exist alongside small and medium-sized cities generated by processes of urban development marketing which have been applied in a similar manner in the majority of urban contexts. The latter are “marginal” territories, where low density is a common feature. These small and medium centres have gradually lost their urban qualities, and currently many of them are struggling for survival.The contemporary city that shows itself in unusual spatial configurations compared to the consolidated city, is due to the changes in settlement and the social, economic, cultural and landscape changes that have taken place and continue to take place on the territory.The need to seek new definitions, connected with a widening of the concept of inhabiting, to which corresponds an expansion in the use of territory, projects spatial images which require new interpretative categories at the border between different analytical and project-oriented disciplines.The aim of this research is to trace the relationship between natural resources and the potential evolution of future urban landscapes in urban territory. This means referring to “urban” as “social” and to examine closely the spatial dynamics of the contemporary city. The approach is based on the recognition of “settlement ecologies” as territorial contexts through which social and spatial organization gives meaning to space settlement.The research aims at destructuring the axial rigidity of the dichotomous system by picking out territory and urban, beginning from the identification of semantic relationships, in trying to rethink the discipline of urban planning through the irruption of the “landscape” as structural element of the city, checking contributions in terms of methodology.