Festival dell'architettura

If a settlement phenomenon comes to assume the connotations of a city this becomes evident first and foremost through its economic characterisation as a structural factor that is simultaneously determinant and diriment. Determinant in its capacity to make the settlement material dynamic and qualified in its becoming a “city”, true to a development, from historical experience, that is principally, but not necessarily, expansive. Diriment inasmuch as it is able to build identity through peculiar physiologies modelled on historical/geographical factors typical of its rôle, thereby equally of a political nature.

In Max Weber’s classification, we find a precise personification of the city through its economic rôle, yet today that physiognomic model seems increasingly to be losing efficacy in the face of global phenomena of a capitalistic evolution that has fostered the sprawling settlement, the replication of urban types, the liquefaction of a unitary or at any rate articulate city entity.

In this paradoxical dynamic of maximum relativization and at the same time homologation of the urban phenomenon, it does however appear clear that after the expansive phase and the prevailing market crisis caused by the property speculation bubble, the relationship between economics and city can no longer arise through synergic mechanisms involving finance, land revenues and the property sector. The process of continuous regeneration necessary to maintain city status is going to have to reacquire its peculiar functionality, returning to make itself a tool of productive, logistical, and representative opportunities, context by context but at all times within a multi-scalar scene of urban and territorial relationships. In parallel, in line with a historically proven vocation, the city will also be obliged to rediscover its own economy in a community key, one of elaboration and accumulation of social, cultural and civil values through a renewed citizenship formula.

As part of cities’ search for new, increasingly necessary, economic strategies, the urban form needs to grow to be a component that is anything but secondary. In reality, in the applied experimentation of the new productive and social economy already mentioned, what often prevails, as a reaction to the recent building bulimia, is the unequivocal albeit liquidating identification of the city’s formal datum and material datum, within the Italian context represented, often understandably, by the appellative of what has been called “overbuilding”. The involuntary or fanciful forms to be found in many urban landscapes indeed risk representing tout court – in the eyes of widespread but frequently qualified public opinion – the sense of an architectural form that has fallen short in its urban duty in terms of functionality, liveability ‒ conceivably beauty ̶ but above all, or so I feel, of identity.

With respect to this generalisation as common as it is equivocal, the fashionable theme of the “smart city”, for example, seems to moot the alternative of a city that is immaterial and substantially little prone to the formal datum, in favour of a facilitating functionalism realized by way of new data processing and environmental technologies. Yet again, in other ways and with other tools, the functionalist response does promise to provide answers to the problems of the city. It is however difficult to think that this can come about by leaving aside the datum of urban forms, through an organic unity based virtually exclusively on the nervous system - yesterday of transport infrastructure, today of communication – and hence devoid of tissues, muscles, corporeal form (spatial, plastic, figurative).

On the contrary, wishing precisely to provide access to the importance of the image in the city’s economic reconfiguration processes, focussing on an economy of forms integrated with that of production functions, lifestyles and sociality, a ceaselessly sought identity would appear the obligatory avenue to free up all the potentialities of being a city. Evidently, this will have to occur outside of any episteme, including that which nihilistically tends to exorcize any formal episteme, comprising that of the right angle according to Zaha Hadid, in favour of an interpretative game capable, as Cacciari has underlined, of “giving form to the contradiction of the city” as a surmise to bind together the manifold true to the community meaning of the common good: material, social no less than aesthetic forms.

Not recognizing the necessity for an economy of the urban form means heavily reducing the city’s potential to elaborate values in favour of a territory that is nothing more than settled and de-urbanised, in tune with the opportunism of individual actions and the dislocation of built objects or even appreciable works of design architecture. This is a condition which, from the point of view of the non-city, could consign to the same plane the trivialisation of the residential Roman suburbs of apartment blocks from the latest speculation, and that of the “designer” buildings of the reconstructed centre of Beijing.

Exercising an economy of the urban form, as well as being a demonstration of the ethical weight of the project, means in contrast arranging all the potential urban material available, whether material or immaterial, formal or devoid of form, into a structure with the highest possible degree of reciprocal relationship, necessity, significance. In this sense, the science of the city’s form/s, with public and private interpreters called to practice it, with its ensuing humanistic and participative weight, should be the chief tool to fine tune a strategy for the regeneration of the city.