Festival dell'architettura

Leonardo da Vinci, Maps of city of Imola, 1502

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Abstract

Giuseppe Samonà's idea of the "city in extension" offers the occasion to reflect on the meaning of the urban phenomenon today. The author does so through nine points, from “extension” to “polysemy”, passing via “scale”, “method” and “function”, which become the terms of a new reasoned glossary for the European city, for an aware approach to studio and the project of what he calls “the territorial dilemma”.

Starting from Giuseppe Samonà’s notion of “city in extension”.

1. Extension: an ascertainment and a paradox.

The ascertainment: the phenomenon of the territorial extension of large cities which began in the 20^th century has by now assumed disturbing proportions. Cities like Paris, Shanghai, São Paulo, and Mexico City have turned into real megalopoleis. The common problems these generate (demographic, densification and/or sprawl; traffic and residential; sudden economic and environmental changes; relationship with nature...) lead us to speak of globalisation, of the search for a new “landscape” on a territorial scale, to respond to the resultant economic, cultural, and social questions. The phenomena that accompany these mutations have been condemned as ill-omened, or, on the contrary, considered ineluctable, or even interpreted as a sign of a new modernity. One example is the concept of Oecuménopolis from Konstantinos Doxiadis, the Islamabad town planner, who proclaimed, in 1960, that from Beijing to New York the same problems demand the same solutions.

Over the last century, German, French, Italian, English and American town planning, have tried at different times, to resolve the same question: that of the dispersion and diffusion linked to metropolisation. But the question is not always asked nor with due perseverance whether this phenomenon might express itself in a different way in line with different solutions, according to the countries and cities in question.

And here is the paradox present in current practices and discourses: On the one hand Globalisation is spoken of and on the other Identity. The question to be asked concerning metropolitan territories is the following: certain discourses pit globalisation against identity (the former would stop the latter from expressing itself) while others try to find a balance between the globalisation and the identities. Unlike economists, political experts, sociologists and philosophers (who, as far as the question of economic globalisation is concerned, are split into other-worldists and liberal globalists ‒ the interpretation of the Greek crisis is just one example), town planners are unanimous in tackling the question, seeking a potential balance. The projects for Grand Paris have shown that this unanimous discourse on the part of architects/town planners is expressed through the idea that the current “metropolisation”, with all the problems it generates, is ineluctable, but that it can hunt for pacification through the maintenance of local identities or a search for new specificities, through a balance between material (physical landscape) and immaterial (the human factor, the culture of living, customs and practices…).

2. Scale

The scale passage between urban and territorial projects we experience today is a fact. For over 25 years, especially in France, despite differing methods, approaches and definitions, the urban project has been tackled by circumscribing well-defined “pieces” of city: abandoned industrial or port areas to be renovated, public spaces, parks and green areas to be created, residential quarters to be redeveloped, grands ensembles and social dwellings to be improved, suburban garden neighbourhoods to be rearranged, plus places to develop new means of collective transport. The synergy between the various players ‒ local, regional and national politicians, public groups and private enterprise, technicians and users, and so forth. – this has been considered the sine qua non for a successful urban project. The search for consenso has been the main rule and every failure has been attributed to its lack.

This has led to a change in the way of understanding the problem, to be found both in the doctrines – which do not all express a theory – and in the programmes suggested to architects/town planners, and has provoked corporative opposition between “purist” planners, engineers and architects/town planners.

So just what is a territorial project? It is defined by an ensemble of different entities, at times located within precise, rigid physical confines provided by infrastructure or geographical elements, at others imprecise and vague. The limits of a space to be thought of are no longer the administrative limits, landed logic, micro-political agreement, but are those of perception, the project’s internal coherence, the landscape (in Greek topion which means both space and place, topos).

Thus a territorial project is the invention of an ensemble composed of subsets, which form a figure. This provokes a short circuit between the fragment and the vision of the whole, its figure: this is a vision of the “landscape” according to the various accepted meanings of the term (starting from the definition provided by the “European Landscape Convention”).

3. The territorial dilemma: the one and the many

At the same time a dilemma appears, linked to the incoherence between this figure of an ensemble and the fragments that make it up. Thus we can advance the hypothesis that the goal of the project is to rediscover a new coherence for the whole while conserving the identity of the fragment. The dilemma concerns the extension of the territory and the difficulty in interpreting the relationship between the fragment and the whole. Then the figure becomes inoperative since, given the extension of the metropolitan territory, how is it possible to seek one identity only? And if we have to separate out several identities, how is it possible for one project to simultaneously embrace the one and the many?

And then the dilemma becomes complicated because of ideological and political reasons and visions of the world since, as I already stated, on the one hand the phenomenon of metropolisation is understood starting off from a point of view of globalisation - the functions of metropoleis and their form which seem to present identical infrastructures and make all metropoleis identical – and on the other strengthen the identity of the single fragments.

Nowadays we know that constructing a city and its territory is not a science. It is an action that feeds on multidisciplinary approaches and, at the same time, is the fruit of a vision from the architect/town planner’s personal cultural background. Autonomy is not the result of free will but the capacity to create a “spatial tale”, an internal coherence constructed starting from the composition of disparate elements. The design is then the formalisation of this canny bricolage.

4. Times, layers

In his Scientific Autobiography, Aldo Rossi writes of the “double sense of time”: Atmospheric phenomenon and chronological phenomenon. However within the term “chronological” other “times” are hidden. Historical Time and the Time of Memory. The European city possesses the centuries-old quality of not confusing these two temporalities; the first of which belongs to the intellectual world, and the second to the world of experience and the lived. Following studies by French historians, anthropologists and sociologists, between the 1930s to 1970s French and Italian architects were able to distinguish between, on the one hand, the time of experience, practices and ways of living – the time of orality – and, on the other, the time of layers plus the observation of different layers – the time of writing, of the archaeologist, of the architect.

But do the enforced confinement in museums, the levelling off of the time of memory and historical time not run the risk of muddling up what belongs to “permanence” and what belongs to “transformation”? Isn‘t there a risk of removing strength from the archaeological core, i.e. the spatial reasoning between what has to be perpetuated and what can be transformed? At the same time, isn’t there yet another risk that this amalgam will confine typology to a museum and degrade the relationship between place and type, as Samonà thought?

5. Mobility

On the one hand the networks spread out, with ever more sophisticated cars, linked to the demand to leave nothing enclosed within the metropolitan area and the idea that everyone can move where and when he/she wants. A legitimate demand we might say.

But the idea of mobility for “everyone” leaves no room for the social and cultural question of a certain sector of the population’s immobility. The new hairpin bend of the history of the city and work, linked to the story of city/territory consumption, has been adopted as a model for the territorial project[1]. And the demand for a reduction in the time spent on transport becomes a synonym of the claim for time linked to the consumption of goods and space, as, at a geostrategic and economic level, is demonstrated by the example of the excessive consumption of the space/time relationship and the hypertrophy of low-cost airline airports.

6. Method

It is possible to perceive space in several manners according to one’s culture, one’s psychological state, the reasons for moving around. But when one is an architect with the objective of producing a project for a certain place, the perception of the latter depends on the means of transport and the extent of the space to be covered. According to the scale of the project, it is necessary to try to know the space and to “run over it”, smell its “odours” and perfumes, take on board its colours and forms. So how can we perceive a space measuring several square kilometres to be crossed by high-speed train? The distance and the means to move imply a leap in scale and hence in method. It is impossible to plan in the same way a housing estate, the renovation of an industrial area and a territory that can only be comprehended, in its full extension, thanks to a satellite image. If for the town planner it is possible to conceive a regulatory plan starting from a map on a scale of 1:20.000 or 1:50.000 (these would be a spatial subdivision of the economic functions in the broadest sense), the architect/town-planner will then adapt the method to the scale. His or her method would be that of cuttings and working in sequence, so as to be able to garner and understand what can be grasped that actually constitutes the reality to be taken into consideration: city, pieces of city, villages, rivers, streams, fields and valleys, hills, cultivated plains, forests and woods design a geography and historical topography that cannot be understood except through spatial sequences. One cannot design a territory – and especially a European territory, with its history and social, cultural and spatial stratification – as one would an architectural object. It is necessary to have “architectural instruments” that allow work at any scale. The difference is given by the degree of abstraction: to plan a territory.

7. Function

“Therefore, with architectural instruments we favour an event, independently from the fact that it happens; […] Hence the measuring of a table, or a house, is very important; not as the functionalists thought, to absolve a determined function[2] but to allow several functions.
Lastly to allow for everything in life that is unforeseeable.”[3].

This statement by Aldo Rossi can be read as a metaphor: how can the architectural project, finished, materially constructed, embrace the uncertainty of unforeseen social events, despite its indispensable “certainty” ? In other terms, how can the “immaterial” social aspect – transform and alter the functions pre-established by the architect? If this is easier to conceive on the building scale, it should equally be so at the territorial scale, where several situations and configurations follow one another. But often we architects/town-planners, because we do not grasp the breadth of the problem, muddle form and configuration. We confuse context (with a static definition) and situation (with a dynamic and ever-changing definition).

8. Poiesis

The construction of space is not a narcissistic practice: it is a practice that needs the contribution of other disciplines. Constructing space is a poietic practice (in the double sense of the term poiesis, creation and the form of doing) and “poetic” creation, which is not self-sufficient: this is a “collective poetic”. In this way town-planning establishes a relationship with the epos: a collective tale, a tale of collective actions enclosed by and given structure within a work. In our case a spatial tale, a “tale of a territory”, internally coherent and supplementing partial tales, exactly as the Odyssey is made up of autonomous stories that integrate the whole: Ulysses’ epic journey.

9. Polysemy

If it is clear that town-planning, inasmuch a conscious culture and action, was born in Europe at the beginning of the 20^th century, this is equally true of the fact that, in every country, town-planning practices vary, even though frequently linked to the same doctrine. This depends on the fact that the regulations, the laws, the logic of the actors, the scales, the histories of the cities, and the policies and strategies are equally different. It is sufficient to observe the urban policies in France and how they differ with respect to Italy, despite the unhindered flow of ideas between the two countries. It was believed that, following globalisation, and because of the formal models imposed everywhere by the great personalities of architecture, the practices linked to the construction of the territory were somehow interchangeable. But, I repeat, the territory cannot be built like an architectural object.

The territorial project is not monosemic, it does not have the same meanings and values everywhere. The relationship, not so much between “natural factors and human factors”, as between the culture of nature and urban culture, differs not only because of climatic and “natural” reasons, but above all for reasons of “culture”, of a vision linked to civilisation. And so the basic question becomes: for which form of present/future civilisation do we want to build?