y. VII - nr. 42 - oct, dec 2017
edited by: Paolo Strina
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FROM URBANIZED COUNTRYSIDE TO EXPANDED CITY
City-Countryside: a game of crossed destinies.
If we consider the territory as a complex network of individually interrelated and evolving densifications, it’s probable that a positive interpretation of its diffuse fragmentation could be found for the hybrid ways in which it is “built”, ways which are in antithesis to the permanence of its signs.
This is because the structural discontinuity of places, and the dispersive settlements of new constructions in the rural countryside, would be replaced by other semantic values not required to recapture historical identity, grammatical concordance, or new forms of balance between urban and rural areas based on slow sedimentation. Instead, they would make a decisive impact and re-establish contact with functional ways with which to use the territory. From this point of view, its form, designed as the form of its networks, would actually become a way to control whether or not it works.
However, the issue is more intimate and complex.
This field of learning cannot be so short-sighted as to consider the territory as a form of immaterial relationships, narrowing its field of vision to the homologation of specific morphologies and imposing models which are as transitory as they are conventional. Instead, when describing and gathering data about the territory, it should use comprehensible models and design tools capable of describing, imagining and regulating the structural complexities and internal contradictions of the ways in which we now settle and live in those “open territories”. Where smaller centres with stable configurations co-exist with settlement morphologies devoid of any values and contextual coherence, places where the reasons for their existence have found their own, temporarily perfect order. The result of intermittent transformations dictated by fragmentary impermanence, implacable speculative reasons, casual appropriations, and entrenchments in specific functional enclosures.
One possible way to study not only the physical nature, but also the processes behind the creation of the contemporary Italian landscape, is the definition of a grammar to interpret their reciprocal founding elements and understand the extent of these changes. Fully aware that this option prefigures, but does not as yet describe the rule.
The spatiality of città in estensione, a mysterious and intriguing object of knowledge, reveals a possible contraposition to the impositions imposed by large urban conglomerations on more peripheral inhabited territories.
The countryside can be designed and organized just like the city and its parts understood as a unified whole in terms of form.
All the elements of an open-territory (agricultural countryside, small towns, geographical landscape, networks and infrastructure) then assume a particular settlement value in this view. The notion of “an extended city” according to Giuseppe Samona’s definition, becomes a fertile reference, to be verified or disproved as the case may be.
A working hypothesis that provides a configured framework design where “the difference between buildings and agriculture would be in this case subordinated by a common spatial arrangement, with a meeting point in the form as a regulatory …. In this way, each element of the countryside becomes part of a city in which the two horizontal dimensions prevail over the third.
This then is an extended city, founded on this particular three-dimensional relationship” ( Samonà, 1976, 8-9).
The reasoning behind the search for possible scenarios for the città in estensione involves the interpretative ability of the heuristic mandate, referred to a dialectics which can become vital reason and support for the project, assuming sequence and stratification as a value for its own spatial and formal adjustment.
It involves drafting an overall plan to restore a new balance to the elements at stake, establishing the behavioural codes of an architectural project capable of critically influencing the operative objectives.
Bibliography
Samonà, G. (1976). La città in estensione. Conferenza tenuta presso la Facoltà di Architettura di Palermo il 25 maggio 1976
Ripubblicato in: Amistadi, L. (2012). La costruzione della città.
Antonella Falzetti is university researcher in Architecture and Architectural and Urban Composition at the Faculty of Engineering Building-Architecture of Roma ”Tor Vergata”, where she has been carrying out research (PRIN). She is Assistant Professor of the course of Architectural Design for the refurbishment of the buildings.
PRIN 2009 (Research Programme of National Interest)
FROM URBANIZED COUNTRYSIDE TO EXPANDED CITY. The norms of composition for the architecture of the territory of minor centres.
National Coordinator: Prof. Luigi Ramazzotti
Research Group Roma "Tor Vergata"
Luigi Ramazzotti (Coordinator), Antonella Falzetti, Maria Ioannilli, Rodolfo Strollo, Francesco Taormina, Filippo Cerrini
Research Group Roma "La Sapienza"
Giuseppe Strappa (Coordinator), Alessandro Camiz, Paolo Carlotti, Martina Longo
Research Group Napoli Seconda Università
Carlo Alessandro Manzo (Coordinator), Marino Borrelli, Emanuele Carreri, Carlo Coppola, Francesco Costanzo, Efisio Pitzalis, Massimiliano Rendina, Gianluca Cioffi, M. Antonia Giannino, Gaspare Oliva, Andrea Santacroce, Pasquale Zeppetella (Dipartimento di Architettura e Disegno Industriale “Luigi Vanvitelli” Seconda Università di Napoli);Rejana Lucci, Enrico Carafa (Dipartimento di Architettura, Università di Napoli Federico II)
Research Group Napoli "Federico II"
Francesco Rispoli (Coordinator), Francesca Bruni, Angela D’Agostino, Luigi Stendardo, Francesco Viola, Daniela Buonanno, Maria Teresa Giammetti, Maria Italia Insetti, Giovanni Zucchi.)
Research Group Palermo, Faculty of Architecture
Andrea Sciascia (Coordinator), Emanuele Palazzotto, Dario Costi, Emanuela Davì, Monica Gentile, Luciana Macaluso
Andrea Sciascia (Coordinator), Emanuele Palazzotto, Dario Costi, Emanuela Davì, Monica Gentile, Luciana Macaluso
Research Group Palermo, Faculty of Engeenering
Antonino Margagliotta (Coordinator), Valentina Acierno, Domenico Costantino, Giovanni Palazzo, Giovanni Francesco Tuzzolino, Salvatore Rugino, Fabio Sedia (assegnista), Serena Sanzo (coll.)
Antonino Margagliotta (Coordinator), Valentina Acierno, Domenico Costantino, Giovanni Palazzo, Giovanni Francesco Tuzzolino, Salvatore Rugino, Fabio Sedia (assegnista), Serena Sanzo (coll.)
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