archipelago, diffuse and reverse city

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37The Contemporary European

Urban Project: Archipelago City,Diffuse City and Reverse City

P a o l a V i g a n ò

INTRODUCTION

In their introductory chapter to this section,

McGrath and Shane have defended the ideathat the European metropolis persists incapturing the imagination of both globalarchitects and citizens. However, Europeanurbanism 1 has focused in the most recent yearson the prevailing interpretation of space interms of the juxtaposition of fragments. Attimes a place for articulating differences,personal and individual rhythms, at otherssimply the inherited, residual, terrain vague ,or again a separate and protected enclave, thefragment has represented the concrete condi-tion of contemporary design action, whetherin the old metropolis or in the new territoriesof dispersion. This interpretation, and mate-rial condition, has nurtured design positionsthat are very distant from one another. Somehave exalted the freedom of the patchwork;others have worked in opposition to it, oftenconfusing an inevitably episodic and frag-mented return to the various forms of thetraditional city with the real possibility of

negating the fundamental meanings of con-temporary space and practices. In response toMcGrath and Shane’s formulation of the

emergence of the metacity, this chapter out-lines some elements of the contemporaryurban project inside the conceptual frame ofthe fragmented urban space and criticallydiscusses it.

Along with design and epistemologicalthinking, some important theoretical images 2 have located the fragment as the basis of anew urban-territorial form that might involveand absorb heterogeneous patches within newspatial relationships. The city-archipelago,the city-territory, the diffuse city are notonly descriptions of new spatial models,phenomena or economies; they are alsoattempts at redefining the field in whichthe fragment might possibly be imaginedas a design component, taking into accountits still-important role in the construction ofthe collective imaginary. The issue of infra-structure, of multi-scale supports that con-nect with contemporary lifestyles, assumes,in this context, a renewed central role as



THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY658

designers face the different, and often layeredand contradictory forms of rationality, struc-ture and hierarchy present in the territory.The project 3 for the city-territory, a ‘reversecity’, first and foremost tackles this question.The concepts that insistently recur refer toconnectivity, porosity, permeability, multi-functionality in reaction to the compact,the impermeable and the functional simpli-fication of fragments in many parts of theterritory.

This chapter is divided into three parts,each of which addresses distinct issues. Thefirst part defines some characteristics ofthe framework that provides the main moti-

vations and justifications underlying thecontemporary spatial fragmentation. Thesecond refers to a specific Italian discourse,the conceptualization of the city-territory,stressing a connective tissue of landscapeand infrastructures. The third part seeks toutilize the categories and tools defined inthe previous sections to provide a possiblereading – selective and not necessarilycomprehensive – of some of the characteris-

tics of the contemporary Reverse Cityproject. All three parts contain specifichypotheses. The first, ‘Fragments’, positsthat the most interesting contributions comingto us from the second half of the twentiethcentury concerned inter pretations of frag-mentary and diffuse spatial conditions as apotential expression of the subject’s ‘auto-nomization’ process. The second, ‘CityTerritory’, observes the debate in Italy thatbegan in the 1950s, and continued over thefollowing decades as a search for new inter-pretations and images that could absorb thefragment within a new territorial scale. Thethird, ‘Reverse City’, advances the hypothe-sis that the logic of fragmentation is also, andincreasingly, a logic of power and thatit should, today, be deconstructed and ana-lyzed in depth to go beyond it. New formsof city-territory – from megacities to the ter-ritories of dispersion – provide us with anopportunity to position the fragment within adifferent logic and within a new system ofrelations.

FRAGMENTS

A space of fragments: Differentialspace and the metropolitancity-region

The process of Western modernization cameabout as separation along with the inventionof new distances (Foucault 1982), producingfragmented and dispersed space and a newurban dimension. Today this logic is magni-fied in the Latin American megacities butalso, in more implicit and hidden ways, inEuropean and western territories. During thelast part of the twentieth century, many

scholars sought to reveal and relate themechanisms through which this kind ofspace was produced by defining categories tounderstand and reinterpret it as a potentialexpression of the subject’s ‘autonomization’.

In La production de l’espace (Lefebvre1991 [1974]), Henri Lefebvre proposesinverting the dominating trend of fragmenta-tion, separation and pulverization carried outby knowledge in the name of power.

Differential space ( espace différentiel ) canonly emerge out of difference with respect tothe abstract institutional space of globalcapitalism, which is not homogeneous butattempts to reduce difference, to separate,scatter and segregate. Translating differenceand other-ness into explicitly spatial terms,Lefebvre supports the right to difference, inopposition to processes of homogenization,sectorialization and hierarchization. Thesector, in particular, an organizational device,rather than form, of division and separation,has been widely used in the European andnon-European city. It is largely responsiblefor the episodic and fragmented nature ofcontemporary space. A triumphant devicefor urbanization in the modernized city(Mangin 2004), implicit or explicit citationof Le Corbusier’s and Colin Buchanan’stheories (Buchanan 1963), the sector is anexpedient for separation and exclusion, the-matic spatial organization, functionalistregional zoning and ordered hierarchizationof flows: ‘… homogenizing and fractured



THE CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN URBAN PROJECT 659

space is broken down in highly complexfashion into models of sectors’ (Lefebvre1991, 311). The urbanism of sectors, opposedto the urbanism of tracés , eradicated Team10’s attempts to redefine a new relationshipbetween habitat and street, today it has pro-vided a structure for the new and difficultrelationships between enclaves and the restof the territory, a change in scale involvingmeans of transport and a variety of actors(Graham and Marvin 2001).

Lefebvre’s differential space renders visi-ble the contradictions between abstractspace with its global aspiration and its localfragmentation and sectorialization. The con-

troversial aspect of this position has to dowith the fragment’s ambiguous role (bothsocial and spatial) that is simultaneouslythe expression of splinters of power (even ifglobalized) and the starting point for theappropriation of space by social forces andindividuals excluded from the very samepower mechanisms.

As opposed to the figure of continuity, thefragment leads to ‘a topological conception

of space, to the depth of difference andspecificities of place’ (Secchi 2000); to incre-mental and specific ways of constructing anddefining space; to the irreducible differencebetween subjects; to the impossibilityof achieving a broad overview or even acomprehensive reading. The fragment seemsto facilitate an interpretation of the city afterWestern civilization’s first modernity: as therupture of an existing whole to which torefer; as the result of a logic of separationand distancing; but also as the expression offreedom of choice in terms of settlement andlocation. Each fragment can be studied inde-pendently as an autonomous and perfectentity and does not necessitate, or, in anycase, inhibit a general overview.

A space of idiorrhythms

In the mid-1970s, Roland Barthes speculatedabout ways of living together ( vivre ensem-ble ) and particularly about idiorrhythmic

configurations. His inspiration derived fromthe Mount Athos monasteries where eachmonk lived according to his own individualand unique rhythm within a small group.The search for a separate space to host one’spersonal rhythm is the subject of Barthes’thinking which, through such literary refer-ences as Gide’s La sequestrée de Poitiers ,refers to certain spatial devices like the room.The forms analysed are all expressions ofthe search for autonomy – of a small groupin relation to society; of an individual inrelation to a group, to society or to power; ofthe search for configurations that are notconcentrated but rather dispersed.

Without opposing community to society,as in Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft(1887), Barthes’ is an attempt to understandin greater depth the possibility for the coex-istence and the juxtaposition of differentrhythms, for obtaining a space for individualexpression within group configurations, orthe possibility for the presence of differenti-ated rhythms within collective conglomer-ates having different characteristics and

forms.4

At about the same time, Colin Rowededicated his thinking and teaching to thetheme of the collage city which was tobecome the title of his most famous book afew years later (Rowe and Koetter 1978).Even in the collage city, in the city whichthe modern movement’s grand project wasunable to reconstruct, the concept of thefragment initially seemed to open up spacesof freedom. The fragment, as an elementwithin an idiorrhythmic configuration andthe associative mode of collage allowed –according to the authors – the coexistenceof heterogeneity and freedom. To thinkabout urban space as the result of collage,lying at the limits of casual combinationslike those of a plan game 5 was a wayof thinking about the different forms andspaces of individual freedom within a collec-tive environment, or, again, about idiorrhyth-mic space and that which can be sharedwithin individual habits, behaviours andspaces.




The fragment in Collage City allows theintroduction of slivers of utopia instead oftotalizing scenarios. It allows us to thinkabout the city in parts – each endowed withspecific form (Aymonino 1978) – rather thanits general form. It allows us to avoid, or atleast not explicitly treat, the issue of thestructure eventually unifying the fragmentswhich, as Constant Nieuwenhuys shows us inhis collages of New Babylon, encompassesthe leftover, l’objet trouvé , just as the MiltonKeynes new town includes the picturesqueand eclectic within its overall grid.

Archipelago space and thecity archipelago

If the use of collage, in reference toLévi-Strauss’ bricoleur, provided a designtechnique that could modify and manipulatea region of fragments, but not its raisond’être or its necessity, the concept of thearchipelago explores the relationshipsbetween the fragments, expression of multi-

plicity and of distance between things thatare irreducibly different. It seeks to establishnot only the spatial characteristics, but alsothe social ones, of an aggregation of frag-ments. ‘The intelligence of the archipelagodivides and separates’ (Cacciari 1997) andplaces the fragments in relation to oneanother. It is the ‘fatigue’ of a theory thatleaves the different individualities unchangedbut which assembles them within a space –or sea – of coexistence and of absence – theunity which was lost or never attained –‘Imperceptible and Unreachable’ and whichphilosophy indicates as ‘good’. Islands forcedinto dialogue – ‘thus archipelago space, dueto its very nature, does not tolerate subordi-nation and hierarchical succession’ (Cacciari1997, 19–20). It is a space without a centrein constant tension between the need fordialogue and its own individuality or core.

The archipelago is the distance betweenthings but it is also their erasure, the openingto unpredictable voids, the shrinking of thecity and its reduction as a result of events

transforming its economy, demography andsocial makeup. In declining Berlin in themid-1970s, Ungers took the process ofcreating voids as a possible construction of adifferent principle for urban space (Ungerset al. 1978), generated by projects that couldbe better interpreted as fragments or partialsolutions to a specific site, transcendingthe logic of a comprehensive, rigid and inflex-ible plan (Ungers 1976). In Berlin, islandsbecame cities within cities resulting from thecancellation of parts of the urban fabric thatcould not be ‘rehabilitated’ or reintroducedinto the current urban dynamics.

Ungers was one of the first to give visibil-

ity to a condition that was different from theone originally faced and in which modernurbanism was formed – a context defined byprogress and by the stimulation of growth.But the image of the green archipelago,today reintroduced in the research on theshrinking city phenomenon, or as a lastdefence against sprawl, 6 finds a range ofprecedents. Scharoun’s plan for the recon-struction of Berlin (Sohn 2007) reorganized

the city of stone described by Hegemannalong the Spree valley, drastically reducingdensity and imagining dwelling units in a seaof urban agriculture and green space. Anotherprecedent is the German Stadtlandschaftplanning tradition (city landscape or city-scape, an expression coined by the geogra-pher Siegfried Passarge, 1867–1958) which,beginning in the 1920s, produced diagramsof cells whose receptacle – the liquid inwhich the cells were contained – remainedmore or less indistinct. From the depthsemerged services, routes and voids withdifferent characteristics. Empty space, anintegral part of the cell concept, is the con-nective fabric between cells, each of which isdifferent and completely identifiable. Ungersfreed the enclaves – the new recognizableand singular islands – leaving behind the‘anonymity of the city’ (Ungers et al. 1978).Between each fragment, the ‘green lagoon’hosted collective activities and functions, thespace for important commercial and recrea-tional activities. The city was transformed




into a union of fragments, of cells whichstrongly recalled the organic metaphor andwhich did not define a unitary image butrather a ‘living collage’ (Ungers et al. 1978).

The terms cited above are but a few of themany which interpret the contemporary frag-mentary, dispersed spatial conditions as theresult of a modernization process in whichindividual, group and society must rethinkthe ways in which they coexist. If philo-sophical and sociological thought placed theconstruction of spatial devices and their rela-tions with power at the heart of rethinkingthe fragment, the urban and regional project,often referring to these theories along with

intense territorial description, has developedsome images whose value lies in what theyevoke or refer to. Images are a ‘space of rep-resentation’ (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]), a newconceptualization of reality which ‘the imag-ination seeks to change and appropriate. Itoverlays physical space making symbolic useof its objects’ (1991, 39). In this way the‘physical city’ (Quaroni 1981) fostered newimages that in turn, described and interpreted

the city as a design object.

CITY TERRITORY: THE ITALIANDEBATE AND ITS INTERNATIONALCONTEXT

City region; The new urbandimension

The discussion regarding the new dimensionof the city, which came to the fore in Italyduring the 1950s and 1960s and later, playedan important role in defining interpreta-tions and images seeking to integrate thefragment within the new territorial dimen-sion that was beginning to materialize.The recognition of sprawl as an enduringphenomenon was not instantaneous. Theurgency was rather to understand the changesunderway, described as original and recent,in order to be able to shape and modify thecity’s attributes. A new urban dimension, a

new (design) scale and a new social constel-lation (with greater mobility than in the past)were the three aspects underlying muchresearch at the end of the 1950s. Underliningthe importance of the city’s new scale notonly in economic and geographic terms, thediscussion also became important for archi-tecture and urbanism. Among the conse-quences of this position was the necessity todevelop design scales and tools for interven-ing and understanding the territory in orderto respond adequately to the new conditions.Influenced by the Anglo-Saxon discourse ofMumford (1938) and Dickinson (1964), thedispute on the city-region and the city-

territory produced great and fascinatingambiguities between description, interpreta-tion and design. It was distinguished fromothers during that same period because ofthe continuity it established between archi-tecture and urbanism, not only in the sense ofconceiving a new planning-architecturaldimension, as Gregotti, Rossi and Aymoninoaffirmed at the time, but also because of thecentrality of thinking about form on many

scales and the relation between various fieldsin terms of different morphologies (social,economic, infrastructural, naturalistic, etc.).

The image of the city-region came downfrom Geddes whose appellation conurbation,coined in 1915, described a new spatial entity– an urban federation, specific to Englandand representative of its lifestyle: a city-region or a community inhabiting a vast, andalmost completely urbanized, poly-nuclearspace. But this clear definition of a territoryin which the city no longer played a funda-mental generative role was quickly flankedby other meanings and attributes that wouldcontradict the original locution. In the 1920s,Lewis Mumford and Thomas Adams dis-cussed the term regional city in reference toNew York. If they both agreed that themenace to be eliminated was the congestedand polluted industrial city, they differedregarding contents that defined the image ofthe city region (Robic 1998). For Mumford,it expressed a communitarian ideology repre-sented, in planning terms, by a network




of satellite cities. For Adams, it was theexpression of a logic reinforcing the role ofthe large city as the centre of a vast region.Communitarianism and metropolitanism,while using similar devices (such as expan-sion by means of the introduction of newurban units), differed profoundly. GiancarloDe Carlo referred to Geddes’ and Mumford’simages of the city-region and linked them toincreased economic well-being, to the accel-eration of social and territorial mobility andto the consequent multiplication of choice.Later, in the Milan inter-municipal plan,De Carlo (1966) used the image of the urbancontinuum for which, and within which, city

planning needed to identify systems andstructures. De Carlo was interested in thestructure of urban form, especially the struc-ture of a new form of dispersed and openurbanity. Over time, a fundamental ambiguity,also present in his writings, was introducedand took root in the image of the city-region.

The urbanized countryside

Samonà was a great promoter of images,which, in very intriguing ways, were locatedat the confines between interpretation andprediction. Samonà’s images stimulated thedesigner’s imagination and indicated a pos-sible direction for the construction of a newkind of space. His ‘urbanized countryside’was one of the most powerful images por-traying the new territorial scale for design. Itwas born from the perception of the crisis ofthe countryside and the endangerment oftraditional rural settlements throughout theAdige Valley in Trentino. It announced a ter-ritorial project inspired by this idea. TheTrentino Plan, the result of work initiated inthe early 1960s and exhibited in the XIIIMilan Triennale ( Piano urbanistico delTrentino 1968), faced the issues of the vastscale and territorial form and the creation ofa project for it. At the time there was signifi-cant out-migration from rural areas. Rejectingthe idea of urban concentration along theAdige River, the design hypothesis was

summed up in the image of the ‘urbanizedcountryside’ – ‘a kind of urbanization whichreconstitutes an urban settlement in the coun-tryside to offer an array of basic choicesclose to those that today characterize thetraditional urban phenomenon’ (1968, 50).The urbanized countryside was offered as a

possible contemporary settlement form.Samonà entrusted to agriculture, and notonly to industrial or infrastructural growth,the responsibility for producing urban devel-opment just as it had in the past. With theidea of the ‘park facility’ he attributed toagriculture, along with all other open space,the role of ‘provocative element’ for the inte-gration of the archaic and rural world withinthe new urban condition.

The city-territory

Again in 1962, Piccinato, Quilici and Tafuri,representing the Roman office AUA(Associazione Urbanisti ed Architetti), intro-duced the image of the city-territory in themagazine Casabella Continuità into thebroader Italian debate. This image indicatednot only a change in scale, but a new point ofview. The inability of planning and urbanismto read the new phenomena was, according tothe authors, an ideological question as

Figure 37.1 (Above) The ‘urbanized

countryside’. (Interpretation of Samonà’sconcept sketch by Paola Viganò)




these disciplines were, at the time, involvedin generating ‘microcosms and neighbour-hood units absolutely separated from itssurrounding environment in every singleaspect’ (Piccinato et al. 1962, 16). Expressingstrong criticism towards the intimate solu-tions of neo-empiricism, the authors, insteadof facing the problem of searching for newinstruments of intervention or inquiry, main-tained that the problem lay in identifyingissues and their relationships, something thatrequired the definition of a new ‘structuralframework’.

Like De Carlo, the AUA group began fromthe consideration of increased well-being but

introduced new attention to the issue of freetime – the spread of loisirs , the emergence ofthe second home – and the progressivedispersion of industry that ‘evaporated’ intothe territory abandoning its proximity tothe urban centre. Insistence was on the accel-eration of change, territorial dynamics, onthe transformations in ways of living together.These positions were founded to counterthe risk lying in the lack of understanding

of the transformations underway, on thenecessity of new techniques of enquiry, ofnew readings and surveys and the urgencyof reformulating design tools. These weremuch graver questions than ones regard-ing obsolete institutional and legislativeinstruments.

A process-oriented idea of the project,which could no longer face the whole and inwhich the individual exercised his or her ownfreedom and autonomy, also took formaround the image of the city-territory. ‘Thecity territory moves its field of applicationfrom total city planning to the identificationof elements to leverage … but does notrefute, however, a territorial scale plan’(Piccinato et al. 1962, 17). More extensiveplanning did not correspond to the dilation ofthe scale of the urban phenomenon but ratherto the selection of the places underlying abroad-scale planning project. In thosesame years, Samonà began working on theTrentino Plan which was the first territorialand development plan in Italy to be drafted

by architects and urbanists and not only byeconomists.

The territory that emerged at the time wasboth the result of, and stimulus for, importantchanges in society (Ardigò 1967). Startingfrom the phenomenon of decentralization ofproduction, Arnaldo Bagnasco, an Italiansociologist at the University of Turin, estab-lished a connection between the diffusedurbanization and the logic of dispersed local-ization of the small and medium enterprises,in particular in the north-east and in thecentre of Italy (Bagnasco 1977). The prob-lem was to provide a ‘democratic direction’to the potential due to the ambition of the

new affluent society ‘to find, in all condi-tions, a variety of contacts and choicesthat the city has to offer’ (Piccinato et al.1962, 17). The idea of a movement in thedirection of ‘more evolved forms of territo-rial organization’ was shared by many even ifit was not clear if these forms were sociallypositive or not. As opposed to the modernmovement which had proposed, and imposed,a progressive model of development on

society, AUA underlined the impossibility ofrepeating or maintaining this ambition whilefocusing on the issue of the crisis in theconstructivist position. They proposed tran-scending the rationalist approach in order to‘obtain, instead, a continuous process ofrationalization’ – the constant verification ofthe emergence of a new form of social lifeand a new way of coexisting.

Design tools and concepts forthe diffuse city

Beginning in the mid-1960s and for almosttwenty years, the production of images andthe debate regarding the city-territory in Italyseemed to come to a halt until the second halfof the 1980s when research on the new con-dition of urban sprawl and fragmentationdocumented the transformation that hadcome about (in the Anglo-American worldthis was the period of Kevin Lynch’s TheView from the Road (Appleyard et al. 1963),




Iain McHarg’s Design With Nature (1969),Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles; The

Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) and

the Venturi, Scott-Brown and Izenour groupresearch Learning from Las Vegas (1972)).As mentioned above, criticism regardingthe fragment and Archipelago City soughtto utilize the concept of the fragment andtransform it into ‘differential space’(Lefebvre), ‘idiorrhythm’ (Barthes), locatingthem within a ‘collage’ (Rowe), or belongingto an ‘archipelago’ (Cacciari), all withan emphasis on context and connection.These interpretations fostered discussionand debate regarding the city-territory andits project.

In many Italian regions a ‘diffuse city’ – aterm introduced by Francesco Indovina andBernardo Secchi in 1990 and preceded by aseries of studies on northeast and centralItaly (Piccinato and De Luca 1983; Sartore1988) – had already been formed. The dif-fuse city is a term describing a kind of hybridmegalopolitan spatial organization character-ized by the presence of certain urban charac-teristics in the absence of others. It is theconsequence of the dispersion of not only

residential functions but also of other urbanactivities. It is the result of both spontaneousactions as well as policy positions. A firstwave – due to the improvement in livingconditions for the agricultural populationswho passed over to the secondary servicessector – was followed by a second one tied tothe out-migration from the city by a part ofits residents (middle classes, dissatisfied withthe quality of urban life) driven by lowerhousing costs and by the possibility of livingin a different way.

The diffuse city is an interpretative con-cept allowing us to face the issue of individ-ual and collective freedom – a crucial pointfor Indovina – and for passing judgement onthis new phenomenon. Different from a tradi-tional metropolitan area characterized byvertical connections and intense hierarchy,the diffuse city is interwoven with horizontalrelationships and distinguished by weakerhierarchical ones. Within this horizontalterritory, which Secchi began to describeon a European scale, filaments, platforms,

Figure 37.2 (Above) Contemporaryfragmentation and dispersion in Aarhus(Denmark). In white: built areas androads. (GIS elaboration: N. Mathiesen,Aarhus School of Architecture)

Figure 37.3 (Above) Contemporarydispersion in the Veneto region: builtareas, Carta Tecnica Regionale – Veneto,2000/2007 from: B. Secchi, P. Viganò,with L. Fabian, P. Pellegrini Waterand Asphalt, the project of Isotropy ,PRIN Research 2007–2008, UniversitàIuav di Venezia.




accumulations, still unstable areas of density,voids awaiting content – a ‘world of objects’ –could be recognized (Secchi 1991). CitingBanham, Secchi suggested a new ecology –in reality, many ecologies – tied, in fact, tothe different histories of the urban phenom-enon in Europe, awaiting description anddesign within a general framework recogniz-ing the significant issues. If the term cittàdiffusa soon became international – alongwith the armature of a new local politicalconscience and affirmation of territorialidentity – in the rest of Europe other researchwas being carried out which only partiallyprovided true occasions for comparison but

which, in any case, contributed to revealingthe important epochal change that had comeabout in the European territory. 7

THE PROJECT FOR A REVERSE CITY

To what degree are the categories and imagesdiscussed in the preceding paragraphs

involved in today’s discussion on theproject for the city-territory and metacity?Contemporary space has inverted the tradi-tional code of urbanity; there is a new scale;there are new and original proportionsbetween solid and void; agriculture and natu-ral elements are contained within urbanspace. If we look at the thinking in thetwentieth century that began to study thecharacteristics of diffusion and consider themin design work, we find some precursors(H.G. Wells’ descriptions in Anticipations ,1901); diagrams illustrating the process ofthe construction of the new settlement formsand the centrality of thinking about space(from Wright’s Broadacre City to Gutkind’scentreless region); descriptions evokingnew lifestyles and ways of using the territory(in Gottmann’s Megalopolis , 1961). Whatemerges is parallel thinking about the cityconceptualizing it in an inverse way withrespect to traditional thinking – a ‘reversecity’ of discontinuity and distances with avoid at its centre.

The Reverse City (Viganò 1999) is thespace of the deconstruction of traditionalurban relationships, an ‘elementary city’ inwhich innovation becomes the combinationand juxtaposition of known elements andthe invention of new materials. It is aninverse city because it negates traditionalmeanings of urban space – its continuitiesand discontinuities – and transforms theminto new forms of urbanity within a territorialcontext.

Since all of the positions previouslyillustrated insist on the possibility of indi-viduals to express themselves in a newlyconceived space, the city of fragments might

seem paradoxical if we do not also refercritically to its role as technique and as a newdispersed form of power. This is one of thereasons why today a new attempt at concep-tualization has become necessary, beyond

just analytically describing this fragmentedand dispersed space. So the question thatarises is the following: in what sense is theprocess of individualization – which charac-terized the contemporary era – represented

by or in this space?

The European territorial project;new tools; ‘urban grain’ research

The research on the phenomenon of urbandispersion in Europe over the last twentyyears can be grouped around some commonissues and hypotheses: the modernizationprocess as a producer of dispersion; urbandiffusion as an ancient phenomenon ratherthan a more recent one – the result of anexplicit political project in some cases, as inFlanders, and in others implicit, but clearlyidentifiable (in some Italian, Swiss andPortuguese regions this is more clearlymanifested); the presence of a widespreadinfrastructure network creating the possibil-ity for the extensive use of, and settlement in,the territory. Research also demonstrates thatthe great mobility infrastructure does notseem to have a direct link of necessityand inevitability with economic and urban




development, although in many cases it isassociated with it; many territories of disper-sion have a great underlying density of road,water and agricultural land use networks.However, beyond the apparent similarities –which are clear in some zenithal views and incertain uses of the territory – lie long historiesthat profoundly differ from one another.

Differences emerge in the ‘grains’ of dis-persion, such as the coarse grain of theFrench territory in which the process of sepa-ration defines a contemporary geography ofcentralities. In France, the areas outside ofurban centres are often the principal placeof commerce managed by large groups who

design their own very identifiable space.The lack of social and functional mix appearsincreasingly marked – from logistics plat-forms to activity zones, from office parks toshopping malls. Mono-functionality attractsinvestment and projects because of its ease ofrealization, lack of conflict and ostensiblelower costs, but it does not take into accountthe longer term effects, deterioration, decline,social costs and control of underutilized por-

tions of the territory.Again, the coarse grain appears in someGerman regions like the Ruhr area wherea long history of territorial-scale industri-alization and heavy infrastructure projectsprogressively cut up and subdivided territo-rial space. There are many histories, only

Figures 37.5 (Below) and 37.6(Below right) The Ruhr and theVeneto region: a comparison on asquare of 10 km. In white: openspaces. (Elaboration: F. Volpiana andS. Rasia)

Figure 37.4 (Above) Hydrologynetwork in the Veneto region, CartaTecnica Regionale – Veneto, 2007 +Humid areas Clc 2000 from: B. Secchi,P. Viganò, with L. Fabian, P. PellegriniWater and Asphalt, the project ofIsotropy , PRIN Research 2007–2008,Università Iuav di Venezia.




apparently similar, which, when examinedseparately, tell the story of the formation of thecity-territory and the resistance of differencesrooted in the land and in space along with epi-sodes of homologation. The fine grain emergesin regions like Veneto, Flanders or Portugalwhere extensive water and road networks sus-tained individual initiative in the constructionof places in which to live and work.

The new dimension of the European cityequates the urban phenomenon with the greatworld megacities (Sieverts 2003 [1997]) notonly due to their dimensions and growingdensity but also because of increasing immi-gration, and social and functional segregation.

Separations, edges and confines limiting indi-vidual and collective liberties are ever morefrequently organized around fragments. Formsof power are not static. They adapt to frag-ments and idiorrhythms, born against, andoutside of, centralized power. The crises andparadoxes in the dispersed and fragmentary

city are tied together because today it hasbecome a technique and new form of power.

The common element in the researchbriefly described here is the centrality of theidea of territory not only as a place of change,but as a place in which to imagine the future.In other words, the territory emerges as oneof the most important contexts in which torethink the modern project and the project forthe contemporary city – the place for theformation of a new imaginary.

New tools; images as ‘connectors’

The importance of images emerges as aconstant in territorial design and research.

Figure 37.7 (Below) View of the ‘cittàdiffusa’, the plain in the metropolitanregion of Venice. (Viganò)




These synthetic representations unite the dif-ferent glances upon, and knowledge of, aterritory, and interact among themselves.They are sufficiently fuzzy and vague to beconsidered pre-mature and so can guide morein-depth research that might confirm orfalsify them.

Images play a key role in design, occupy-ing a hybrid space between description andproject. They can unify the heterogeneouspoints of view of the diverse disciplinesinvolved in territorial thought and provide a‘vanishing point’ for the different trajectoriesthat they describe. Again, what unifies thedifferent images is an attempt to overturn the

traditional sequence of constructing a territo-rial project in order to propose originalsequences of urban spaces and materials, toattempt to describe what they are and whatthey might become, establishing a more-or-less tense and conflicting, but dense, rela-tionship between collective imagination andthe disciplinary one. The images of the city-archipelago, the collage city or the patch-work metropolis have exercised enormous

influence in constructing a different view ofthe contemporary city. These images arebased upon the fragment; they adhere to itwithout distancing themselves from it.However, the Reverse City, the city whichhas radically modified its very form anddimensions, requires the production of newstructural hypotheses without denying thefragment, a new idea of continuity and rela-tions that is different from the past. It requiresimages that do not stop at the fragment – butintegrate movements and dynamics in a newframe.

New tools; multiple modelsand supports

Today the project for the Reverse City is afundamental place for redefining the domainof architecture and urbanism. It could notexist without open spaces and agriculture,along with economies and landscape. On theterritorial scale, different types of projects

emerge which, as a group, have formed thecontemporary space: individual and informalprojects, along with collective and institu-tional ones tied to the idea of decentralizationand rebalancing. If we examine them indetail, some threads emerge. The first con-cerns the understanding and improvement of‘spontaneous’ models of territorial construc-tion. The second refers to the study of theinnovations needed to connect different situ-ations and eliminate their contradictions. Inthe Reverse City, different settlement modal-ities alternate and follow one another, eachusing specific materials and supports andeach capable of being designed correctly and

coherently with regard to specific naturaland climatic conditions. The domain of thedesign project returns as a reflection uponmodels of spatial organization and theirdifferent supports.

The new form of the city pushes us tothink more deeply about the limits of thetraditional infrastructure system that has beenperfected over the last two centuries and thatwas almost always conceived for compact

and dense urban conditions. The territorialproject deals first and foremost with thedesign of different infrastructural layers,thinking about what today constitutes neces-sary support for the reproduction of thesocial process and the welfare and risk thatneed to be redistributed.

Infrastructure is not synonymous with col-lective investment even if it cannot be com-pletely detached from it. The territories ofurban dispersion provide an excellent labora-tory from this point of view. They are at thesame time rich in infrastructure, especially inEurope, but having grave deficiencies insome aspects that are not always called topublic attention (large parts of the populationnot connected to public sewage systems, forexample, or lack of water purification sys-tems and not just highways and airports).From the territory emerges an infrastructuremodel, a diffuse model which adapts and ismodified over time. It is decentralized andnot hierarchical, extensive and extendable.The contemporary territorial project studies




the necessary technologies and attempts togive form to a different kind of rationalitythat is coherent with diffuse settlementpatterns – sun and wind energy, energyprogrammes tied to cycles of water andwaste management, local facilities plants,weakly connected networks. It is a projectthat is at the same time technological, territo-rial and environmental, as well as beingeconomically and politically relevant(Sieverts 2003 [1997]; Viganò 2001).

This important programme requiresrethinking the small-scale construction of theterritory and not only its most importantepisodes – from the project for the diffusion

of nature which requires space and time tocome about without great investment; to theproject for aquifer protection and recharging;to the project for natural water purification –differently conceived for areas of dispersionor for urban centres; to the improvementof microclimatic conditions; to interventionsthat counter the rapidly spreading desertifica-tion processes accelerated by climate change,or risk of flooding; to the project for the

production of renewable energy sources; tothe project for mobility which takes advan-tage of the ‘sponge’ of existing minor roadand rail routes and their capacity to connectentire regions in a capillary manner. Theseand other projects are not innovative exceptfor their broad, regional scale to which theyrefer and which gives them their importance.It is on the territorial scale that a project ofminute rules can produce new landscapes,introduce new geographies and forms ofrationality that are different from the past, orcan rediscover an integrated and systemiclogic rather than a fragmentary one.

CONCLUSIONS; A NEW MODERNITY;A ‘MULTIFORM’ URBAN CONDITION

The project for territorial supports transcendsthe sectoral logic of the metropolitanconstruction of the city. From this point ofview, a project for a territorial architecture

must recover its ability to interact with thedisparate set of projects that crowd andfragment it. Some transversal sequencesemerge from the study of strategies of coex-istence, multifunctionality, re-use, reinterpre-tation. The city’s new dimension and theincreasingly intense processes of fragmenta-tion, place the territorial scale with itsdifferent expressions and opportunities at thecentre of discussion – from inverted relation-ships between solid and void, to the design ofurban sprawl, to the vast dimensions of thetransformations currently underway.

The Reverse City is a sphere in which toinvestigate new spaces such as under-utilized

industrial areas which can become equippedplatforms crossed by concentrations of natureto serve the creation of new businesses; streetswhich become narrative itineraries, densespatial stories not only of the past but ofpresent relations. Land forms are territorialforms which relate episodes and fragments,local and territorial scales, the institutionaland the informal. They are elements of media-tion between the situated project and the large

scale; they transcend sectoral policy andadministrative boundaries. If most of today’simages and projects based on the logic of thefragment seek to absorb and avoid conflict,the project for territorial supports inevitablynegates the intensification of the fragment andnecessitates the discussion of differences.

Some years ago, Giuseppe De Matteisidentified, in the cultural passage of the1970s, the emergence of the ‘subjective’, ofthe qualitative and the specific in geographicstudies, in opposition to the generalizing,quantitative and functionalist current thatcharacterized human geography in the 1950sand 1960s. This conflict, or crisis, in geo-graphic studies was not perceived as negativeby De Matteis who considered it as ‘some-thing which allows it to represent the world asa dialectic interaction between homologatingglobal tendencies and active resistance basedon local specificity’ (De Matteis 1992).

The condition of the project for the ReverseCity is just this – to constitute, as De Matteisdid for human geography, the right place to




observe one of today’s central issues ‘in itsmultiform manifestations’. If geographicdescription revealed, through the productionof images and interpretative categories, latentstructures, settlement principles ‘as responsesof local subjects and environments to stimuli,impulses, decisions, etc. arriving from theglobal network of flows’ (De Matteis 1992),the territorial project is the place in whichdiscussion takes on an explicit form and refersto the future. The terms of resistance andidentity are not adequate for resolving thequestion. The response of the ‘local’ oftenbecomes aggressive especially in its immobil-ity. A new spatial policy requires deep rethink-

ing of our idea of individual and collectivewell-being, the transcendence of the limitinglocal–global, individual-society counterpointand fresh inquiry into the necessity of aproject for the territory, its goals, its sustain-ability and ecological rationality, its proposalof a new multi-form and diffuse modernity.

NOTES

1 While urbanism in the US most often refers to‘the ways of life of urban dwellers’ as defined bysociologist William Wirth in the Chicago School ofurban studies, here it refers to the European sense ofa specific field of study in architecture of the formof cities, which in the Anglo-American context isusually treated as separate disciplines: urban design,city planning, regional design.

2 Here image is used in the sense of Bergson asmore than a representation and less than matter. Ithas a mental reality in the sense that Kevin Lynchdescribes as cognitive mapping in The Image of theCity , and the production of new images is one of theprimary roles of urbanism. See also Secchi andViganò 2009.

3 Project here, is used in the sense of projection,again a primary task of architecture as Robin Evanshas described in The Projective Cast (1995).

4 The relationships between group ideology andthe small group explored in the countercultural com-munes in the US and Europe in the 1960s cannot beignored in this regard.

5 Sylvain Malfroy (2002), introduction to the newedition of Collage City , Folio Editions, Switzerland.

6 See for example, today’s use, in France, of thefigure of the archipelago (Veltz 1996) and its use asa metaphor for the construction of regional-scaleplans (Chapuis 2003).

7 In 1993 Boeri, Lanzani and Marini, in Il TerritorioChe Cambia attempt to group together the different

dimensions of change revealed by the crisis in tradi-tional and natural morphogenetic elements in thesearch for a new geographic image. Attention tothe persistence and values of the street and roadsystem is accompanied by an attempt to describe thedifferent ways of modifying the territory, observingthe practices which are not disconnected by thedifferent urban spaces. See also the Italian nationalresearch project Itaten , in Clementi et al. (1996);Munarin and Tosi (2001); Viganò (2001; 2004);Bianchetti (2004).

In this context it is impossible to refer to all of the

texts and authors in an exhaustive way. It is impor-tant to recall at least the research work of N. Portason dispersion in Portugal, of A. Font on Barcelona’smetropolitan area, of T. Sieverts on the Ruhr region,of M. Smets, B. De Meulder and M. Dehaene onFlanders.

archipelago, diffuse and reverse city

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