Dalla campagna urbanizzata alla città in estensione

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 as it is the city and its parts are understood in a unified whole in terms of the form. All elements of a open-territory (agricultural countryside, small towns , geographical landscape, network, infrastructures) assume, in this view, a particular settlement value. The mean of “città in estensione” according to Giuseppe Samonà’s definition, becomes a fertile reference, to verify or to disprove in the various specific cases. A working hypothesis which provides a configured framework design where “la differenza tra edilizia e agricoltura sarebbe in questo caso subordinata da una regolazione spaziale comune, con un punto di incontro nella forma come punto regolatore …. In questo modo ogni elemento della campagna diventa parte di una città in cui sono prevalenti le due dimensioni orizzontali sulla terza. Si tratta perciò di una città in estensione, fondata su questa particolare relazione tridimensionale” ( 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.

territorio; forma; infrastruttura; architettura del paesaggio