Need of New Standards for New Definition of Cities

Cities, according to the most recent research, are no longer intended as territories enclosed within administrative limits (for example the municipal boundaries), but are part of much larger geographical areas, better defined by the flows and interchange of people, goods, information within a territory. We therefore can speak of city-regions, i.e. territorial entities that largely go beyond the traditionally defined urban centres. Today, the relationship of cities with their territories of reference has changed a lot, and have lost the centripetal character of the past. The ease of logistics, communications - and above all telecommunications - have definitely changed the economic and cultural character of cities and the relationship among cities. Therefore, the old administrative delimitation is starting to make less sense. This fact not only has a bureaucratic meaning, but represents a fundamental aspect in the development of new standards to describe and address the vulnerabilities of cities: the concentration of the population in restricted geographical areas and the growing complexity of urban systems, do represent high risk factors in the face of which modern cities appear as surprisingly fragile, even for modest adverse events (by comparison, from antiquity and up to industrial development, cities were much simpler and, consequently, much less vulnerable).