Recent Developments in Urban Morphology in Italy

The Italian tradition of urban studies is characterized by the recognition of the city as an artifact, resulting from the historically defined transformation of given conditions to make it habitable. Having said that, three distinct approaches can be acknowledged. A first orientation is recognized in the model of the ‘city as organism’. In this perspective, form is immanent to the transformation process itself and can only be transcended through an act of thought. The latter emerges from a comparative evaluation of the partial outcomes resulting from the transformative project, thus sorted into relative classes and relationships. It is an approach that is inscribed in the centrality of the body in movement and circumscribed by its specific horizon of reference, which establishes its field of application. A second approach is identified in the idea of the ‘analogous city’. The logical-rational capacity induces the same transformative process, transcending it, through the reduction of the city to its elementary principles, obtained by separating the ‘synol’ of form and matter, to subordinate the construction of new possible languages and urbanity to a relatively different articulation of its essence. This attitude implies the primacy of the mind, whose reference horizon exceeds every possible limitation in terms of time and space. A third orientation recognizes itself in the ‘city network’ model, complementing the previous ones. The historically given form is transcended by a generic transformative intention, which is defined, in the germinal phase, as an indeterminate goal, with the aim of removing its implicit limits. The city, thus artificially brought back to the state of pure matter, is subjected to multiple exploratory paths of new opportunities, from which new formal instances progressively emerge. The relative project is inscribed in a body augmented by technological prostheses, whose reference horizon is theoretically unlimited, programmatically unstable and difficult to circumscribe, if not by resort to a political decision.