Infrastructure and Territory—‘Leaving a Trace’ in the Contemporary (Urban) Archipelago

Territory is the continuous manifestation of the relationship between living beings and the environment. It is, on closer inspection, a particular relationship, the specific form of which conditions the character of the terms involved, that are not given outside of it, being contextually conditioned by their respective developments, in space and time. The complexity of this dynamic is amplified by the observation that the entities involved in, and implicated by, the relationship are sentient and sensitive bodies. The first attribute derives from their being endowed with receptors that vary in quantity and quality. The second depends on their respective ability to react to received stimuli in ways that are not necessarily predictable. The Greek etymology of the lemma xώρα (chôra), with the meaning of territory, which can be traced back to the verb ὁράω (horaô), which denotes ‘to see’, confirms that the foundation of the territory must be traced back to the specific posture through which the living being orients itself in the environment, originally natural. As such, it conditions the former, being reciprocally conditioned by it through a perceptive modality inseparable from the fruitive dimension, which also becomes cognitive, of which a persistent trace remains in both. It is a form of knowledge that is an embodied ‘imprint’, both in the living being and in the environment. If repeated and shared, it becomes typical. The relationship is complicated insofar as it is mediated by the emergence of a third instrumentality, which reifies it as a prosthesis, making it autonomous, beyond the dynamic co-essence of the entities involved. If this anthropological phase manifests itself in all its possible implications with modernity, contemporaneity today poses new challenges. These are attributable to the ongoing technological migration from the material to the immaterial dimension, which is becoming an environment in its own right, alternative, albeit potentially complementary, to the natural and the pre-digital artificial. Thus, a new scenario is prefigured within which one may not only rethink the notion of territory, and its resilience, but also that of the city. To this end, the ‘urban archipelago’ is identified as a model capable of taking into account the ongoing technological innovation and the need to ‘leave a trace’ of humanity as a whole.