On borders. An operational proposal for a sustainable city

The demands of the 2030 Agenda’s targets have as their primary goal the resolution of the trade-off between the efficiency of city life and the healthiness offered by rural conditions. Although the problematic relationship between city and nature has emerged with particular topicality as a result of the health emergency, it has its roots in the distant past. An example of this is the provocative thesis of the “culture of congestion” proposed by Rem Koolhaas in 1978 in reference to the urban experience lived by man in most of the world’s metropolises, a precursor to the crisis that the proximity condition linked to metropolitan life reached with the outbreak of the epidemiological situation. The proposal – 'on borders' – who not impose itself as a feasible operation, but rather as a verification of theoretical positions, aims to re-establish the sense of the parts in the city of Palermo as it emerged from the morphological-spatial reading. Through the rewriting of the city’s borders, the sinuous thorn of building that imposes itself on the traces of the ancient streams is replaced by a void of nature, a pause between the meshes of the built-up area to signify the different moments, and the different ways, of construction of the parts of the city that overlook it. The goals of Agenda 2030 thus become a pretext for understanding how the definition of green and accessible spaces can be both a structural and transformative condition for making the “city by parts” intelligible and for adopting a model of inclusiveness and sustainability in line with the challenges that the world poses to all those who study the city and its phenomena.