Distanze critiche tra identità e omologazione

In a delicate historical era such as ours, Trasporti & Cultura dedicates this issue to the important theme of the relationship between the character of the territory and the cultural context, in light of the most significant, more or less recent, experiences, with a view to exploring possible alternative scenarios to today’s crisis in architectural language. In this sense, it should be observed that what we recognize today as a clear margin between identity and standardisation is actually – quite often – more of a hypothetical threshold; a sensitive border that embraces the formation processes of historicized urban structures, but at the same time, includes the images and phenomena of our contemporary age. This multiplicity of links and meanings makes it hard, at first glance, to recognize shared characters and values within a world as strongly globalized as our own. Furthermore, the dualism identity/standardisation is not perceived in the same measure in all environments; the recent reconstructions in Germany and Eastern Europe display, in this regard, an approach linked to a specific territory, though quite distant in all likelihood from a sensibility towards other contexts. From Europe to China, through North and South America, issue number 59 examines a plurality of scenarios, seeking to set an ideal course between the sense of identity at certain critical moments (in recent history) and contemporary trends, within which the urban paradigm of the future is being shaped.