L’idea di spazio e il disegno del territorio

Usually, the historical cartography is considered an essential tool to know and describe the territory. Even so, in the field of urban design, several ways, tools and techniques of representation have translated different concepts of “space” over the centuries. Thus the transition which takes place in modern times from the concept of space “of localization” to the one “of extension” (Foucault 2002), within the cartography it is marked by the origin of vedutist genre. More or less with awareness, studies of urban analysis sought to recover the capacity of the historical maps not only to fix the characters of a territory, but mainly to narrate its spatial structure and values, selecting elements and their way of being represented. From this point of view, it can be examined the study about Naples by Bisogni and Renna in 1966, an example that was defined “masterly” (Purini 1998). In the 80’s it was realized that the techniques of traditional representation “skid” (Boeri 2002) on a dynamically changing reality. So, the description of territory becomes a “complex” matter that is enriched by innovative techniques and tools, but sometimes loses its meaning as a planning tool, transforming itself in a kind of “descriptive anxiety” (Viganò, 1999). On the one hand it is necessary to recover or re-invent these kind of tools and techniques for describing territories, on the other we must be aware that the contemporary territory is constantly in “mutation” (Koolhaas 2001) and, as such, it can not be described through the use of universal categories. Starting from these considerations, the paper focuses on some examples in order to identify ways, tools and techniques that, similarly to historical representations of territory, are able to “set to shape” contemporary urban projects. So, the new “figures” of the project not only are able to tell the structure of the context they take place in, through the arrangement of their elements, but, above all, they become able to represent the idea of space in contemporary architecture: a dynamic and “topological” space, (such as) the space of the network that replaces the traditional concepts of measure with “position relationships” such as proximity and distance.