Dispositivi regolatori. Da strumenti a progetti

The following considerations reflect on a series of studies, which for many years have been investigating possible ways to work onto the form of contemporary city. A city scattered over those territories lying on the earth surface, largely beyond the furthest parts of the well-established city as well as outskirts. The horizontal dimension of a widespread, tiny, pulverized built environment that is randomly scattered through the still strongly agriculturally plotted landscape, marks these territories. In his text on the città in estensione, written in 1976, G. Samonà described the process of transformation that started in the countryside, which had been rapidly overwhelmed and contaminated by the faster and faster urban sprawl; he wished a new metropolis’ form that would assume the dialectics with the horizontality of agricultural landscape as a starting point. Forty years after Samonà’s lecture we are faced with landscapes of the città in estensione, where, although the horizontal dimension is still prevailing, the structure of the agricultural plot has been violated by a widespread and lawless building campaign. Heavy infrastructures have overlapped the layout of cultivated fields, and smaller or wider scattered neighbourhoods cluster around motorway junctions. The contemporary città in estensione shows a series of layers, unresponsive towards each other, randomly overlapped onto the countryside surfaces’ layout. The urban fabric is randomly shaped and does not dialogue with the territorial nature; there is a nearly total lack of designing of void space, street space included. The desire to design a form of contemporary landscape, where set of elements are no longer framed in a univocal, predetermined, and blocked set of relationships, and are able to establish new multiple relationships, must cope with the fragmentation of landscape. With respect to this condition, the compositional principle for the regeneration of the landscape of the città in estensione aims to the development of regulating devices for the design of public space, capable of interpreting the numerous traces written onto the territory, and thus to cope with different collective memories. The ‘device’ is meant according to a double interpretation: on one side the term means ‘mechanical equipment’, i.e. a tool; on the other side it is the expression of a method, a way intended to solve a problem, i.e. a project or an idea. The term ‘regulating’ is also interpreted according to a double meaning: it provides a feature of generalization to the device and, at the same time, explains its aim to be a ruling element, the idea of form in a peculiar context. The fundamental principle underscoring the design of the città in estensione is finally the relationship between artifact and nature, according to which we can give up the making of new objects and then work with architectures deriving from the structure of soil. We can refer to what Peter Eisenman has defined the ‘figure urbanism’ or, moreover, we can speak of a project for the re-figuration as meant by Paul Ricoeur in his essay Architecture and Narrative. Along mixed, broken or straight infrastructural lines, which collect fragments of existing blueprints or are drawn as new measuring tools, the design of void space deploys according to sequences where manipulation is drawn onto enclosures, walls, trees, empty or green or deserted spaces, unfinished architectures, existing facilities, which now appear as ghosts in no one’s city. The new spaces, generated through the manipulation of the elements and materials of the città in estensione, lose their features of objects to acquire a geographical physiognomy. The design of public space in the città in estensione is led, in different locations and according to different declinations, through the regulating device/tool of infrastructure that turns into regulating device/form of a peculiar re-figuration of traces and memories of the landscape of the città in estensione.