The title of this written work derives from an observation by Richard Ingersoll with regard to the Italian periphery areas: «In the past two years, I have been in many Italian cities to participate in conventions on urbanism. During that same time, I also visited cities in other countries such as Mexico City, Caracas, Cairo, Jerusalem, Lille, Almere, Vitoria, Shanghai and Beijing. The most extreme conclusion I reached was that all of Italy, one of the most highly appreciated urban cultures in the world, is becoming one entire spread out city».
The continuous city is an expression that contains a useful paradox for shedding light on the "secret fear" lodged in the collective conscience of a general transformation of the natural landscape into an artificial landscape. Moreover, that phrase contains within its folds, a glaring truth that lights up an anxiety-inspiring image that makes those who care for the city and even those who simply live in it apprehensive. With respect to this reality, on which there has been a great deal of literature written, one can become aware of the problem or ignore what it represents. It is like a dark evil that erodes the integrity of an organism blocking its vital functions. However, frequently, even despite awareness, it is preferred to postpone critical decisions to the future in an attempt to invert the action of that negative process, passively accepting a slithering and absolutely uncontrolled rate of transformation. It is an unstoppable process of occupation of the territory due to demographic growth, migrations determined by the needs of peoples from depressed areas, the unstoppable and ungovernable driving change of economic development carried forward in a chaotic manner. This, as Leonardo Benevolo confirms in a recent essay (L'architettura nell'Italia contemporanea. Ovvero il tramonto del Paesaggio), has brought about the eclipse and decay of territorial design squandering the physical identity of our country.
The continuous city represents the metaphor of the Italian city in expansion (with the relative problems that creates). However in a more general sense this phenomenon is tied to globalization, though in different areas and assuming different configurations.
The reasons behind that fact and the internal mechanisms of it, the reflexes both in a spatial and social-anthropological sense have still not been sufficiently studied in all of their aspects (despite the theoretical research and attempts at experimental intervention regarding them) for which they require increasing attention from scholars and designers to individuate new directions for building interventions (with the aim of redefining a more liveable reality) and to halt the erosive action on the natural patrimony. The chaotic image that manifests the urban expansion that was produced, beginning during the post world war II era, (in Italy it was the object of an important historical analysis by Vezio De Lucia, Se questa è una città. La condizione urbana nell’Italia contemporanea) is the result of a weave of contradictions in interpersonal dramas, the communicative flow of strong architectural presences (sometimes even of creative interest) and of living environments with scarce significance spread throughout the territory without the support of clear spatial definition, which add up and chain together in a continuous and undefined manner, creating the formation of so-called places of “living confusion” (urban environments in which the spatial pattern has lost its original sense of community without yet having acquired an alternate definition).
This peri-urban style settlement process (the Italian style of the fifties and sixties was acutely analyzed in movies by Fellini, Visconti and Pasolini), has today reached the “critical” mass to bring autonomy to the city itself. It is not hard to understand that those who live in this city-non-city are pushed to use, as Ingersoll notes in his recent writing (Periferia italiana), the expression “let’s go to the city," to mean "let's go to the centre."
Even despite the conditions of detachment in that living context with its labyrinths and a design that is frequently difficult to decipher (it can be seen with regard to the studies of Boeri, Lanzani and Martini, Il territorio che cambia), it is the result, more times than not, of a development built around a historical dwelling area that remains as an identifying, cultural, administrative and economic nucleus for the concentration of commercial and directional structures.
It is the duty of contemporary architectural culture to dig, with all of the means available (theoretical and non), into these interstitial areas of daily reality, searching to reveal the most hidden sides with the all of the auxiliary scientific and humanistic disciplines that can contribute to a strict and coherent analysis of this condition in which a large slice of humanity currently lives and works.
The phenomenon that we are talking about and which should be proposed as an imperative to understanding its essence, is something that appears invisible to the eye. It is therefore necessary to work so that in the contribution of our studies and critical elaborations, these realities are revealed with a flagrantly Brandi-style flair: as a concrete dimension, that is defined and absolutely visible.
It is not by chance that in the opening of his popular essay Sprawltown, Ingersoll writes «Without realizing it, the city has disappeared. We continue to live in urban environments with historic names such as Rome, Paris, New York and Beijing, but today most of the developed world lives in periphery areas. The excesses in urbanization over the past 50 years have led the city beyond metropolis, to megalopolis: urbanized territory. Eugenio Turri (2000) sustains that northern Italy, including Turin, Genoa, Milan, Bologna and Venice act like one single urban entity. The dozens of cities in the Randastad (city-ring) in Holland interact like an interurban context. That which is meant when mentioning "Los Angeles" is in fact a federation composed of around 42 different municipalities. Tokyo-Yokohama, with 31 million inhabitants is absolutely the largest conurbation. With over 18 million inhabitants, Mexico City, which is more highly populated than Australia, can no longer be referred to as a city. A municipal area like Houston cannot be referred to as a city either, with almost 2000 square kilometres it is like the small country of Luxembourg. All over the world, the dimensions of cities have increased beyond recognizable sizes.»
From this piece we can extract two important facts with regard to the contemporary urban condition.
The first is that it tends to develop outside the understanding and control of society itself. Delirious New York, by Rem Koolhaas confirms that, in its subtitle A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan. Becoming the poster child for Dutch “second modernity” (to then serve as an example in many other countries), it is based on the understanding of the cultural importance (the culture of living, dwelling and working) of the message contained in Manhattanism, and in the discovery of the intrinsic significant message in the delirious concentration of skyscrapers realized by professionals without deep, or well understood cultural ambitions and by builders moved by strong economic interests.
The second, is that it represents a profound transformation of the landscape at a world level and this imposes a radical modification of the older parameters with which we all, up to now, measured the world.
The complexity of living space is presented first and foremost by the sums (or by the complicated weave) of a group of components that invade the territory without a clear aim (with regard to which, we should also search to understand the meaning) and efficient connections: manufacturing and residential complexes, logistic and communications infrastructures, local systems of industry, culture, forms of living and more generally all those aspects of social life that allow us to talk about “complex society.”
In this sort of continuous city, as was said, the traditional relationships between the centre and periphery areas change. All of those confines which were commonly considered to allow for recognizing (evaluating, appreciating, critiquing, refusing) the aspects and the distinctive peculiarities of a place in a physical context, have been dissolved.
If in the past all of the strategic/organizational functions of the entire territory were designated to the metropolitan area and the smaller centres were designated with the functions of periphery areas, that model does not seem to correspond to present reality, inasmuch as the changes that have taken place in this relationship are now too many, both from an urban and from an economic point of view, as well as from a demographic and infrastructural one. Therefore, while the centre once enjoyed supremacy, the periphery areas were subordinate to them but now this model no longer exists. Metropolitan centres are in fact no longer "centrally located" and at the moment that the periphery is no longer “peripheral,” it is subject to the same processes and events that take place in metropolises. It must be added that the metropolis was the privileged area for "sociation," according to the German sociologist in reference to that form indicated as "sociability" of individuals and groups, which are forced to reduce the possible distances existing between them. Today, from the moment that these relationships have changed, the complex dialectic between association and disassociation has changed the same forms of social conflict. Therefore it goes from the trade unions of the industrial past, to that of today's society, which Ralf Dahrendorf defines as "the classes without a battle and the battle without classes."
The multiplication of the chances that favoured individual mobility, at the same time individualized the conflict by detaching from class organizations. With regard to that, just to cite a couple of examples though there have been many essays on the argument, Paul Virilio recently published City of Panic and Zygmunt Bauman published Modus Vivendi. Inferno e utopia del mondo liquido.
The first of the two books highlights how the real catastrophe of modernity is the metropolis, the living museum of political incongruence that cannot manage to control the development of technical progress. The world, in this manner, becomes omnipolitan, it results as being transformed deeply by the temporal compression of information: the circumference is all over and the centre is nowhere. The geopolitical phenomenon of the polis, became an omnipolis, the contemporary megalopolis: ghost-cities, meta-cities without limits and without laws convinced that they are the world's epicentre, but in reality, they are without location.
The second reflects on the current condition in which there are no longer many sites of land available on which individuals may build their hopes for salvation. We can no longer seriously hope, the author observes, to make the world a better place to live in. We can no longer make that better place, which we may have been able to create for ourselves, secure. The insecurity remains, no matter what happens.
Richard Ingersoll, Periferia italiana, Meltemi, Rome 2001, p. 11.
Richard Ingersoll, Sprawltown, Meltemi, Rome 2004, p. 8.
Up to reaching the outlines of the Großstadt, the transformation of the city into the metropolis, whose characteristics would be studied by Georg Simmel.
The continuous city is an expression that contains a useful paradox for shedding light on the "secret fear" lodged in the collective conscience of a general transformation of the natural landscape into an artificial landscape. Moreover, that phrase contains within its folds, a glaring truth that lights up an anxiety-inspiring image that makes those who care for the city and even those who simply live in it apprehensive. With respect to this reality, on which there has been a great deal of literature written, one can become aware of the problem or ignore what it represents. It is like a dark evil that erodes the integrity of an organism blocking its vital functions. However, frequently, even despite awareness, it is preferred to postpone critical decisions to the future in an attempt to invert the action of that negative process, passively accepting a slithering and absolutely uncontrolled rate of transformation. It is an unstoppable process of occupation of the territory due to demographic growth, migrations determined by the needs of peoples from depressed areas, the unstoppable and ungovernable driving change of economic development carried forward in a chaotic manner. This, as Leonardo Benevolo confirms in a recent essay (L'architettura nell'Italia contemporanea. Ovvero il tramonto del Paesaggio), has brought about the eclipse and decay of territorial design squandering the physical identity of our country.
The continuous city represents the metaphor of the Italian city in expansion (with the relative problems that creates). However in a more general sense this phenomenon is tied to globalization, though in different areas and assuming different configurations.
The reasons behind that fact and the internal mechanisms of it, the reflexes both in a spatial and social-anthropological sense have still not been sufficiently studied in all of their aspects (despite the theoretical research and attempts at experimental intervention regarding them) for which they require increasing attention from scholars and designers to individuate new directions for building interventions (with the aim of redefining a more liveable reality) and to halt the erosive action on the natural patrimony. The chaotic image that manifests the urban expansion that was produced, beginning during the post world war II era, (in Italy it was the object of an important historical analysis by Vezio De Lucia, Se questa è una città. La condizione urbana nell’Italia contemporanea) is the result of a weave of contradictions in interpersonal dramas, the communicative flow of strong architectural presences (sometimes even of creative interest) and of living environments with scarce significance spread throughout the territory without the support of clear spatial definition, which add up and chain together in a continuous and undefined manner, creating the formation of so-called places of “living confusion” (urban environments in which the spatial pattern has lost its original sense of community without yet having acquired an alternate definition).
This peri-urban style settlement process (the Italian style of the fifties and sixties was acutely analyzed in movies by Fellini, Visconti and Pasolini), has today reached the “critical” mass to bring autonomy to the city itself. It is not hard to understand that those who live in this city-non-city are pushed to use, as Ingersoll notes in his recent writing (Periferia italiana), the expression “let’s go to the city," to mean "let's go to the centre."
Even despite the conditions of detachment in that living context with its labyrinths and a design that is frequently difficult to decipher (it can be seen with regard to the studies of Boeri, Lanzani and Martini, Il territorio che cambia), it is the result, more times than not, of a development built around a historical dwelling area that remains as an identifying, cultural, administrative and economic nucleus for the concentration of commercial and directional structures.
It is the duty of contemporary architectural culture to dig, with all of the means available (theoretical and non), into these interstitial areas of daily reality, searching to reveal the most hidden sides with the all of the auxiliary scientific and humanistic disciplines that can contribute to a strict and coherent analysis of this condition in which a large slice of humanity currently lives and works.
The phenomenon that we are talking about and which should be proposed as an imperative to understanding its essence, is something that appears invisible to the eye. It is therefore necessary to work so that in the contribution of our studies and critical elaborations, these realities are revealed with a flagrantly Brandi-style flair: as a concrete dimension, that is defined and absolutely visible.
It is not by chance that in the opening of his popular essay Sprawltown, Ingersoll writes «Without realizing it, the city has disappeared. We continue to live in urban environments with historic names such as Rome, Paris, New York and Beijing, but today most of the developed world lives in periphery areas. The excesses in urbanization over the past 50 years have led the city beyond metropolis, to megalopolis: urbanized territory. Eugenio Turri (2000) sustains that northern Italy, including Turin, Genoa, Milan, Bologna and Venice act like one single urban entity. The dozens of cities in the Randastad (city-ring) in Holland interact like an interurban context. That which is meant when mentioning "Los Angeles" is in fact a federation composed of around 42 different municipalities. Tokyo-Yokohama, with 31 million inhabitants is absolutely the largest conurbation. With over 18 million inhabitants, Mexico City, which is more highly populated than Australia, can no longer be referred to as a city. A municipal area like Houston cannot be referred to as a city either, with almost 2000 square kilometres it is like the small country of Luxembourg. All over the world, the dimensions of cities have increased beyond recognizable sizes.»
From this piece we can extract two important facts with regard to the contemporary urban condition.
The first is that it tends to develop outside the understanding and control of society itself. Delirious New York, by Rem Koolhaas confirms that, in its subtitle A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan. Becoming the poster child for Dutch “second modernity” (to then serve as an example in many other countries), it is based on the understanding of the cultural importance (the culture of living, dwelling and working) of the message contained in Manhattanism, and in the discovery of the intrinsic significant message in the delirious concentration of skyscrapers realized by professionals without deep, or well understood cultural ambitions and by builders moved by strong economic interests.
The second, is that it represents a profound transformation of the landscape at a world level and this imposes a radical modification of the older parameters with which we all, up to now, measured the world.
The complexity of living space is presented first and foremost by the sums (or by the complicated weave) of a group of components that invade the territory without a clear aim (with regard to which, we should also search to understand the meaning) and efficient connections: manufacturing and residential complexes, logistic and communications infrastructures, local systems of industry, culture, forms of living and more generally all those aspects of social life that allow us to talk about “complex society.”
In this sort of continuous city, as was said, the traditional relationships between the centre and periphery areas change. All of those confines which were commonly considered to allow for recognizing (evaluating, appreciating, critiquing, refusing) the aspects and the distinctive peculiarities of a place in a physical context, have been dissolved.
If in the past all of the strategic/organizational functions of the entire territory were designated to the metropolitan area and the smaller centres were designated with the functions of periphery areas, that model does not seem to correspond to present reality, inasmuch as the changes that have taken place in this relationship are now too many, both from an urban and from an economic point of view, as well as from a demographic and infrastructural one. Therefore, while the centre once enjoyed supremacy, the periphery areas were subordinate to them but now this model no longer exists. Metropolitan centres are in fact no longer "centrally located" and at the moment that the periphery is no longer “peripheral,” it is subject to the same processes and events that take place in metropolises. It must be added that the metropolis was the privileged area for "sociation," according to the German sociologist in reference to that form indicated as "sociability" of individuals and groups, which are forced to reduce the possible distances existing between them. Today, from the moment that these relationships have changed, the complex dialectic between association and disassociation has changed the same forms of social conflict. Therefore it goes from the trade unions of the industrial past, to that of today's society, which Ralf Dahrendorf defines as "the classes without a battle and the battle without classes."
The multiplication of the chances that favoured individual mobility, at the same time individualized the conflict by detaching from class organizations. With regard to that, just to cite a couple of examples though there have been many essays on the argument, Paul Virilio recently published City of Panic and Zygmunt Bauman published Modus Vivendi. Inferno e utopia del mondo liquido.
The first of the two books highlights how the real catastrophe of modernity is the metropolis, the living museum of political incongruence that cannot manage to control the development of technical progress. The world, in this manner, becomes omnipolitan, it results as being transformed deeply by the temporal compression of information: the circumference is all over and the centre is nowhere. The geopolitical phenomenon of the polis, became an omnipolis, the contemporary megalopolis: ghost-cities, meta-cities without limits and without laws convinced that they are the world's epicentre, but in reality, they are without location.
The second reflects on the current condition in which there are no longer many sites of land available on which individuals may build their hopes for salvation. We can no longer seriously hope, the author observes, to make the world a better place to live in. We can no longer make that better place, which we may have been able to create for ourselves, secure. The insecurity remains, no matter what happens.
Richard Ingersoll, Periferia italiana, Meltemi, Rome 2001, p. 11.
Richard Ingersoll, Sprawltown, Meltemi, Rome 2004, p. 8.
Up to reaching the outlines of the Großstadt, the transformation of the city into the metropolis, whose characteristics would be studied by Georg Simmel.
