M. Urbanizations and Territories

The urbanized space is at the center of the orientation “Urbanizations and Territories”, as a support defining new conditions of individual and collective practices, natural dynamics and rationalizations. Both its description and its project require the development of specific conceptual and operational tools and call for a renewal of landscape and urban design practices, knowledge producers, pooling urban design, landscape urbanism, regional and environmental planning.

Beyond the center/periphery opposition, the City-Territory concept or Horizontal Metropolis allows to read the dispersed contemporary condition as a potential, and not only as a problem, for the construction of a sustainable and innovative urban dimension, where the notion of territorial reconditioning/recycling/reinvestment reverses the idea that urbanization is just a process of waste and considers it, instead, as a “stock” and a reservoir of embodied energy. This orientation explores the possibility of conceiving the city and its landscapes as a renewable resource, exploring the potential of a transformation that recycles the existing to the full, valorizing open and built space, heterogeneity and coexistence in space.

The City-Territory, interpreted as a concrete potential for the construction of an enduring and innovative urban dimension, is thus the core of our investigations.  Shaped by the slow accumulation of infrastructures, landscapes dynamics, ecological and agrarian manipulations, fine settlements grains, distribution of services, fully productive landscapes, and urban life-styles, those original and extremely stratified forms of urbanity represent the spatial capital that orientation explores, through the tools of representation, design, conceptualization, history and politics.