The crisis resulting from the effects of the pandemic has revealed more than just a financial impact, but also the inability of our cities to react to pressing changes that cannot be postponed. Only a portion of this can be traced back to the structural inertia in modifying a social framework founded on automatisms that involve both action (pràxis) and production (poiesis). The primary cause can be found in the deontic function of the Plan and its regulatory corollaries. In this restrictive context, the need for intervention in emergency conditions in our country required a dangerous dependence on the "state of exception". Some pioneering practices nevertheless demonstrated the existence of effective alternatives to extraordinary measures, legitimising the pre-eminence of the culture of design in urban transformation. ... Read more

In port cities there is a tendency to dislocate production activities in favour of logistic-productive dynamics. In addition, the transition from an industrial area model to a ‘logistics hinterland’ formula shifts attention to a territorial scale, focusing on spaces at the border between the port and city areas. Today, port–city borders are commonly perceived as barriers but they could be dynamic development thresholds. Existing port cities exhibit different states of coexistence at their port–city borders: sometimes they are forced situations originating from poor management, but they can also provide opportunities for mutual interaction and synergy. This paper compares port–city borders in Genoa and Rotterdam using interviews, relevant literature and mapping. Conclusions are drawn concerning the possibilities and potential for future port–city borders. ... Read more

This chapter focuses on the specificity of Urban Morphology in comparison to other field of research, which shares the same interest on urban form. This specificity is intended as the raison d’être of Urban Morphology itself. Compared to Urban History, which is mostly intended as an ordered sequence of conventional interpretations of urban form, corresponding to distinguishable epochs and consciously related spatial products, Urban Morphology complements the aforementioned aspects with a comparable concern on the experimental processes of transformation, made via trials and errors, which creates the conditions for the possible appearance of the conventional as an objective. Compared to Urban Restoration, interested in preservation of the existing, which is assumed as a value, Urban Morphology also considers the critical reflection on the precedent, which is not necessary considered as a value. Compared to Urban Sociology, mostly focusing on agency and its embodiment in the city form, Urban Morphology considers agency as a phenomenon emerging through the endless interplay with the space of the city, which is symmetrically revealed trough the same relation. Therefore, it appears how the specificity of Urban Morphology relay on its interest on the entire life cycle of the city, encompassing conscious and unconscious aspects which belong to the same process, resulting into an urban anthropology. ... Read more

The dismission of the industrial city gives us an "unproductive" waiting condition, with regard to which three different strategies can be recognized. The first, spread in Europe since the second half of the 1970s, has elegantly removed this cumbersome presence, assimilating it to a "gap”, to redeem by invoking the "authority of the past” at achieving a continuity with the morpho-typological principles derived from the existing urban layout. The second, which consolidates in the mid-1990s, sees the chance of emptiness as an opportunity to be relocated in the reference horizon of globalization, eradicating it from the local dimension in favor of de-territorialization processes which are not given a chance of control. The third, generated by the crisis of the creative finance, requires a reflection on the "landscape of abandonment", which, due to the state of affliction which the traditional subjects of transformation experience, open up to an unprecedented crisis of the discipline. The writer believes that the prolongation of the waiting condition can become an occasion for a profound rethinking of the architect's profession and his culture, provided that people know how to look at the reality for what it is, avoiding both the "fascination" for re-composition of the lost unity and the "selfsatisfaction" for the equivalence of solutions, generated by the temporary absence of constraints, which the crisis liberates and entails. ... Read more

Urban Morphology systematically reflects on urban phenomena, with the aim of describing city formation and transformation over the time. Since the end of the XIX century onward, in the western city we had been witnessing a dramatic shift in perspective. Ought to the appearance of Modernity and its ideological Project, the city form is not anymore regenerated, but mostly destroyed and substituted according to new principles, considered not compatible with the existing fabrics and infrastructures. Le Corbusier’s theory of the city clearly expresses the new strategy: the modern city is envisioned as a problem to be solved through the use of technology, intended as a value in itself, for the sake of the industrial civilization. This is an unprecedented change in the history of Urban Form. In fact technology had always been considered merely instrumental to the definition of a precise idea of the Public and not vice versa. Not by chance Urban Morphology starts, after the second world war, as an explicit reaction to that ideological background. The different proposals therefore reflect on the crisis of the pre-industrial city, highlighting its transformation and development to underline the cultural fracture prompted by Modernity. The new economicfinancial crisis we have been witnessing over the last years still claims for a radical revision of the Modern perspective, which seems not anymore compatible with the current condition. This paper intend to develop a reflection on Urban Morphology, in order to discover methodological devices supporting the urgent need for urban regeneration. ... Read more