A-long path. Streets as spatial flow gradient for urban and social integration

Many cities are shaped by the forces that limit their borders. These spatial elements are determined socially and acquired culturally, being reified using rigid walls. Nowadays, cities are progressively losing their immunity to changing their static form. This perspective implies the need to rethink our approach to how we draw borders, raise barriers and model our space. We need to rethink our “freedom of architectural boundaries” (Koolhaas Rem 1995). Our postmodern era, defined by sociologists as the “Age of Migration” (Castels, Miller, 1993), is being stretched by an apparently opposing forces. According to the United Nations, an estimated 60% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2030. By 2050, the number of displaced people is likely to have risen to 200 million. The result will be that migrant resettlement inevitably becomes an urban issue. This problem therefore takes on two dimensions: Physical, relating to the permeability of a city’s boundaries; Social, relating to the new social fabric incorporated in the city. From a social point of view, the Galois group theory can be used as a cognitive tool to recognize four questions that arise from the conflict between static cities and migratory flows. “Closure”: identify a group of relationships and the relative degrees of freedom. “Associativity”: migration paths are twoway roads that connect a two destinations, departures and arrivals. “Inversion”: imagine opposing forces that cause the events to go back to the primary reference point. “Identity”: interpreted as a social “multi-identity”. The road acts as a spatial gradient able to manage urban perturbations caused by migratory flows. The road can be understood as the real place of cohabitation since it is not possible to separate the beginning from the end. The strategy proposed to support urban transformations is to design roads as urban gradients based on three operational categories: Accessibility; Appropriation; Reciprocity.