New generation infrastructures to rebuild the urban space: from the European city to the Iranian one

As days goes by the progressive crisis that grips contemporary cities seems to be unstoppable. As architects we have the need for a new set of strong and revolutionary actions, that could completely change the link between architecture and city and introduce new enzymes intended to raise and develop, in order to invert the development direction. This is a worldwide situation not only located in one specific place but that invests both the European and Islamic city and shows how we need to develop a common strategy, a mutual manifesto of intents to stop this decaying process and to modify the space in which we live in, related to a machinist vision of the world that we are often obliged to accept. The paper focuses on infrastructures as the key for the future development of contemporary cities and explains how the growth of the urban fabric has always been strictly connected to the role of its infrastructures and has to start again from them to operate a proper paradigm shift. This contribution illustrates, with many examples, the history and conception of new generation infrastructures, a multifunctional and multitasking typology completely different from the linear and monotasking ones developed under the industrial age, and deeply analyse the development of a specific type of them: the inhabited bridge, which is seen as a strong element of connection between Europe (specifically Italy) and Iran. Furthermore, the city of Tehran is seen as a virtuous example of how these new architecture artifacts can change the city’s shape and be the starting point, for contemporary architects, to develop new operative categories. At the end of the text a direct experience of a design workshop on the infrastructure theme made by the author in Iran, being part of a multicultural team, is reported.