Urban Morphology and Sustainability: towards a shared design methodology

The information revolution is radically transforming the very foundation of the fossil city'. A 'virtual' macro-urbanism will intersect with an 'actual' micro-urbanism, physical and concrete, determining the form of the new urban environment. Within the binomial of macro- and micro- urbanism, urban morphology identifies an interesting socio-building scale that can serve as the basic strategy for sustainable city planning in the twenty-first century. Morphology thus becomes the necessary 'plug-in' for registering the different 'networks' that characterize the contemporary city -from IT and 'smart' devices to energy and environmental systems - translating these networks into building practices, into 'fabrics', for the physical city. At this purpose an Urban Design methodology has been developed in order to combine the Urban Morphology tools with those of Sustainability giving particular attention to the topics of the comfort outdoor and the passive environmental control systems. The methodology has then been applied in the Sant Adria de Besos Waterfront Regeneration Project in Barcelona. Neighbourhood's size, complexity and localization, between the sea and a large area of brown fields at the northern gateway of the Catalan capital, has set up an interesting testing bench. A sequence of consecutive steps characterizes the methodology in which morphology, architecture and sustainability intersect one another within a single design process.