Eutopias. The art of building future cities

The dissociation and the detachment between architecture and city have made not immediate the reference to an idea of city for the near future. In the urban contemporary, increasingly indifferent to the settlement design, the provision lack of spatial and infrastructural arrangements has necessarily repercussions on the city’s image, on what are its connotative elements and its constitutive structures. Thinking about the future city, what can we expect after the massive nineteenth-century urban overhaul, or after the potentially infinite homologation of the modernity or even after the most recent smartization led by the global? Although in a way these temporal simplifications appear approximate and a little reductive, as generalized classification, the author focuses her attention on some central, and not at all rhetorical, themes of the current urban debate: questioning thought and imagination about the city’s idea we would like, or the value of places and spaces, or the way to preserve an urban memory or, more generally, on the idea of the community and society that we, as citizens, aspire to build are all important issues for the architectural and urban disciplines. In the city’s utopias the desire has almost been placed above reality, the idea before the solution, the vision before the actual realization. Proceeding by opposition or by accentuation of some particular aspect, the image of the city was abstractly constructed, often idealizing it to the point of considering it a lot of times unreal. Is it possible, therefore, to “establish a concrete eutopia that arises from the real conditions of the everyday environment and at the same time returns to it by creatively modifying it in order to make it closer to our desires (Mumford, 1962)”? The essay discusses the role that creativity has as the driving force behind the invention and as an active tool in the positive and wise transformation of the physical reality in which we operate as architects. Even if the contemporary suggests the renunciation of considering the city a project's matter, we should not stop imagining the future of the cities to come.