Urbanities

Following a consolidated tradition since the first number of the journal, the 16th of Archi-DOCT is the result of a call for contribution focused on one single word “Urbanities”. When we were discussing the direction that we wanted to give to this issue, we concluded that we aimed to focus its critical slant - through a specific call to action to the schools of architectures and their students - towards a new interest concerning the multiple scales and resolutions of the so-called urban dimension. During the last decades, centralized planning - as a result of the Modernist heritage - fostered the implementation of top-down hierarchic processes that despite the political and ideological background led the city to be suffering phenomena such as sprawling, undefined expansions, and the emergence of the alleged “urban voids” (that aroused a new matrix of problems and issues to be tackled. Whether we refer to Rome, Tirana, Valencia, Athens, or any contemporary metropolis, these criticalities are far from being solved and, even less, we are close to defining a methodological approach that could suggest effective strategies to proactively remedy this condition. For this, we have been interested in collecting inputs from our authors in order to set the scene so that everyone could tell a specific story and personally question the keyword we choose.