Dorotea, the city, can be different: urban projects in Rome based on the seminal role of infrastructures

This paper offers a semiotic perspective of the city as an enunciation of different signs in which contemporary projects (the alleged urbanities) play a fundamental role in resemantizing the urban environment. Such design outcomes allow us to understand the city as a hypotactic complex system, not created then only by the simple juxtaposition of elements, but intended as the results of multiple primary and secondary intertwined narrations. The work adopts a structuralist-based approach to the topic where the examples presented act on two combinatory levels: a first one, where each of them maintains its autonomy and functions as an independent predicate, and a second one where the importance relies on the structural system in a dyachronic perspective. What we argue for is the possibility for architects to promote a bottom-up incremental design strategy in the urban enviroment to trigger sustainable urban transformation processes. Moreover, through the specific experience of the authors in the Tevere Cavo project, the papers aims to demonstrate the importance of multitasking interactive spaces and new generation infrastructures for the revitalization and re-activation of the abandoned urban spaces using the city of Rome as object of such investigation.