Ri-mappare la città. L’approccio sistemico dell’Information Design per la sostenibilità urbana

«What makes a good city? » (Lynch, 1981): a question that is perhaps too general in the urban and planning overview, as still current and necessary in the dynamic and complex contemporary scenario. By shifting the focus from the formal and configurative research of the city in favour of its representation, and focusing on the need for a systemic approach in the management of urban design issues, the need to orientate in the abstraction of dynamics that are at the basis of the overall and complex processes about the regeneration of the city and the territory, becomes increasingly evident. The city is no longer defined only for its physical architecture, but also and above all for its "information architecture" (Coward & Salingaros, 2005), where the communicative and representative component takes on the role of interpretation of the present "to return essential models and to prefigure the future" (Bergamo, 2018). The more the variability of the city implies an update of its representation models, the more its design should include its communicability. In the framework of these reflections, the paper proposes a reading, through the collection of case studies, of urban regeneration initiatives developed through the interpretative and synthetic processes of Information Design, identifying structured visualization as a complementary practice to specific field research in the development of models and tools for the management of complex problems (Pontis, 2019). The reflection will focus in particular on reticular models and maps as tools of and for the city, catalysts for the development of the so-called "semantic capital" (Floridi, 2020) linking "general values to specific actions" (Lynch, 1981) on environment and territory, starting from the proposal of Information Design to "help people to make sense of the world" (Cairo, 2020).