Searching for the sustainable “form” of the city

The theme of urban morphology has always been inherent in a balanced relationship between natural space and man-made space, with a particular interaction between the built and the void, where the margin between the two elements has never been a “border”, influencing the shape . With the excessive development the settlements have expanded in a fragmentary way, highlighting the rupture of the historical relationship, defining the indeterminate limit of the spaces of the city, but above all deforming their thickness, meanings and identity. However, the form is obviously not an exclusive connotation of the city, but a quality that can be found in nature, when the two types of space are combined, where the boundary between urban and natural is confused with penetrations of the “ green “in the urban” crevices”, so much so that they can be considered a summary expression that has become a” new space “of the ancient urban dimension. An act that restores design strength to marginal open spaces, to re-evaluate public space as a space for sharing, inclusiveness, identity, but also healthiness and well-being, with a series of actions that link nature and architecture in a new compositional order between fabrics and environment , which conquer their shape by discovering an environmental and anthropic “depth”. In this vision, the design of the limits between the city and the rural landscape assumes central importance, restoring crucial relationships to reverse the trend of the deterioration of urban systems, responding to the new needs and different themes of the contemporary city. The paper aims to deepen, explaining with examples, the interventions that concern the open territory and the urban fabric, as a matrix form that connotes a dialectic of values, redefining the role of the built context as an “environmental connective” between urban spaces and redefinition morphology of the margins, for the functioning of the ecological network, of mobility, of the urban fabric, for environmental and social regeneration.