Il Grand Paris: verso la “territorializzazione” dello spazio urbano

Following the tradition of the city-territory studies of the 1960s, the theories of Lefebvre and the reflections of the Territorialists around the 1990s-2000s, together with the consolidation of the notion of urban landscape, the disciplinary debate has undertaken a critical rethinking of the concept of the city, focusing the attention on its indissoluble connection to the territorial whole in which it is inscribed. From the need to study the territorial whole as an organic system, of which human settlement constitutes only one of the components, a general re-direction of design approaches has arisen. The need to explore the potentialities of the participation of local communities in the construction of shared scenarios is affirmed; the vast scale of living calls for a greater responsibility towards the entirety of the “territory as a common good”, which passes through the rediscovery of the urban nature of the territory as well as the territorial nature of the city. At the same time, by undermining the traditional city-centric approach by shifting attention from the city object to the production processes of urban space, the urban landscape is described as the outcome of controversial processes of irregular development and socio-spatial differentiation. The general re-culturalisation of the disciplinary approach described above can be read in the events that have involved the urban transformations of the Parisian metropolis in the last decades, generating a prolific cultural ferment in terms of regional planning policies and operating methods at the local scale.