Confini territoriali “molli” e identità forti

Within the space of a few decades, we have seen a drastic change in the spatial relationships between one city and another and between cities and their environs. We’ve witnessed a change in the territorial hierarchies and balances that had evolved over time, to the point that today even the attempts to set boundaries and limits to cities seem totally inconceivable. In this new urban dimension, development potentials are countered by growing, increasingly explosive disparities, and the city is once again becoming a place of progressively varied conflict that is difficult to control. Considering the fact that a reflection on the future of the metropolitan territory must contemplate the general situation of ecological, economic, and social crisis, which has brought to the fore the diseconomies of the urban sprawl significant in social, environmental, and mobility terms, speaking of a structural change in the way of governing towns and the territory is not a matter of choice, but an obligatory route to follow. It is a change of perspective which appears inevitable, considering the results that the overflowing urban sprawl – which continues today, albeit at a slower pace – has produced throughout the territory; an overall rethinking which contemplates a return to a city and presupposes a plan for recomposing the existing cities, attributing new shared “qualities” to parts already substantially built, adapting the city’s structures, fabrics, and spaces in relation to the transformation in the makeup of family units, to the new ways of living, new production procedures, and new lifestyles. Identity, integration, and social inclusion form the common theme of the “Migrating Landscapes” exhibit at the Canadian pavilion of the 2012 Venice Biennale. The various models of homes, from the to the to the Trap Line Cabins Dance of the Minarets Making, tell the story of the landscape, the result of the settlement Memory migrating dynamics characterizing the globalized world, resulting in the sedimentation of people and cultures of different origins. These migrated memories, from another place or another time, are transformed and deposited into new contexts. New memories are forged, through processes of stratification, cancellation, and juxtaposition, migrating into new landscapes and new architectural environments. In a total countertrend to the great majority of the designs presented at the Biennale, the Russian pavilion presents the plan for Skolkovo City, a ‘smart city’ that reinterprets the model of the linear city, drawing inspiration from the principles of New Urbanism, proposing a chain of compact, self-sufficient districts characterized by a functional mix of homes and work activities.