La forma della città e la vitalità dello spazio pubblico urbano

The urban space can be considered lively when things happen there: a lot of people move around generating chances for interaction and for economic and cultural activities. Urban vitality consists thus in the very essence of the city in its ancestral meaning of an active community of individuals, which has been too often put aside by modern and contemporary urban reflections and design proposals. The current time of crisis of the collective realm, the virtualization of interpersonal relations and the attention to the global scale instead of the local one lead to ask what it will be of the urban everyday life, especially regarding its most basic declinations such as the proximity relations. The human activity in the cities – as Jan Gehl reminds us – is conditioned by a number of factors, many of which have to do with the environmental and behavioral sphere. A major set of conditioning factors, however, has to do with the fisical and relational configuration of the city. The relation between the fisical characters of the city and the expression of the urban life can be traced by analyzing the form of the city and its topological features with an appropriate metodology, as well as scientifically observing the way people act in the urban space. Finding out about how deep can a set of characters of the urban form influence vitality can result in an enormously useful tool for the development of new urban areas as well as for the requalification of existing dull neighbourhoods, a task many western cities are nowadays called to answer to.