The consecutio temporum in the contemporary historical city design

The city is a community with a stable and defined territorial basis. Since its origins, the city grows around and above itself; it is therefore always the result of a stratification where the parts that are being built are juxtaposed to, interposed on and overlap the ancient city nucleus. The city has an evolutionary inner character, a strong inclination to metabolize the novelty, with this last determining its relative present in return. At the same time it is characterized by an inherent resilience ensuring its tendency towards stability, defined by Aldo Rossi as “permanence of the plane” (Rossi, 1966). However, there is a genetic difference between the pre-modern city and the newer forms of urbanity. The former grows according to a continuous shaping process, whilst the latter overlap and are interposed in hybrid and unprincipled ways. Since the early twentieth century, early urban geography studies show that the deterministic model, related to physical laws is no longer suffice to describe a model of comprehensive development of modern cities. As a matter of fact, such cities clearly do not reflect the tight relationship between the organism’s growth, its internal structure and its external shape (Geddes, 1915). This has led to negatively consider certain instances of recent mutation as pathologies, and to the employment of the metaphor of chaos, despite this being an order which is just not known (Miller in Quaroni, 1967). Nowadays, it is clear that the city as a whole is an open system with a multifaceted and porous structure. It lives off the relationship with its territory and the material and immaterial networks that transcend, feed and substantiate it. The city is forged over time and functions as a gathering place for matter and anthropogenic actions. Nevertheless, today its fringe is elusive. The new forms of urbanity, as GMOs, cannot acknowledge themselves as further developments of the original settlements, and no analogical figurative theory can explain the contemporary city. The uncontrolled expansion, the realization of infrastructures, the intangible networks and the instability of the community have changed the meaning and the role of the historical city – even in the instances when its morphology has been preserved – and have turned it into new raw material open to new interpretations and significations. This change places any potential design in a new condition as it forces the designer to deal with unprecedented co-evolutionary aspects that have broken up the rhythms and modalities of the pre-modern Darwinian process. Recognizing this condition means acquiring a systemic and inclusive vision. Methodologically, it implies accepting the coexistence of layers and the overlapping of the interpretations as the only effective – although improvable – instrument to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon. Only the empirical project, as both ontological and operational practice, is able to redefine a dynamic and unstable balance which could go beyond nostalgic rhetoric and the utopian rapprochement.