For a new organic-city

Organic= deriving from living matter; relating to a bodily organ; fit together as part of the whole In his investigation of Europe’s architectural identity and crisis, V. Gregotti tries to examine the reasons of this condition and the material circumstances in which nowadays architects act. Among the mentioned causes the lack of thoughtful consideration towards the themes of transformation of the existing fabric instead of fostering the city expansion; the proliferation of specializations and the confining of the profession of the architect in the role of an image maker for the marketing; the rise of comprehensible environmental preoccupations acting as an ideological guise deprived of content. To these we have to add the lack of interest of the politics to take into account the longue durée of the territorial transformation. As a result our cities and architecture are designed through a careful attention in answering numerous building codes regulations as well as strict environmental controls and all sorts of bureaucratic responses, lacking instead the principal goal that is the capacity of “crafting the city”. In his more recent contribution regarding the sublime in ours time, Gregotti regards the landscape as a recently recuperated concept capable of nurturing a cultural collective idea of settlement. Yet landscape cannot be confused with sustainable and ecological practices, that per se cannot guarantee design excellence. The reference towards the geographical and historical nature of the landscape implies the acknowledgement of an overall character collectively recognizable in terms of scale, imaginary, memory, morphology. The paper aims at analyzing modern and contemporary urban design case studies with the goal of understanding the new urban design morphologies and principles and to highlight what we can understand as new organic-city. The urban is the site of complex relationships and successful projects are those who accomplish disciplinary knowledge together with sustainable and innovative challenges.