Towards a polyphonic urban score

Abstract

By drawing on literature from various disciplinary fields, in particular branches of geography, philosophy, urban design and planning, the article investigates the deep spatial transformations affecting cities and territories. As this variety of reading seems to point out, we increasingly encounter space that is replacing the sharpness of figures of definite boundaries, the hierarchies and regularity, the oneness and coherence with a tangled, vibrant territoriality that is continuously shifting and difficult to map out following the criteria by which we have been used to giving order to the world. Space made up of different situations in which the old dichotomies centre/edge, city/country, local/global, nearness/distance, inside/out, public/private and real/virtual disappear and disintegrate, and in which the invisible and the immaterial return to populate the world. Starting with an acknowledgement of these deep changes and the sense of bewilderment they arouse in us, the article invites us not to take refuge in horizons already known or to try to recompose by creating simulacra the members of a dead body of a city and territory that no longer exist. It proposes instead new explorative methods with which to investigate and above all give expression to the materials, needs, the urgency and qualities that characterise this new widespread urban condition belonging to us. It invites us not to consider the territory like a white board upon which to impose forms, but to pay attention to memories, strengths and energies that cannot be seen but which work uninterruptedly to produce change. It is indeed by starting from an acknowledgement of these qualities that produce different kinds of territoriality and cannot be standardised on a single plane, that the article suggests it is possible to give shape to an original composition, able to “artistically” express a new urban culture. By taking inspiration from the concept of polyphony, borrowed from music, it invites us not to standardise these diversities in a single time or on a single plane, but to use them to give life, through “weaving” and “mending” tasks, to an original composition: a polyphonic composition, in which the different qualities of the parts, though developing autonomously, can play simultaneously, so as to produce an unprecedented urban sound. A sound in which it is the contraction and expansion of spaces, the alternation of full and empty elements, the flights and refrains, deserted places and high intensity nodes that will determine the rhythmic course of the form.

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