External territories and environmental project for the city

Original forms of city/territory interdependence are enabling new urban experiences and languages to be acknowledged. Profound changes in contemporary life have allowed “obsolescent figurative elements” that had spread over the territory to become outdated. The emerging large-scale networks have placed the territory in the foreground again, highlighting a growing reference to its centrality in the project for space. The emerging territories indicate new geographies that are resistant to the hetero-directed models of the global economy, showing rootedness and “anchoring” action that render them unusual in terms of urban and environmental quality, and thus neither interchangeable nor transferable. The new city forms give a sense and role to other ambits, apart from those of the dense metropolises, territories that possess the feature of externity and offer new opportunities to the metropolis, though they are excluded from its spatial patterns and organising logic. The urban potential of the territory may be manifested via a process of recognition of the figurative and fruitional images whose convergence creates a “formative” city, a chance for re-orientation which will give back a sense of aim and belonging to the individual and the collectivity. To design the formative city means to favour potential already present in the context, improve the degree of social complexity and the possibilities of regeneration of interactive systems, clarify emerging innovative forms. The project is thus a process of plural interaction; it is flexible and adaptable, steering urban policies towards legitimisation and efficacy. The environmental orientation and social rootedness of transformative action make it possible to imagine multifarious expressions of the public sphere as a place of possible experiences of collective interaction, and as an opportunity for sharing common goods pertaining to city and territory