Like Araba Fenice. Design strategies for urban development.

The contemporary city has to solve, “inter alia”, the need of new accommodations through intervention’ strategies aimed to preserve the territory, by virtue of the sustainable development from the economic, environmental and social point of view. It is important to recover the ancient strategies of adding layers and building on built, which are typical of the historical city, where the intervention context is the city itself, which here it becomes new ground where it is possible to build, through renovated instruments able to answer to the quick change of needs and the new users and their use of the city itself, with immediate and efficient interventions. The challenge is to revert the trend of development related to the cities going out from their borders, emptying the cities themselves and transforming them into museums, to make reference to the words of Marc Augé, and creating unsustainable distances and neighbourhoods like satellite isles that consume territories. A city that comes back to itself, with new modalities, and able to recycle the existing stock building, improving its quality and identity. On the basis of these interventions, however, it is necessary to think again about the city itself, starting from the concept of inviolable “object” which belongs to a specific space and time, to an “open system”, made of components and rules of relation between them, and up to a “system of systems”, concluding with a concept of the project as a morphogenetic process, the only instrument of organisation, made of a start, a development and an end.