Architecture + City. 30 figures of contemporary urbanism

"Architecture + City, 30 Figures of Contemporary Urbanism" offers a selective tour by the urban planning culture of modern architecture that, after the Industrial Revolution, conceived and designed the contemporary city. It is a personal journey to the extent that it cannot be exhaustive. With a formative dimension, it is written with the conviction both usefulness of this culture in the journey toward a more humane and efficient city, and its potential to imagine our cities in their commitment to a more sustainable future. The figures that trace the book blend thoughts and proposals, ideas and solutions, contextualized within the limitations of a text that aims to be concise. Open to the reader's interests, it relies on the diversity and fertility of architecture as a discipline of the city, but it is not an exclusive compendium. Its intention is to encourage the expansion of knowledge wherever deemed appropriate, complementing what is proposed with what appears in the margins or with new topics. It aims to help readers create their own repository of the ideas and tools that architecture has at its disposal to "shape" the urban. Intermediate between humanistic and scientific cultures, architecture and urban planning are technical disciplines that approach the city not with an explanatory logic but with a projective logic; they think about the city to intervene within it. It's true that the city and its architecture can be observed as distinct realities, which in their constant encounter often emerge contradictory. But without a specific narrative with its own interpretive categories, the form of the city is inaccessible. Understanding our cities, burdened by the uncertainties of the societies that inhabit them, their environmental, demographic, and economic challenges, is more difficult than it seems. Faced with this difficulty, this book shares with its characters their original affection for cities, inseparable from their affection for their architecture. It is the starting point for unfolding 30 stories that are both autonomous and related, where the temporal sequence is only apparent, because they always deal with issues that are still alive, even if they belong to specific episodes in our history.