New Urbanization Phenomena and Potential Landscapes: Rhizomatic Grids and Asymmetrical Clusters
Authors: Formato Enrico 
Published: February 2022

More and more nowadays, the Circular Economy is at the heart of European public policies. As a result of the “Next Generation EU” Recovery Plans, a huge amount of financial resources will be available in the coming years to give shape the concept of “ecological transition". For that purpose, radical vision and operational concreteness are needed.

In order to strengthen the territorial dimension of public policies aimed at ecological transition, the paper points to consider the status quo of the European territory, looking for recurring elements and differences. In this perspective, a return of “hard” urban studies, focusing on the issues of land ownership, land parcelling, infrastructural and urbanization procedures (and their relationships with the environment and the landscape) should be conducted at the European scale.

A central role for the future of contemporary territories is recognized in the so-called “fringe area”, the part of the urban region where patterns of building development and unbuilt space interwave: its intermediary character, as a place between the compact city and the suburban countryside, makes this zone favourable to the collaboration between the two worlds. In addition, its easy accessibility from both the denser contexts and the outer areas makes it the perfect place to locate the equipment required to create short supply chains, so relevant for the circular economy and the ecological transition.

These transition areas need to be rethought as new collective spaces of the contemporary city, areas for the proliferation of biodiversity, inhibited from settlement increase and subject to restrictions on car traffic. In them, the circular dimension of the new green economy could give shape to certain spatial conditions and new landscapes.

Two main spatial models can describe this sustainable reform of the peri-urban territories. The first one assumes the figure of the “cluster”: a territorially and functionally defined region with one or more reference centres and an edge marking the discontinuity from other clusters. The second model is based on the figure of the “grid”: an unlimited mesh, which gives measure and organizes space according to a replicable and open system. This spatiality is built on a redundant and weak infrastructure, devoid of hierarchy, which can give rise to a sponge rich in pores, with neither internal nor external boundaries.

The concept of the materiality also deals with the physical status of each context where the clusters of shortening flows would define local metabolisms, self-sufficient, marked by the use and recycling of what can be produced or “extracted” in the cluster itself. The closing of short supply chains for the use and recycling of materials, also with reference to the construction cycle and CDW recycling, would have direct consequences on the architectural character of the new arrangements: a kind of hyper-contextualism in which the landscape takes on grains, colours, materiality, closely linked to the local condition.

Finally, a reflection on the rationales of the project is outlined. What is proposed, in fact, requires going beyond the traditional way in which the project has been conceived. In fact, these urban reconfiguration processes, structurally open to uncertainty, would take advantage of a programmatic choice of spatial incompleteness: a condition of “unfinished”, open to the accumulation over time of functions, forms, aggregations and densifications.