Rethinking the Urban and Territorial Space

With the Covid19-pandemic, ancient problems of territorial imbalance have arisen, not only between north and south but between metropolitan cities and medium-sized cities, between the same urban neighborhoods. Urban concentration has manifested all its contradictions and dangers. Debate opens on prospects for changing contemporary city model and, one may hope, like Lefebvre in 1968, a new "Right to the city". A city that has changed culturally and economically compared to the past where contradictions persist: in social inequalities and in the fracture between the center and the suburbs. Debate over prospects for change in contemporary city's centralised model that, as a magnet, attracts innovation, economy and ideas, desertifying the rest of the territory. Today, forced distancing lockdown for the pandemic situation leads to anti-urban behaviour and makes it difficult to understand what the outcome will be in terms of living and working. It is propose a return to the villages, to the small municipalities located in the inland areas: proposals that result from the search for greater livability than metropolitan areas, but that would also represent an opportunity for territorial rebalancing. Italy of the "hundred bell towers" has produced cities and villages of exceptional beauty that today are at risk of extinction. It takes a great national project to redesign cities, places and landscapes of the "Bel Paese" and heal existing imbalances in fragile internal areas. Will predictions of possible increasingly damaging pandemics be enough to reverse course?' It's a gamble with uncertain outcomes, given the development model of today's cities. Salvatore Settis recently spoke of a "prison city" and called for a return to the countryside "as a place to stay alive". Rem Koohlaas in "Delirius New York" identifies urban gigantism and "Manhattan-ism" as a "culture of congestion" that forces residents to live in a completely artificial, unimaginative landscape.