Professional Documents
Culture Documents
New Urban Forms: The Distinctive Character of The European Metropolis Francesco Indovina IUAV Universtity
New Urban Forms: The Distinctive Character of The European Metropolis Francesco Indovina IUAV Universtity
net/publication/298778603
CITATIONS READS
0 59
1 author:
Francesco Indovina
Università Iuav di Venezia
30 PUBLICATIONS 90 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE
Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:
E se la città del XXI secolo non fosse quella che noi europei vorremmo? View project
All content following this page was uploaded by Francesco Indovina on 17 March 2016.
1 (Secchi, 2005)
smaller towns. This movement can be seen as a trend towards deurbanisation, and
therefore contradictory to the dynamics of urban gigantism I just alluded to. However,
the settlers of these "diffuse" areas do not reject the large dimension, but try to reach a
condition allowing them to enjoy its advantages without suffering its disadvantages.
More than urbanisation, the so-called urban explosion is a symptom of the spread of
urbanisation over entire regions.
2For an assessment of the historical evolution of the city in Europe, see among others Benevolo (1993) and
Hohenberg & Lees (1995). For a general discussion of the contemporary features of the European metropolis, see le
Galès (2001) and Indovina (2014).
Those who investigated the diffusion phenomenon at its inception called it diffuse city, taking
its unique features and outcomes into account. 3 Nonetheless, this is a contradictory
concept: by nature, a city is concentrated and not diffuse. Resolving this contradiction
requires discriminating between urban morphology and the urban condition.4 What is new is that
the urban condition arises even in places that lack the physical-morphological attributes of
a city (density, intensity and compactness). The social, economic, productive, cultural,
friendship and other relations of an urban type that are forged in a morphologically non-
urban space testify that it is not the walls (or a given shape) that make a city, but the
relations between people and their initiative to attain their targets. As the drive to
agglomerate has weakened, new forms of “city” are coming to the fore; the concentrated
city is not disappearing, but it is no longer the canonical form that ensures the urban
condition.
In this process of diffusion, the traditional concentrated city of large or medium scale has
tended to retain most of its governmental institutions (political, administrative, financial,
cultural, educational, etc.) and centres of excellence (research, higher education, etc.). The
concentrated city has attempted to defend its role of driving force, thinking that its
history was a guarantee, but the dynamics was external to it and its lines of resistance did
not succeed in countering ongoing processes.
The consolidation of the diffuse city, including processes of densification (occurring
spontaneously or as a result of timid public action), the need for escaping the grip of the
ever-growing urban costs of the concentrated city, as well as a different geographic
distribution of users and customers (in the diffuse city), have made private activities and
centres of government and excellence more distributed and more easily accessible. In
practice, some of these activities or centres have followed the diffusion trend and have
been relocated into the extended or wide area (the diffuse city), opening up new
opportunities, and above all, giving rise to new territorial organisation. It is the increasing
number of dwellers in the wide area (continuing to grow until it reaches the scale of a
metropolis) that has generated newer and newer opportunities for private services and
promoted the dissemination of public ones, in a process that may rightly be called
cumulative.
This has given shape to a landscape that hosts large, medium and small towns, sparse
settlements, small neighbourhoods, industrial and small-business districts, but also isolated
productive activities, shopping centres or precincts, specialised commercial outlets,
entertainment or recreational facilities, sports facilities, centres of government, health care,
higher education, research, quality services, social or public housing, farmland, barren
wasteland, brown fields, etc.: all this has become dispersed over wide areas, in a
bewildering mixture of people and activities surpassing that of a concentrated metropolis,
where the mutual relations between its various parts and functions are underpinned by a
wide and very dense array of infrastructures. This cityscape is inhabited by a continuously
moving population that enjoys an extended metropolitan space without being oppressed
by major concentration. The metropolitan condition is no longer the prerogative of certain
(albeit numerous) segments of the population, but an opportunity for growing portions
thereof. In a nutshell, it can be said that the European metropolis identifies a shared space,
shattering the differences between those inside and those outside the small or large
fragments of the metropolitan space.
3 Indovina (1990).
4 For more about this distinction, see Indovina (2009).
Indeed, metropolisation is a trend common to wide areas, whether diffuse or belonging to
traditional metropolitan areas. This settlement phenomenon leverages new ICTs, people’s
higher propensity for mobility, broader opportunities of choice among different ways of
inhabiting space, as well as a new awareness of environmental sustainability.
5 For an overview of the status of spatial planning in Europe, see Dühr, Colomb & Nadin (2010).
6Here it is not possible to analyse the role of urban policies in the configuration of the European metropolis. For a
critical approach to the policies developed by the European institutions, see among others Halern and le Galès (2012).
and opportunities for economic growth, while respecting individual settlement choices
that express real needs as far as possible.
Policies for an appropriate use of resources are not only important, but in the case of the
European metropolis they may be more easily implemented and more effective, e.g. the
harnessing of solar and biomass energy or water reuse, etc. Obviously, a metropolitan
region can more easily accommodate climate-appropriate building construction using
suitable materials. A metropolitan region is also much more resilient than a concentrated
metropolis, due to lower anthropogenic pressure on its individual points.
In European metropolises, planning (generally pursuing the goal of improving the situation
of communities) is imperative, because the process is still in the making and careful
governance of this process may multiply opportunities and benefits. Planning is a tool for
implementing an articulated strategy using different methods (from constraints to
premiums, communication to organisation, direct action to partial support of individual
choices, bans, etc.) to achieve the targets set for a possible future. Planning may facilitate
the materialisation of this process, which is triggered by individual choices that reflect the
needs of our era. By giving shape and collective dimensions to individual choices, planning
may strengthen the creation of new territorial forms. Flexibility, which is often demanded
in view of the fast dynamics of our era, should not be applied to targets, but rather to
instruments and actions to achieve them. This implies continuous monitoring of the
situation and outcomes, in order to refocus, strengthen or change the types of actions
envisaged. The metropolitan region does not need less planning, but more and better
planning. It is worth reiterating that the new territorial structure makes novel use of the
urban network of the “old continent”. The trend towards the European metropolis may be
the specific way in which European countries, relying on their urban mesh, are creating
metropolitan structures that avoid the drawbacks of their size, a process that must be
sustained by adequate planning and policies.
Lifestyles in European metropolises are “metropolitan”, but in an “advanced” sense: there
are no longer suburbs where people lock themselves in at the end of the working day. In
general, we see a lack of isolation and a refusal to shut oneself behind closed doors as in
many other urban areas of the world. Relationships of friendship and love weave a web
across the whole territory and young people’s groups are not geographically bounded. The
European metropolis can be an antidote to the degradation of cities and the degeneration of
concentrated metropolises.
References
Benevolo, L. (1993), La città nella storia d'Europa. Bari. Laterza.
Dühr, S., Colomb, C., Nadin, V. (2010), European Spatial Planning and Territorial
Cooperation. Abingdon, Routledge Chapman & Hall.
Halpern, C., Le Galès, P. (2012), Ascesa e declino della politica urbana dell'unione
europea. Analisi longitudinale degli strumenti di azione pubblica (1972-2006), in Grazi, L.
La città e l’Unione Europea. La dimensione urbana tra percorsi storici e dinamiche di europeizzazione.
Bologna. Il Mulino.
Hohenberg, P.M., Lynn H.L. (1995), The making of urban Europe: 1000-1994, Cambridge.
Harvard University Press.
Indovina, F. (1990), La città diffusa, Quaderno Daest, 1, IUAV, Venezia.
Indovina, F. (2009), Dalla città diffusa all’archipelago metropolitano. Milano. Franco Angeli.
Indovina, F. (2014), La metropoli europea. Una prospettiva. Milano. Franco Angeli.
Secchi, B. (2005), La città del ventesimo secolo. Roma. Laterza