NO-CITY: Designing across the Urban Pluriverse

Type of the Paper: Peer-reviewed Conference Paper / Full Paper

Track title: “Urban-rural Integration” and “Areas In-Between”

NO-CITY: Designing across the Urban Pluriverse

Marco Ranzato ¹, Davide Cauciello ² and Federica Fava ³

¹ Department of Architecture, Roma Tre University; marco.ranzato@uniroma3.it

² Department of Architecture, Roma Tre University; davide.cauciello@uniroma3.it

³ Department of Architecture, Roma Tre University; federica.fava@uniroma3.it

Abstract: This paper presents some of the results of NO-CITY SALARIA, part of an interuniversity research and educational programme between Roma Tre University, the University of Camerino (UNICAM), and IUAV University of Venice. The programme was launched to explore the urban-rural dichotomy in three different territories of the Italian peninsula. Each area cuts through a particular urban condition up until the most peripheral regional areas of the country, namely the so-called “inner areas,” identified by the 2014 National Strategy of the same name (SNAI). Challenging city-centric or urban-centric visions, today reinforced by the SNAI, this contribution presents some exercises of imagination that show possible ways to overcome dual territorial approaches. Methodologically, the study adopts the transect as a conceptual and practical tool that serves to address the territorial dialectic in a novel way. Fluctuating along the transect, the onward-backward movement blurs the imaginary line that profoundly limits a more complex urban discourse. Affirming the interchangeable and intrinsic value of both urban and rural realities, i.e. of each gradient of today’s urban condition, the design speculations thus show the potential of the pluriverse of forms emerging from this continuous exchange.

Keywords: planetary urbanisation; transect; inner areas; human agency

1. Beyond the urban-rural dichotomy

From its early days, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the city-countryside debate and the consequences of all-encompassing urbanisation to the forefront (Boeri, 2020). Having forced many people to stay locked in their homes, the pandemic has strongly affected our cities and profoundly modified the discourse about density and dispersion, serendipity and tranquillity, and consumption and responsible production. Among those citizens who were in a position to choose if moving from or staying in the city, concerns about density and densification (Florida et al., 2020) has provoked anti-urban behaviours and a movement toward not only the suburbs, where a dwelling can include at least one garden, but also toward more peripheral regional areas, where it is possible to feel some distance from everyone.

Yet in Italy, a country that has been deeply affected by the pandemic (Amante & Balmer, 2020), the debate on the urban-rural dichotomy has been revived since 2014, when the National Strategy on Inner Areas (SNAI) policy was approved in order to re-balance the inequalities in access to services (education, health, public transport) that affect 60% of the territory (Agenzia per la Coesione Territoriale, 2012). Controversially, the policy redraws the country’s boundaries between urban and rural, while promoting the implementation of typically urban services in the inner areas, defined in relation to their distance from “poles” (20>40 mins, 40>75 mins, >75 mins), which are areas that offer basic services in terms of education, health, and public transport. In other words, the difference between the city and the so-called “inner areas” is marked by reference to the remoteness of these territorial portions to urban infrastructures. The SNAI attempts to shorten (at least partially) this gap through the injection of a series of initiatives and services into the inner areas.

The dichotomy which the SNAI affirms is deeply rooted in the history of the country and its physiography. From the Po Valley in the North down to Sicily in the South, the Italian peninsula is crossed by the Apennines, a mountain range that divides the coastal urbanisation of the Adriatic Coast in the East – with Ancona, Pescara, and Bari as the main poles – from that of the Tyrrhenian Coast in the West – with central poles in Genova, Rome, Naples, and Messina. As early as 1958 (although with reference to the South of Italy), Rossi Doria (1958) called the abovementioned Apennine territories the “bone lands” to denounce the socio-economic gulf that was emerging between the many inland areas of the interior and the plain areas along the coasts. The bone lands have not only been a reservoir of laborers and workers (for the industries of northern Italy and elsewhere, such as the mines of Belgium), but also of essential resources such as water, timber, and food. To a certain extent, because of their mix of environment, culture, production, and landscape, they can be seen as the backbone of the country (Pazzagli 2017, 20).

In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, reflecting on the Italian urban-rural dichotomy and its socio-physical and political conditions seemed naturally relevant. With a critical perspective, ‘NO-CITY,’ an interuniversity research and educational programme between the Roma Tre University (Rome), the University of Camerino (UNICAM, Ascoli Piceno), Iuav University of Venice (Venice), and other national and international universities and research groups, was launched in an attempt to question the urban-rural dichotomy by investigating it along three transects of the Italian peninsula, each of which cuts through a given urban condition up until an inner area. The research question posed through NO-CITY is, “How can we best tackle the urban-rural dichotomy, reinforced by the SNAI policy, at a time of planetary urbanisation (Brenner & Schmid, 2011)?” By building on the complex cross-scaling convergency concerning all territories now entangled in the ever-present urban (Friedmann, 2002), the main objective of NO-CITY is to analyse and design urbanised territories by thinking about and building upon the relationships between urban assemblages of different and dynamic natures instead of their alleged boundaries (Balducci et al., 2016, 16).

To this end, the transect is adopted as conceptual and practical methodological tool that serves to address the urban-rural dialectic in a novel way. Fluctuating along the transect, it is possible to activate a rhythm that contrasts urban- or rural-centric positions, blurring that imaginary line that profoundly limits a more complex urban discourse. From the Geddesian “section” stretching the understanding of the city from the “tower of the centre” toward the valley-region and the universe, to the botanical perspective capable of holding the complexity of life, the transect offers itself as space for creative territorial exploration. In contrast, it allows the civic dimension of the area to be explored, which functions as entry point to the understanding of the local context and its inner dynamics.

By building on this tradition, NO-CITY SALARIA (the part of the programme that deals with the territory of Rome) investigated the transect that runs along the Roman road, via Salaria, which connects Rome on the Tyrrhenian coast to the Adriatic by traversing the mountain range of the Apennines. Drawing on the results of the first year of the programme experimentation (par. 3), this paper presents some reflections on the potential of a fluctuant or transient methodological approach (par. 2) toward and opposed to urban conditions that are still identified with the city. Moving along this trajectory, categories of analysis, spatialities, and types of urbanisation emerge in contrast to overly sharpen conceptual boundaries. The results show how the transect is a tool for detecting and, via the project, manipulating the relationships by holding together place and “region” (as Geddes would put it). At the same time, the transect shows its limits of spatial determination in the face of relationships that are discontinuous in space and uncontainable because planetary (par. 4).

2. The Transect and the Civics

Over the past 150 years, many pages have been devoted to the dissolution of the city. Already at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, at the height of the industrialisation that was raging in Europe and beyond, Ildefons Cerdà spoke about urbanisation (Cerdà, 1867). Cerdà’s intuition was that the “the city, as an entity differentiated from the territory, should cease to exist” and be “replaced by a dislocated system, potentially extendible to infinity, whose function is no longer to produce a form, but to be a process” (Campani 2021, 254). In 2002, 140 years later, John Friedmann claimed that the city is dead and that what remains is the urban (Friedmann, 2002). Just 30 years before that, Henry Lefebvre spoke of the appearance of an urbanised society, a reflection that, not long ago, brought Neil Brenner and others to forge the hypothesis of a planetary urbanisation (e.g., Brenner, 2014). Needless to say, these cutting-edge understandings would deserve additional explanations, while several others would merit being mentioned and further explored. However, for what might concern the NO-CITY project, it is important to recall the common malaise expressed by these studies, namely, the trouble of dealing with the uncontainable transformations of the city, then of the territory. Periphery, dispersion, sprawl, conurbations, etc., are all notions abundantly used throughout the twentieth century to mark the disintegration of the urban-non-urban distinction, and, by extension, of the city-countryside binomial.

A few decades after Cerdà’s theories on urbanisation, Patrick Geddes produced a series of hypotheses and theorizations about the city and the territory at large. They were all oriented towards a great cultural and social renewal in the face of “the narrow utilitarianism that characterised the industrial revolution” (Mazza, 2008, 1). Geddes’ proposals were reactionary and, to a certain extent, city-centric. However, they were all oriented toward the reintegration of the urban within a wider territory in the belief that social processes and spatial form are intimately related. The famous Valley Section renders Geddes’ thoughtful cross-scaling and territorial understanding apparent: the entire valley region is a region-city, an ideal type of city “modelled on the valley region with its network of settlements of various sizes and one large city as its centre” (Welter, 2001). The territory is reclaimed as an inhabited space and town and country are not set against each other. In this line, Geddes also highlighted the relevance of the knowledge of places – be they cities, towns, or any other form of settlement – via the practice of the survey, a true carrier for acquiring an active citizenship. This is what makes the Civics, i.e. associations of citizens that are able to search for the common good (Mazza, 2008).

The complex morphologies and interdependencies of planetary urbanisation disrupt Geddes’s vision of a hierarchical and evolutionary town-city relation. Moreover, the current (and increasing) plurality of realities claiming different ways-of-being in the world describes a “pluriverse,” i.e. “a world where many worlds fit” (Escobar 2018, 21). Although the Valley Section and the Civics localism and regionalism are relevant in describing territorial nexus, more recent developments thus suggest the urgency to explore other, nonhierarchical approaches to design or, in Escobar’s words, a new “design imagination” (ibid).

Similarly to the Geddesian Valley Section, the transect promises to be a means of holding together the many assemblages of different and dynamic natures that characterise today’s urbanisation and of understanding their complex relationships. According to Gandy (2020, 161), the transect is a botanical walk, “one of the most familiar methods used in conducting ecological surveys.” In botany, the transect has the capacity to record variations, i.e., it allows one to overcome binary visions by recording transitions together with counterpoints. Herbert Sukopp (1990, quoted in Gandy 2020, 164) himself referred to the transect also as “a schematic approach adopted in order to provide a cross-sectional representation of the urban-rural gradient in terms of variations in the built environment and its characteristic vegetation.” The very fact that the transect has so much in common with the Valley Section can be traced back to the fact that Geddes himself was a biologist.¹

By building on these two traditions for its investigations, the NO-CITY programme adopts the idea of travelling along a line and stumbling into places. Those places are a sort of “accidental” situations along the way in order to make them every time vantage points for observation.

The investigation conducted in the frame of NO-CITY and presented below adopted a five-step (Figure 1) approach, described as follows:

1. territorial crossing: analysis of the entire transect by mapping and survey;

2. diagnosis of urban practices: selection and analysis of associations – intended as civics – carrying social and cultural values connected to the territorial specificities;

3. research by design: definition of a design proposal related to a portion of the territory narrowly related to the selected urban practices;

4. re-composition: assemblage of the different portions of the territory during both the analysis and design phases (1 and 3) in order to reconnect the study with the different urban conditions that exist beyond the territorial unit by moving once again along the transect;

5. finalisation: definition of the final proposal by including additional elements that have emerged in the re-composition phase.

Figure 1. The Transect and the Civics.

For NO-CITY SALARIA (Rome), this five-step process was applied by following the consular Roman road Salaria that cuts through the identifiable urban condition at the centre of ancient Rome up until the countryside of the Monti Reatini Inner Area (Figure 2). The transect longitudinal development is of about 70 km; its altitude varies from 20 metres up to 800 metres above sea level.

Along the Salaria road, a series of associations or human practices were identified as the vantage point for observation and design (Table 1). Each association is understood as a rhizomatic figure standing out against a background or a portion of the territory that speaks about a specific urban/rural condition. As for the Civics of Geddes, each association operates projecting on a certain situation within the urban/rural gradient a supposed common good in terms of “living together,” “living with the environment” and “tangible and intangible heritage.”

Figure 2. NO-CITY SALARIA transect. (source: Riccardo Ruggeri)

Table 1. Selected associations along the NO-CITY SALARIA transect.

The background on which the human practices operate was analysed by looking at land use and land cover, urbanisation patterns, services, mobility, and public transport, and environmental threats (step 1). The diagnosis included a campaign of interviews that enabled the researchers to get acquainted with the associations and begin the collaboration (step 2). For each association, a portrayal was developed integrating architectural artefacts, related networks, and societal values. The re-composition, a sort of collage of the associations and their features within the overall transect, was a fundamental move that offered the opportunity to reactivate its original dynamic (step 4). This concerned both the analysis and design phase, the latter intended as an exploration to expand the action of the associations, multiplying their relations with the places and thus with the different urban-rural gradients of the transect (step 3 and 5).

3. The region and the localities

Using the Transect as an epistemological tool and the Civics as agents of the common good, the Salaria stretch of territory, a portion of the complex urban realm, was reviewed by juxtaposing the issues of a given place with those of other places and urban gradients falling within the same stretch (Figure 3). A selection of the resulting design explorations is described below in order to show how the fluctuation within the transect supports a synergic approach among parts, enhancing their material and immaterial relationships toward a socio-spatial whole.

Figure 3. The NO-CITY SALARIA transect with its different urban gradients: urbanisation (grey), agriculture (red lines), olive orchards (red dots), dirt roads (red lines), Tiber river (grey thick line). (source: Lucrezia Alaimo, Marzia Carosi, Michela Di Seri, Matteo Durante)

Multiple agents, inverted public spaces

In Passo Corese, a small town located midway along the transect and where many workers from Rome reside, the association Accademia del Tempo Libero, whose work is all about making up for the place’s lack of leisure activities, recognises the lack of cultural dynamics connected to insufficient and poor public spaces. At the same time, the territorial analysis highlights important agricultural resources; beyond production, the olive orchards scattered all around the village describe also heritage patterns, both natural and cultural, which present themselves as potential public ground for socialising activities.

Building on the inversion of the materialities characterising urban and rural public spaces, the design proposal involves the Accademia del Tempo Libero engaging local farms in organising an annual festival that attracts audiences from Rome and nearby Rieti. The festival is based upon the natural rhythms of the olive trees, altering the common urban hierarchy of the cityscape. Local residents who are interested may decide to participate in activities distributed throughout the year and all oriented towards the preparation of the festival (Figure 4). By looking at the transect from the vantage point of the Accademia del Tempo Libero, local leisure activities could make a space of specialised production a potential place for both local and supra-local publics to be involved at different times of the year.

Figure 4. The olive orchards area as leisure facility for NO-CITY SALARIA: olive orchards (grey pattern), urbanisation (dark grey areas), existing pedestrian paths (red lines), new pedestrian paths (dashed red lines), dirt roads (dashed grey lines), intervention sites (dashed red squares), parkings (grey squares), starting point of the pedestrian path (red triangle). (source: Lucrezia Alaimo, Marzia Carosi, Michela Di Seri, Matteo Durante)

Hospitality beyond common hierarchic

In the very proximity of the GRA, i.e., the Rome metropolitan highway ring, between the big blocks of the public housing district of Serpentara and the industrial plots bordering the left bank of the River Tiber, the Pedro Arrupe Centre (PAC) hosts refugees in the railway enclave of the so-called ‘Roma Smistamento.’ The analysis of the surrounding context highlights the value of an informal, non-institutional approach to inclusion (Figure 5); this is something that characterises more rural realities, often strongly grounded on proximity and relational bonds, than urban ones. Moreover, the “protectiveness” assured by the figure of the enclave suggests the possibility of creating different logics of publicness.

According to the design proposal, the PAC would first expand its social and cultural activities in the abandoned spaces within the enclave, right next to the existing accommodation facility. In addition, two parallel possibilities of hospitality and integration would be explored by working on different forms of abandonment: 1) revitalising one of the General Markets of Rome, and 2) opening uninhabited houses in the small village of Montelibretti in the Apennines. In order for inclusive dynamics to be activated, the first proposal defines an enclosed system of public and private spaces, occasionally open to the outside world. Conversely, the natural isolation of the Montelibretti village creates the conditions for integration to happen directly in the public spaces and the surrounding open landscape, reversing the spatial qualities of what can be described as intimate and free space.

Figure 5. The hospitality spread throughout the NO-CITY SALARIA transect. (source: Valeria Barghiglioni, Ester Teresa Castillo Anis, Martina Lena De Gregorio, Benedetta Ventriglia)

4. The uncontainable pluriverse

The project’s speculations on the Salaria transect have brought forth some early results that have much in common with those of studies focused on the world urbanisation phenomena. Although further studies are undoubtedly needed, some elements of interest can be read in the pluriverse of forms emerging from the continuous onward-backward movement created within the transect.

The urban/rural dichotomy thus becomes a creative devise to pinpoint and investigate the relational and synergic capacity of gradients of urbanity (Levy and Lussault, 2003) at all the points on the planet: the interaction of urban logics with rural materiality and heritage manifests other ways to inhabit a small town such as Passo Corese, designing new and specific scenarios of autonomy. The “ruralisation” of relationships that happens in certain public spaces of the city, along with the need to recreate a sort of “urban village” to assure conditions of hospitality, blur the line between the rural and the urban, reversing hierarchical orders and redefining territorial figures.

Although these evidences witness the imaginative potential of those relationalities activated within the transect, it must be noted that NO-CITY observations yet have a methodological limit. The transect and the civics continue to show a fixity, a definition, and a measure, from which the implosions and explosions of urbanisation seem to escape. For instance, a design speculation that tackles the issue of hospitality within localities and planetary perspectives together may question where hospitality begins and what generates migration flows. However, despite this, what NO-CITY exercises of imagination show are possible ways to overcome city-centric and rural-centric visions, affirming the interchangeable and intrinsic value of both the urban and the rural, namely, of each gradient of today’s urban condition.

Acknowledgments

This paper reports some of the result of the design studio of urbanism of the A.A. 2020–2021 at the Department of Architecture of the University Roma Tre and conducted by Andrea Aragone, Davide Cauciello, Federica Fava, Marco Ranzato and Riccardo Ruggeri.

References

1. Agenzia per la Coesione Territoriale (2012). Strategia Nazionale Aree Interne. Retrieved from https://www.agenziacoesione.gov.it/strategia-nazionale-aree-interne/

2. Amante, A., Balmer, C. (2020). Why Italy Suffered so Badly during the Pandemic? World Economic Forum with Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/12/italy-death-toll-pandemic-covid-coronavirus-health-population-europe/

3. Balducci, A., Curci, F., Fedeli, V. (2017). Oltre la metropoli. L’urbanizzazione regionale in Italia. Milano: Guerini e Associati

4. Boeri S. (2020). Via dalle città, nei vecchi borghi c’è il nostro futuro. La Repubblica. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2Jy6QxI

5. Brenner, N. (2014). Implosion/Explosion: Towards a Study of Planetary Ur­banisation. Berlin, Germany: Jovis Verlag

6. Brenner, N, Schmid, C (2011). Planetary urbanisation. In: Gandy, M. (ed.) Urban Constellations. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 10–13

7. Campani, C. (2021). The Architecture of the Fabbrichetta. Towards a Critical Return of Material Production in Italy. [PhD Thesis. Università Roma Tre]

8. Cerdà, I. (2017). General Theory of Urbanisation. Barcelona, Spain: Actar

9. De Certeau, M. (2001). L’invenzione del quotidiano. Rome, Italy: Lavoro

10. Doxiadis, C. A., Papaioannou, J.G. (1974). Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the Future. New York, NY: Norton

11. Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press

12. Florida R, Rodriguez-Pose A, Storper M (2020). Cities in a post-COVID World. Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) #2041. Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography.

13. Friedmann, J. (2002). The Prospect of Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

14. Gandy, M. (2020). Queering the Transect. In Gandy, M., Jasper, S. (eds.). The Botanical City. Berlin: Jovis Verlag, pp. 160–169

15. Katsikis, N. (2014). Two Approaches to “World Management”: C. A. Doxiadis and R. B. Fuller. In: Brenner, N. (ed.). Implosions/Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanisation. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 480–504.

16. Koolhaas, R. (1995). What Ever Happened to Urbanism? In: Koolhaas, R. and Mau. B., S, M, L, XL. New York: The Monicelli Press, pp. 959–971.

17. Lefebvre, H. (1970). La révolution urbaine. Paris, France: Gallimard, trad. it. (1973) La rivoluzione urbana. Rome, Italy: Armando

18. Lévy, J., Lussault, M. (2003). Urbanité. In Lévy, J., Lussault, M. Dictionnaire de la géographie et de l’espace des sociétés, France: Belin, p. 966

19. Mazza L. (2008). Geddes ‘Politico’: Vision, Survey, Citizenship. Territorio: 45, pp. 91–98.

20. Pazzagli, R. (2017). Un paese scivolato a valle. Patrimonio territoriale delle aree interne italiane tra deriva e rinascita. In Marchetti, M., Panunzi, S., Pazzagli, R. (ed.) Aree interne. Per una rinascita dei territori rurali e montani. Italy: Rubbettino, p.20

21. Rossi Doria, M. (1958). Dieci anni di politica agraria. Bari, Italy: Laterza

22. Secchi, B. (2008). La città del ventesimo secolo. Bari, Italy: Editori Laterza

23. Sieverts, T. (2003). Cities Without Cities. An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt. New York, NY: Routledge

24. Sukopp, H. (1990). Stadtökologie: Das Beispiel Berlin. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer

25. Virilio, P. (2009). Stop Eject. In Le Futurisme de l’instant. Paris, France: Galilée

26. Welter, V. M. (2001). Post-war CIAM, Team X, and the Influence of Patrick Geddes: Five Annotations. In Camp, D. L., van den Heuvel, D., de Waal, G. (eds.). CIAM-Team 10: The English Context. Delft, The Netherlands: Delft Technische Universiteit