Massimo Tadi
New Physical Transformations in Complex Development Systems:
From the City to the Metropolitan Urban Landscape.
Massimo Tadi is Professor in Architecture
Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy;

The air of the city makes you free. This incisive sentence was engraved on the city walls of Mainz to assert its pride to those who entered the town from the surrounding countryside for the weekly market, and who became temporarily part of an exclusive as well as attractive society, based on a voluntary association and provided with clear symbolic-representative forms of collective identification. At vigil III, after one hundred strokes, by shutting up the city gates, two cultural universes were separated completed (until the first mass the following day), both physically and symbolically: the free citizen, the merchant, the craftsman and the student, within such gates, while the serf left outside.
Our tale begins now with the reference to a urban image (one we all know, even though belonging to the passage to another millennium), where the city used to be symbolically an entire world and, it will continue by investigating the transformations in the physical organization of a world that, at the turning of a new millennium, has become a city.
From Babylon to Los Angeles, passing through Lubecca, ....., Geneve, ..........Milan, ...... This is not to capture the stages of an evolutionary process (as some people uphold), neither it is about reading the current arrangement of contemporary urban forms as a degeneration of those established and previously recognisable (as other people uphold), while it is rather about investigating the current structure of widespread metropolitan landscapes, such as a different, unstable and temporary formalization, included within the patchy historical process of building and rebuilding of development forms of settlements, with changed and faster rhythms of transformation.
The contemporary urban landscape seems to be organized under a different new formal order, according to which the arrangements are unstable and floating, and the relational structure is characterized by fast constituent transformations. In order to grasp the arrangements complexity of the contemporary metropolitan landscape as well as work out the enigma of its present form, it is useful to analyse thoroughly the transformation of the relation between the urban core and its surroundings. Such deep alteration is described by the meaning acquired by three important correlative pairs, good enough Ð until yesterday - to define the members identity of the anthropogeographical landscape, yet today inadequate to represent its relational complexity:
City vs. Countryside - Centre vs. Suburbia - Inside vs. Outside.

Until XXth century, the relation between the city and the countryside was articulated according to specific matching rules and to rules of physical, symbolic and technical recognizability. In fact, what constituted the countryside regions, was the reference background for precisely cutting out the distinguishable figures of urban cores.
General recognizable organizations matched local connotations of the physical form, capable to express specific architectural and organizational contents: walls, villages, towers, bridges, gates. Also ravelins, parish churches, and minor external settlements became a built expression of the ubiquitous relation, yet always different, that every town used to keep up with their wide territory outside the walls.
By fading the compacting logic peculiar of traditional space arrangements to the benefit of a new mode of rarefaction of the dispositions and distribution of the physical space primary components, nowadays, we see a deep transformation in the relation between the globality of the structures and local characterizations of representative contents. New instruments and procedures able to capture the forms in their transformation stages are therefore required, in order to investigate, for planning purposes, the contemporary space in its new configuration, unknown so far (including a new significant kinetic dimension as a dynamic sequence of multiple thresholds of such transformation). On the other hand, the dissolution of the correspondence between the city and the centrality, occurred because of the progressive leakage of elements that were traditionally the important components of the city, has caused a condition of 'loss of the centre', never happened before, in the contemporary metropolitan landscapes. Beside the fading of the key cultural requirement typical of the western urban tradition, it seems to correspond physical consequences more and more apparent in the suburban stretch with low density. For example, the reversal of the settlement balance from the previous centrality to external areas seemingly homogenous is leading to the cancellation of the topological meaning of the relation centre/suburbia, depriving such dialectical couple of any explanatory meaning in respect of the current physical organizations.
Such confusion in the arrangements, due to the loss of a consolidated univocal point of reference, has caused conflicting design attitudes, that is, on one hand, some pseudo avant-garde views praising the fragmentation as an epochal condition; on the other hand, the resort to nostalgic evocations to mythical golden ages from which drawing some pre-established figurative patterns. We think that both should be opposed by the necessity of a conscious and critical design action, capable to give an architectonic sense to a settlement structure seemingly equivalent. Then, we need to establish new hierarchical levels in the development systems, to apply the correlative principles in the arrangement logic and to define a new mapping able to arrange the new ones in the development system. In fact, we also witness the deep relativization of the third relation mentioned above: the relation 'inside vs. outside'.
Today, this relation, is expressing itself no longer following clear and absolute rules (like in the case of the traditional opposition between historical city and its territory and between the city and the countryside), rather it is doing it with a wide range of local conditions, among the parties, the large enclosures, the plants and the networks typical of the new metropolitan stretches, with no clear boundaries. So, the changed conditions of the relation heretofore described seem to be closely related to the transformation and substitution of the matrices that have played their role in the formal organization for the settlement landscapes. As a matter of fact, until the baroque age the symbolic Matrix arranges the space according to a distinguishing principle among the parties, that is the materialization of such point of view that interprets the universe in terms of a space both enclosed and defined.
The symbol/city arranged by this matrix stands out against the background of the uninhabited space, often depicted in its wild aspects. The outline of the walls is the characteristic demarcative condition, a sort of control apparatus between the inside and the outside, a sort of outline of a clear form. Later, the Enlightenment operates a deep revision of the space organizational statutes, performing a new topographical measurement of the reclaimed world. We witness therefore the conceptual passage leading from the enclosed world of the previous matrix to the infinite universe of the following structural Matrix. The Enlightenment landscape, as in the visions and representations of such age, is passed, crossed and measured by tracks that, blooming from the urban figure, establish the new nodes of a structure embracing now the entire world.
On the latter principle, expressing a structural relation with the territory, in the 19th century the city creates its own original organizational mode, known as systemic Matrix. This organizes the particular urban nineteenth-century structure made of complex circulatory systems, with radials and annulars, destined to give prominence and representativeness to the new impressive goods traffic and means of transport. The ninenteenth-century urban landscape, as it appears in the representation of the Impressionists, is characterized by roads travelled by coaches; avenues animated by the new merchant middle class; sheltered arcades marking the triumph of a new building technique; circulation places which become the magnificent spaces for the civil representation.

Starting from the city designed following the new urban theories, that consider the open spaces and the roads as the new privileged elements, the systemic matrix broadens up to dimensional and relational amplifications absorbed by the industrial city at the beginning of the 20th century. This lays the basis for the following deep transformations that will lead to the contemporary metropolitan distributions. At this new passage, well unveiled by Mario Sironi, through his paintings "Costruttori" ("Builders") and "Paesaggi urbani" ("Urban Landscapes"), the incoming known independence is foretold, later accomplished, among open spaces, built spaces and elements of relation. We witness now a broadening of the links and connections in a space seeming to identify itself more in the places of movement and circulation which, no longer busy with celebrating people, show the appearance of a vehicular traffic more and more intrusive. We can identify this formal arrangement as "matrix by network". Such matrix, assumed as a "topological object", appears in its articulation as made of nodes (routing centres, emerging physical elements) and of links (poles), manifesting themselves according to different working modes:
- as a local network of transformation, an oriented link starting from each node.
- as a global network of transformation, without orientation.
The matrix by network seems indeed to exceed both the dimensional scales (in which there were expressed between city and countryside and between centre and suburbia) and the relational scales (where the relation between inside and outside is outlined), ending up with manifesting itself through the new temporal scales of the distance covered.

In the urban landscape of the spread city, the temporality of the connections seems to prevail on the spatiality of the arrangements, this being an expression of a spatial condition structurally in transformation. From this point of view, the physical space is no longer the interaction between built spaces, open spaces and elements of relation (arranged in a system according to known matrices) but it is rather defined by the temporal movements (within infrastructural networks, understood as favourite elements of the relation between inside and outside).

The matrix by network introduces to the landscape of discrete structures, floating connections among the parties, where sudden gaps, sequences of elements and intervals have become more important than the elements in themselves and where the temporal dimension is the privileged condition upsetting the spatial- temporal unity of the previous matrices. Such metropolitan landscape that has recently entered the third millennium appears more and more as an enigmatic shape, a labyrinth made of fragments similar to ruins, obliging us to decode and interpret its multiple overlapping tracks, no longer immediately identifiable nowadays, in order for us to operate new transformations provided with architectonic sense. The architectural and urban planning looks at such hidden plots, inscribed in places and in the memory, in order to elaborate, within the context of the contemporary urban landscape, a new correlative strategy among the selected elements, capable to be the new foundations of the settlement structure. The architectonic and urban planning has to define the condensation nodes of new formal aggregations, to link the parties and fragments, to design the places giving recognizability and representative value to the contemporary architectonic forms, and to give coherence to its modification techniques.

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