Fabrizio Zanni
Urban design and morphogenesis of the generic city
Fabrizio Zanni is Associated Professor in Architecture & Urban Design
Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy;

"where the motorway rises
above the steel structures of Monsanto
illuminated by the moon"
(Allen Ginsberg)

Questions of shape
The current formal structure of a contemporary city is one of the main subjects of current theoretical and experimental elaboration. The paradigms, the concepts, the disciplinary subjects developed to understand, explain and to face the current settlement condition in terms of development are very different and often contradictory. From a more general point of view of a "diffused city" (1), used to stimulate one of the pre-eminent morphological-typological characters to the similar one of a "lost city" , to the koolhaasian concept of a "generic town (2), to the revision of the concept of "grossstadt" (3) many roads have been undertaken to reach a systematic and coherent conceptualisation. Without denying the concept of a diffused city, deriving from discussions on "urban sprawl" and refusing the ideology of "urban fragmentation", it is useful to start with the concept of a generic city that reminds us of the "urbe generica cerdiana", a paradigm of all cities that really do exist. Therefore we can define a "generic city" as the current complex form of urban living in its numerous characterisations and articulations. One of its pre-eminent natures is the upheaval of its relationship with communication networks. From an appendix of compact cities that have become the vital layout for survival against the urban "stuff". Let us now examine some characters following such upheaval, immediately after having attempted to summarise a minimum historical perspective of the urban morphogenesis (4).

For a temporary classification of urban morphogenetic processes
Human activities on the anthropic-geographical support (5) have created an urban form through precise construction throughout the years of practices, foundation rituals, disciplinary and social apparatus (6). The additive procedure goes back to concepts of contours, fences, figures-backgrounds and includes an urban area undergoing development and a historically precipitated area, within a new a much vaster inclusive apparatus (walls, bastions). Addition of the "Raval" in Barcelona, of the eighteenth century besides the "square" Turin and the case of Parma beyond the river constitute three important examples of a form of transformation of the historically dated city, precise and also elegant. In one part the new wall includes a part of this that it had previously excluded. The procedure characterised by urban expansion began with town and country planning of the second half of the Nineteenth century. In at least two important situations, Milan by Engineer Beruto and Barcelona by Ildefons Cerda' (7), the question is the same: the size of the new city compared with the previous one and the new requirements; in the first case we know that the question lies in the fear of overcoming a threshold considered as compatible with the previous one as the "natural" development of the same; in the second case with the theoretical definition of the requirements of a generic city (urbe generica) and in their application within the territorial context of Barcelona. In both cases the new urban form has, if it is not an insurmountable border (in Beruto, the ring road); not even Le Corbusier is aware of it while it prepares a rationalist city within the borders of the measure defined in 1856 by Cerda' together with the GATCPAC group.
The diffusion process, at least in the Italian case, has not been designed by anybody: awareness of the agglomerative phenomenon underway can be traced back, at least in the case of Lombardia, to the IRER (Regional Institute of Research, Milan) acts, the PIM (Milanese Intercity Plan), to ILSES (Lombard Institute of Economics and Social Studies) studies and to the organisations in charge of the Lombardy Region. Previous illustrious individuals, in their interpretation of North American sub-urban sprawl, are the famous studies of Christaller and Isard and, from different points of view, of Rodwyn and Gordon Cullen. The MIP will draw up maps and studies for a polycentric development of the Lombardy region and the metropolitan area of Milan that will not, however, become plan regulations. The urban polycentric nature creates the foundations for the basis of the diffused form that creates a kind of perverted expansion. Furthermore Italian studies have also been created, now perhaps out of date, that attempt to orientate the polycentric and diffusive form: the study for the city of Adda by Gregotti, the future for the "Nolana City", the study by Paolo Portoghesi for the "City of Vallo di Diano", for example, all aim at guiding diffusive pushes, even if partial and articulated throughout the territory, otherwise considered uncontrollable, within an "urban" form: these attempts are not efficient because they are contrasted by local pushes that are protected against any kind or urban and town planning coordination.

Generic City: the nature of diffused urban forms
We know that we can no longer speak about the "form of a city" in its traditional meaning as passed down by the culture of the XIX Century. The architectural project follows this destiny, attracted by forms of "living" varied, multiple and extemporary spaces that must be able to control through its instruments. The case of Euralille is worth mentioning in which the "public" spaces is incorporated within hyper-technological and substantially "private" "caverns", generating a spatial melting-pot that is very difficult to control using traditional instruments of architectural development and perhaps even more so by traditional instruments of town planning disciplines (8). The disappearance and degradation of open public spaces is a phenomenon that is difficult to contrast. Social aggregation space is moving away from urban squares and "streets" towards the sole function of shopping strips, galleries inside large hypermarkets. In a farcical way and especially with regards to decor, they resume the icons of an urban space that is now dissipating. Nineteenth century galleries or futuristic air gangways; environments almost in a liberty style or hyper-technological spaces: the external space is incorporated internally and this would not be so bad, considering that historically internal squares, passages and indoor markets, and other typological specifications of urban forms, have created public spaces that may be defined as "external-internal"; the problem is degradation of the same as pure caricature. A second serious problem, on an urban level, is determined by fragmentation of open public spaces. The specialised technical practices, technical offices, railways, organisations that own roads, energy suppliers and similar, transform the urban ground, that is to say the physical-settlement support of human living, according to partial objectives without taking into account the general layout of a "desire for forms". Motorway connections, "channelled" junctions and masses, to name but a few of the elements of interruption, break the space up into a kind of "chaos" in which the space is degraded from "public" to "public property", to res nullius. The exponential increase in residual open spaces builds heaps of unused residual areas and without any apparent possibility of redemption. The main objective of this urban project is re-qualification of open public space to be re-transformed from chaos into cosmos, from piles of fragments to space systems formally concluded and articulated. Without a doubt it is due to this phenomenon that the number of studies and projects aimed at the opposite objective has grown: recomposing, embellishing, recovering urban spaces; from gardens to public parks, from bus stops to their routes, to environments generally considered as "non urban", such as roundabouts. Going beyond the limits of the architectural project once reserved to "traffic engineering", starting with studies by Kahn for Philadelphia, is something that has accumulated throughout the years; furthermore, in many cases the architectural and urban project has been mixed with landscape architecture which has, in the meantime, moved away from the previous "art of gardens", becoming more and more involved in the detailed and architectural definition of urban and road spaces and of the intermediate space of lost cities. In this context the infra-structural network is a very special urban area together with the spaces dedicated to flows, movements, communication and exchanges. The fact that in time it has replaced the traditional public spaces of the "compact" city, as can be seen from its last "organic" transformation, the nineteenth century, is common knowledge. But a very unique fact is that proliferation of the networks has coincided, with some delay and melancholic anathema of Le Corbusier, with the "death of the road". The main civil space of urban connections in its infinite morphological-typological versions stopped existing when the network, that is to say the territorial urban project of a diffusive nature and specialised in the road itself, the band, the strip and the junction became independent. At this point the majority of specialised development and management logics is devastating the settlement system and is making an integrated development in anthropical space very difficult.

Nodes of a complex city, a project for the infrastructure
In the lost city "areas of accumulation" of tension, power, activities and flows exist constituting important planning subjects but, in reality, are abandoned to more varied technical procedures and therefore are unable to build into important "urban structures" with a well defined synthetic form. The motorway, the most "domestic" of these spaces, has created a strong element of aggregation of spaces and activities by implementing, a strange and independent way, the utopias of a linear city. The motorway, just like any specialised network, is made up of bars and nodes, characterised by apparatus that adopt architectural languages and specialised visions: from the famous "bridge" motorway restaurants, service stations and tollgates. This interior part of the motorway is presented in a heterotopical form: it is enclosed, controlled at its entrance points, it is not accessible to all locomotion vehicles. However, outside of the fence there is a large accumulation of numerous activities, especially production and sales, to modify dramatically and radically the anthropical-geographical landscape. Tidy and untidy, this settlement of limits, undergoing constant modification and accumulation, constitutes an important part of the generic city that is studied, interpreted, understood and, wherever possible, re-transformed. If the liminal settlement is one of the forms of this landscape, accumulation to the nodes of the system constitutes another agglomerative method. Small and medium sized enterprises and markets of low-cost furniture appear to favour the limit for publicity reasons, while tertiary activities and large shopping centres, recreational activities and theme parks appreciate the node, the entrance and exit point, and they accumulate around motorway tollgates. The urban and architectural project should concentrate on these nodal areas much more. There are at least two possibilities of intervention on these device "sections" of urban space: working on and especially "around" the infra-structural bars on the edges of portions of the urbanised territory that are crossed around the road infrastructures, but also the large free spaces that accompany the local railway lines, the canals or watercourses, therefore acting on and around the three main connection systems (railway, road, water). But also working on the infra-structural bars not yet created, and there are a lot in Lombardia, that have left discontinuous yet resistant traces on the earth. Benjamin states "The trace is apparition of proximity, as far away as it may be, of what it has left behind" (9). And continuing along the traces, may mean to designers outstretching a local strategy that makes an urban petrifying forest intelligible in its internal differences, in its intervals of discontinuity and in its remarkable areas. The airport represents a kind of archetype of the lost, a global city that tends to replace the city itself, in terms of its dimension and the level of aggregation of human activities. In a positive or negative way it represents the utmost technological effort in the construction of a kind of architecture of the infra-structural node. They are nodes of a global network of super communication that bring together scales of incommensurable relations at the same time (10).

The urban residual public space and its redemption
The question of public space, of its progressive degeneration and of the transfer of use of urban spaces to other kinds of uses comes about when the public spaces of the nineteenth century city, in which the civic traditions of Italian cities exist since the middle ages, no longer welcome the traditional uses of space: furthermore, the new public spaces, built in the last decade, such as squares and pedestrian pavements do not succeed in replacing, in everyday use, the ones that have become the new public spaces of the lost city, that is to say the large extra-urban or peripheral-urban shopping malls. The public space, in everyday imagination, no longer lies, unfortunately, in the square, in the gallery, along the road, spaces that are rather outdated in large cities, used by tourists and by immigrants. It is easy to reach shopping centres by car with the whole family and it becomes a kind of global container allowing visitors to walk, look, buy, eat and drink at a low price. The architectural project on different relational scales, must therefore face these problems and define a new architecture for urban public spaces that included the infra-structural networks, the peripheral-urban fragmented spaces, the margins and the borders of the lost city, articulating a new spatial morphology, a modern kind of settlement, a coherent constructive and infra-structural technology. Re-composition of the urban fragments in space systems with a recognisable settlement quality and a shape, even if complex, recognisable is the only solution for the urban project applied to the diffusive morphological-typological condition, overcoming an outdated "poetry of fragmentation" that, unfortunately, has only succeeded in generating prices of a disintegrated urban universe. In this way it is possible to rebuild, if not an urban unit that has been lost, a complexity of spaces fitted with a structural coherency. The urban project regains meaning, on a large scale, as an expression of architectural development applied to the dynamic of urban forms.

Notes:
On project paradigms compared with the diffused city see:
S. Crotti, Project paradigms of the contemporary city,: towards an urban architecture in: AA.VV. (by S. Crotti), Towards urban architecture, Monti, Bergamo, 1998;
For the subject in itself see: F. Indovina, The diffused city, Daest, IUAV, Venice;
Rem Koolhaas, The generic city, in: R. Koolhaas., S M L XL, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam;
G. Denti M. Mauri S. Protasoni, Measures and scales of contemporary grossstadt , Clup, Milan, 2001; see in particular, in the same volume: E. d'Alfonso, The record of time and explosion of the city. Research towards the measure and scale between incommensurability and discontinuity: goals and dialogues, page 75;
The concept of urban morphogenesis compared with the theory and the methodology of the architectural project owes its conception definition to Sergio Crotti:
see: S. Crottti, Urban project and morphogenesis: for an architecture of differences, in: Urbanistica n.82, February 1986;
S. Crotti, Development determinations of urban morphogenesis, in: AA.VV.; Project metaphor mimesis, by E. d'Alfonso, Guerini, Milan, 1991;
S. Crotti, Urban morphogenesis and local transformations in: "Books of the Department of Development ", n.2, November, 1994;
The concept of anthropical-geographical landscape has been developed by Vittorio Gregotti but it has its own "magical" moment of elaboration in:
E. Battisti, S. Crotti, Notes for reading of the anthropical-geographical landscape, in: "Modern Constructions " n. 87-88, 1966;
see also V. Gregotti; Part two: The shape of the territory, in: V. Gregotti, The territory of architecture, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1966;
In many compositions Sergio Crotti has developed the concept of theoretical practice of architecture, see for example: S. Crotti, For a theoretical practice of architecture: development research and experimentation, in: AA.VV., The modern nature of urban forms, Electa; Milan, 1995;
AA.VV., Cerda', ciudad y territorio, Electa, Madrid, 1994;
Valeria Erba, "Norms and forms of the urban project", in: "Territory" n.20, Franco Angeli, 2002;
W. Benjamin, Paris capital of the XIX Century, Einaudi, Turin, 1982;
On the relationship between an "incommensurable" scale and a human scale, see: E. d'Alfonso, op. cit.;

Fabrizio Zanni
Italy
fabrizio.zanni@polimi.it
http://www.fabriziozanni.net