“In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms of the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it an ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe. The building with the globes is now Fedora’s museum: every inhabitant visits it, chooses the city that corresponds to his desires, contemplates it, imagining his reflection in the Medusa pond that would have collected waters of the canal (if it had not been dried up), the view from the high canopied box along the avenue reserved for elephants (now banished from the city, the fun of sliding down the spiral, twisting minaret (which never found a pedestal from which to rise). On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room for both the big stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is no longer.”¹
ghhjkl
According to Patrizia Bottaro in “I futuri della città” (The future of the city)² there are three approaches to imagine the city of the future:
– Tendential: which is based on the projection of what is there. The city of the future tends to take on scientific characters based on analysis and outlining a future that is not substantially different from the past, i.e. it differs from it in that it does not grasp the limits of its development.
– Plan: as an urban project. The city of the future derives from a desire to transform the trend structures and is outlined through the construction of scenarios taken from presumed factual states, through models evaluated in the various aspects of their feasibility.
– Utopic: comparable to the proper construct of reasoning. The city of the future starts from the critique of the present condition and outlines a desirable and timeless future, linked more to models and abstractions rather than to specific places and to possibilities actually evaluated (even the ideal city belongs to this area, however it is devoid of critical hints towards the present, indeed it is based on tradition, elevating it to an architectural and urban ideal).
During the development of the text I will try to mix these three approaches, trying to be as orderly as possible, even if due to my nature and the topic addressed this will be almost impossible.
The first question that arises is: does it make sense to talk about cities of the future? Will we live in cities in the future? Why? What if it isn’t like that?
In this regard, some data they come to our rescue. In the book “Living in the Endless City”³ some rather evocative graphics are represented. The first figure is that only 2% of the earth’s surface is occupied by cities, the second is that 53% of the world’s population lives in cities. So far so good. Then the data on the growth of cities began, such as London, which went from 1 million to 10 million inhabitants in 100 years. At the same time, there are cities such as Lagos, Delhi and Dhaka that in the last decade have been growing at a rate of 300,000 people per year. Mumbai is surpassing Tokyo and Mexico City with a population of 35 million. Impressive. The strongest message of the book is that based on current urban growth (250,000 inhabitants per day), by 2050 75% of human beings will live in cities.
It would seem that in the future we will live in cities, but what will cities be? 35 million inhabitants are more than half of the entire Italian population put together, and all live in the same city!
Even the countertrend must be taken into consideration, so in the presentation of the book “Città del passato per il future” (Cities of the past for the future)⁴, Silvano Panzarasa develops an interesting reasoning, which in any case must be contextualized, we are talking about 1986. In fact, the author claims that the human being has always alternated urban flows and refluxes, which have determined the behavioral phenomena of our society and which arise on the basis of both evolutionary and involutionary cycles. This relentless existential wandering to the rediscovery of lost values is a consolidated feature. The escape to the suburbs in the hope of finding a new environment, followed later by a desire to fit into the epicenter of the cities, is also a theme linked to survival. Interpreting this reasoning with contemporary eyes, could we say that the climatic/environmental factor could be the cause of a possible escape from the city of the future?
Renzo Piano and Rem Khoolaas have already embraced the theme of the suburbs, abandoning the city in advance, as excellent precursors have shifted their interest outside the city, but they gave it an urban interpretation. They are trying to turn the suburbs into a city, trying to eliminate the distances, so where will we run away tomorrow if only the cities exist? Will we migrate from one city to another in search of new stimuli and more livable environments? Will we go back to the countryside?
As promised I decided to be ordered, so after this introduction I will develop some concepts using a list, the latter will contain keywords that will help me digress and mumble quotes in a more controlled way. The order of the keywords is scattered, as I said I will try to be ordered, however I cannot do it completely.
IMAGE
The city of the future no longer responds to the idea of a city we have always had. As we have seen above, we can no longer simply speak of cities when we are dealing with a system of 35 million inhabitants. These conglomerates have assumed different names that enhance their growth, openness, flexibility, fragmentation and shape: Magalopoli (Gottmann, 1961), Urban reticulum (Dematteis, 1985), Extended metropolis (Blumenfeld, 1986), Giant cities (Dogan, 1988), Widespread city (Guess, 1990), Post-suburb (Kling, Olin et al., 1991), Exploded metropolis (Whyte, 1993), Post-metropolis (Soja, 1997), Metacity (MVRDV, 1999) . However, these names fail to fully represent the image of the contemporary city projected towards the future.
The concept of “Megalopolis” coined by Gottmann was the first to consider an integrated set of metropolises, the French geographer starts from the observation of the agglomeration of cities that starts from Boston and reaches Washington, after which he deduces “a new order in the organization of the living space”⁵, then the same concept has also been extended to other highly urbanized regions, such as Paris-Randstad-Ruhr and the smaller urban area Milan-Turin-Genoa.
Gottmann’s megalopolis has the following characteristics:
– Unify different conurbations through rapid communication lines.
– Low density elastic built environment that includes a lot of greenery between one inhabited center and the other.
– High density differentiated nuclei dominated by the tertiary (services) and quaternary (intellectual work) sector.
– Quality aspects different from previous urban experiences.
– Functional interdependence that needs a new approach.
Fausto Carmelo Nigrelli in his book “Metropoli Immaginate” (Imagined Metropolis)⁶, in addition to reporting the previous quote, also tells the development of C. A. Doxiadis, who in 1968 further extended Gottmann’s reflection by envisaging a city that by 2050 should cover a sixth of the earth’s surface, calling this planetary system “ecumenopolis”. Doxiadis imagines a huge urban amoeba that develops on planet Earth with denser nuclei in correspondence with Europe and most of the coasts of the other continents, arranging itself according to urbanized reticular filaments.
2050 seems to be upon us and such development is unlikely, however the author of the aforementioned book recalls that the film “Matropolis” is set in the 21st century, “Matrix” in 1999 and “Blade Runner” in 2019. So, these images arise from the experience of existing cities, from the fears they arouse but also from the desires of what they could be. The cities of the future represented in these films are associated with the gods of the ancient Greeks: as they are anthropomorphic but larger than man, infinitely larger, with the strengths and weaknesses of men multiplied infinitely, especially the defects, so the cities.
So in “Blade Runner” the city lives a perennial state of alert, born from the need for security, from the advantages guaranteed to citizens in terms of protection and by contrast it is the place of insecurity, of the daily clash between subversive violence and institutional violence. Furthermore, the theme of the multiracial city becomes “multinatural”, in which there is another “other”, generated by man: the replicant.
Or in the movie “Batman”, Bruce Wayne establishes his company’s headquarters in a very tall, disproportionate, unreachable tower; the city in question is Gotham City, which is full of skyscrapers of the kind that are nothing but the reaction to the race to the sky that today has the cities of the Far East as protagonists.
At the same time Bruce Wayne lives in a neoclassical house, because only the poor and marginalized people stay in the city, in parallel in “Blade Runner” the rich went to live on another planet and the poor were trapped in the earthly limbo. Once again, the characteristics of the contemporary city (in this case social inequality) have been copied, multiplied and taken to the extreme.
In this regard, I would like to mention a very interesting research concerning the New Towns in China.
“The city after Chinese New Towns”⁷ is an interdisciplinary publication conducted by an international team of researchers made up of architects, urban planners and geographers, who have investigated the uniqueness and ordinariness of Chinese urban planning and also analyzed in detail three New Towns: Tongzhou, Zhaoqing and Zheng. But what are New Towns? In order to absorb over 250 million migrants from the countryside across the country, the Chinese government will conclude the construction of over 400 new cities by 2020. In contrast to European and American urban development, where cities were born in parallel with the local economy, China is completing the construction of this ambitious Urban Plan even before people can enter it. So, some of these immense complexes are already inhabited, while others are still empty.
In this research we find the image of the city of the Chinese future, and as they are becoming very efficient in the construction of New Towns, they have already started to export this model to Uzbekistan, Pakistan and other developing countries, in particular I would like to mention the Djibouti⁸ experiment, but in general what they are doing throughout Africa, where they buy large territories, build infrastructures and build on existing cities.
We can say that: considering the times of architecture and the inconsistency of forecasts, the city of the future is the one we are building today. Indeed, these New Towns are the result of ten-year urban development plans, which China has already defined, and which will conclude in the future. In order to complete this reasoning, they had to materialize their image of the city of the future which, however, turns out to be drastically and dangerously rooted in the present, almost following the same modalities that regulate the cities contained in the films mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Within the research there is also a photographic essay made by Samuele Pellecchia (Director of Prospekt Photographers), who through images and a short text develops an empathic / emotional analysis / self-analysis that appears to be fundamental in order to better understand both the Chinese people and the research itself, in this way one becomes aware of the deeper reasons that push this country to do what the study expresses in more scientific terms, moreover the reader is put in the condition to study the publication without any type of prejudice, making reading even more effective.
The text developed by the researchers highlights the contradictions within the Urban Plan, in particular the efficiency of their work which on the one hand is extraordinary, on the other leads them to glorify the urban grid, which dominates the design to the point of cutting entire pieces of surrounding mountains in order to complete it.
Another interesting piece of research is the one on the architectural reproductions of some of the most important monuments in the world. An entrepreneur who participates in the implementation of the Plan has decided to build the Pantheon, the Sphinx, the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum and other attractions for the benefit of the inhabitants who can visit them without leaving their neighborhood. This trend is typical of the Chinese culture and could become a constant in the cities of the future, which, deprived of their own identity, will reflect each other in an endless mirror game.
However, the most interesting part of the research, from the point of view of the topic addressed in this article, is the study on how the various city nuclei (new or existing) are trying to unite, even administratively, to create unique entities. The Pearl River Delta, for example, is a densely urbanized area that is growing dramatically, Zhaoquing City is located in this area but for topographical reasons it is unable to be part of it, so the Chinese government has decided to finance a project that foresees the development of new infrastructures and the doubling of the size of the city in order to reach the “nearby” area of influence. In China they are building the city of the future, which is proposed as a system of nuclei, they are already connecting these nuclei without worrying about the topography, simply by modifying or circumventing it.
As Saskia Sassen argues in the essay contained in “Sistemi urbani e futuro” (Urban systems and the future)⁹, observing a city on the basis of the topographical image is increasingly inadequate in the digital age. Topography fails to grasp the characterizing aspects of globalization as well as the manifestations of the digital revolution, which by their nature escape the concept of place and materiality. Then the author manages to intertwine these factors again, but his initial question remains stronger than the answer.
To explain the impact of digitalization on physical and spatially rooted structures, the author uses a very effective example: the financial sector is certainly characterized by a high degree of use of digital technologies, perhaps the most digitized, dematerialized and globalized of all activities; however, it cannot be considered an exclusively digital sector. To have telematic financial markets with highly digitized tools, the availability of a huge amount of physical infrastructure, such as airports, buildings, etc. and human capacity is required. Conversely, what takes place within cyberspace is profoundly influenced by the different cultures, by daily practices and imaginaries existing outside of cyberspace itself. If there were no external references that have to do with the physical world, most of the operations that take place in the virtual world would have no meaning.
It is still difficult to unite the two worlds through our consolidated categories: what is physical, is physical, and if it is digital, it is digital. However, the previous example as well as the relationship between financial instruments and the real estate market suggest a more complex intertwining and correspondence that, perhaps, is destined to become a union.
The complex interactions between the virtual and the real, which will be the engine of the city of the future, give shape to a completely new image that we still cannot identify and represent.
Another dualism that will characterize the city of the future is the relationship between local and global. As before, these two concepts are also increasingly intertwined and seem to disappear one into the other.
Enrico Ercole in the article entitled “Il giardino dei sentieri che si incrociano: identità locale, capitale sociale, governance e reti come fattori innovativi di sviluppo locale” (The garden of paths that cross: local identity, social capital, governance and networks as innovative factors of local development)¹º illustrates how the concept of glocalization (name coined in 1992) manages to unite under a single reasoning the local and global spheres.
In the process of globalization, which according to Vittorio Gregotti is still a purely economic discourse¹¹, the local dimension becomes relevant, as it is at the sub-state level that local economies are structured.
Local subjects organize themselves around local development projects that mobilize specific resources, creating sociability, competitive advantages and values (social, economic, cultural), capable of circulating in global networks. Furthermore, the local and global dimensions will be increasingly interdependent as regards transportation, in fact the local system acts as a node of supra-regional networks allowing global transport, and in turn interacts, through the aforementioned networks that it helps to create, with the nearest local systems.
Let’s try to imagine the political and economic movement that exists between the local and the global: visualize two balls moving simultaneously in opposite directions from an intermediate body (the national level), one downwards and one upwards, the first ball (the local sphere) impacts on the local systems that are at the bottom, and transfers the thrust carried by the ball that is traveling upwards (the global sphere), which at the moment of maximum height is affected by the impact of the ball that travel downwards and so go back. Both bounce back in a sort of structural entanglement which creates new opportunities for local territorial systems, and which in fact benefits cities rather than rural areas (the latter already discarded when a globalized system is assimilated). I would point out that the intermediate body was present at the beginning of the visualization but not at the end of it. Will the national intermediate body still be needed? If yes, is it correct that it only has more power than the local sphere? And if the two spheres, global and local, which we said were different but equal, had the same power manifested in different ways and the intermediate body served “only” as a sort of protection that allows the exchange between the movement towards the one downwards? What if power, instead of being ascending (local->national->global), was balanced towards the center (local->national<-global)? With a view to cities that will be bigger and more powerful than the nations that host them, how should the political and economic system develop? If the cities within them have 60 million inhabitants, different cultures, a strong identity, a history of their own, political unity, etc … can they be considered nations themselves? What conformation could a world made up of city-states have in a global system?
The coordinates are changing and not everything tends to interpenetrate as we have seen between virtual/real and local/global, there are also images that are fragmenting: for example “the center”.
The center of the city of the past was generally imagined in the city center or “historic center”, now the center is considered the Central Business District, or the center of financial activities. In the city of the future, the “center” is widespread, therefore it transforms into a “node” belonging to a multitude of other connected nodes, this is already happening on a global scale and the urban scale is also reflecting the first symptoms. The analysis of the population density¹² of some specific cities, in particular Mumbai, Sao Paolo, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin, gives a diagram where this network of different nodes of influence is clear, which in addition to occurring in the economic world it also manifests itself in the disposition of the inhabitants within the cities themselves. What image to give to the city center of the future? Will it have a center?
SUSTAINABILITY
Planet Earth has already faced several mass extinctions, the first occurred two and a half billion years ago, due to cyanobacteria, also called blue algae. These organisms were very hungry for energy and so they found an extremely advantageous solution to obtain considerable doses of it. However, their discovery had a price: spreading lethal gases in very large quantities within the atmosphere. After a short time the emissions made the air unbreathable, disrupted the geology of the planet and decimated the living beings, some managed to survive by hiding among the rocks where the gas could not reach, others learned how to live with it, up to use it to their advantage, with time became even indispensable. The poisonous gas was oxygen.
The “Great Oxidation Event”¹³ was an unprecedented ecological catastrophe, in fact oxygen in itself is a toxic gas, it would also attack our biological molecules if we were not equipped with various enzymes that deal with processing harmful substances.
Gas changes, but the situation seems to be the same.
I would like to submit a data: 75% of the planet’s CO₂ emissions are produced by cities¹⁴. Then I would like to quote a sentence that I read on an installation entitled “Abitare il Paese” (Living the Country)¹⁵, created by Migliore + Servetto Architects and contained in the “Interni Human Spaces” exhibition during the Fuorisalone 2019. The phrase reads as follows: “The city is not the problem, it is the solution. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that not only is it a solution for a country’s problems, but it is the solution for the problem of climate change.”
The more the cities’ economy grows, their productivity, consumption patterns, the more their impact on the climate increases. However, the city is the only solution to the city problem.
The 2018 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Cimate Change¹⁶ argues that, in order to have any chance of managing climate change, it is absolutely necessary to keep the Earth’s temperature below +1.5 C by 2100. The problem is that the effects of global warming are not linear but exponentially, every tenth of a degree makes the difference, in fact if, for example, the permafrost (frozen soil of the Arctic) were to melt, tons of CO₂ would be released into the atmosphere which today are trapped inside it in the form of organic matter.
Massimo Sandal in an article entitled “Cronaca di un’apocalisse annunciata” (Chronicle of an announced apocalypse)¹⁷ points out that if we respected international pacts (not signed by all states) to cut emissions on the climate, we will probably find ourselves with +3 degrees of heating medium by 2100. This would mean the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, desertification, melting ice and immense mass migration. Cities like Osaka, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro and Miami would end up underwater.
So, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Cimate Change it takes an additional effort and to curb global warming by staying between +1.5 and +2 degrees we are forced to: halve the use of fossil fuels in 15 years and reset it in 30 years, then readjust the petrochemical industry, the heavy industry and obviously abandon gasoline; we must remove the CO₂ already present in the atmosphere by developing new technologies, such as BECCS that allows us to capture carbon using special plants and then transform them into inert carbon and store them underground (ironically we want to put the carbon back where we got it), in parallel we should plant at least 10 million square km (the surface of China more or less) of forests by 2050.
Angelo Romano in an interesting article¹⁸ reports the words of Gary Yohe, environmental economist at Wesleyan University, who claims that staying below +2 degrees is ambitious, social, political and economic structures should be changed, while staying below +1.5 degrees it is a ridiculous aspiration. He claims that those presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Cimate Change are good targets to achieve, but we should begin to get used to the fact that we may not reach them and think more seriously about what a world with a temperature of 2.5 or 3 degrees higher might look like.
I believe we will make it. The fact that we may not achieve these goals must not stop us from achieving them. I also believe that if the worst-case scenario should arise, with immense migrations, the ever-higher sea level, desertification and the world population decimated, it would be terrible, painful, but in any case we will make it, we will survive by transforming the cities, building canals, planting even more trees and entering into a world alliance. The strategies we implement to keep the temperature below 1.5 degrees are the basis on which to build the world with a temperature of 3 degrees higher.
In the city of the future very different people will live together, some will come from afar but it won’t matter because everyone will have shared the same experience and the same goals, nature will be an integral part of the urban fabric, in the sense that it will be the material that makes up the fabric, politics will be global because it is the only way to face global challenges, habits will respond to different cycles, because natural cycles will have changed, transport will be innovative and its progress formidable, because we will finally get rid of that obsolete technology that we have been carrying for a hundred years, the streets, buildings and objects will produce energy, because the universe is constantly dispersing it … How? I will try to deepen the “sustainability” discourse in the next issue, now we go on, going back.
PAST/FUTURE
Morgana Nichetti’s article¹⁹ in Number 05 clearly addresses the same problem, what will become the past within the city of the future? The author appeals to article 9 of the Italian Constitution which states: “The Republic promotes the development of culture and scientific and technical research. Protect the landscape and the historical and artistic heritage of the nation.”²º
This dilemma may seem like a modern question, but in reality we have always asked ourselves the same question. Raffaello from Urbino, already in 1519, wrote a letter to Pope Leo X asking him to keep the remains of ancient Rome: “… How many popes, holy father, have allowed the ruin of decay of ancient temples, statues, arches and other buildings, glory of their founders? How many have meant that, just to take pozzolan soil, the foundations have been dug, where the buildings came to earth? How much mortar has been made of statues and other antiques ornaments? … Therefore, holy father, it should not be among the last thoughts of Your Holiness to have care that what little remains of this ancient mother of Italian glory and name, as a testimony of those divine souls, is not eradicated in everything and broken and destroyed.“
What makes the Colosseum in Rome different from its reproduction located in a Chinese New Town? If, as Alois Riegl claimed in 1905, “every monument is a document”, why should its copy not have a historical value? With the written documents we make copies that can be examined and appreciated even if the original is kept safe or has been destroyed, the amanuensis monks fortunately copied numerous documents during the Middle Ages to make them reach us.
The word monument comes from the Latin “monere” which means to remember; however, its function does not have any kind of efficacy without its context. The monument is a system, not just an object, therefore without the city, the territory, the population that surrounds it, it has no historical value whatsoever. It is as if during the Middle Ages the monks had transcribed the documents by copying only the vowels, a monument deprived of the context is an incomplete, useless document, which lends itself to wrong interpretations. A monument represents the memory of the past and its presence in the present, but what is its relationship with the future?
The city of the future must build its identity around a conscious use of the historical heritage, without isolating it in a glass case as if it were an urban museum of natural history, where the monuments are immobile like stuffed animals that lose fur and color, but it must give new life to history, starting from the assumption that the value of that heritage is also preserved in the people who live it, in the new functions that are attributed to it. Monuments are historical documents that leave the freedom to continue writing their history, if we do not do it the past dies suicidal and the future remains to watch.
LIVING
“Man lives poetically”²¹ as Friedrich Hölderlin writes in one of his poems, I like to think that the city was his inspiring muse.
Man began to live together building the first urban settlements of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus valley, the city served as an intermediary between the cosmic order (represented by the temple and the priests) and the earthly order (represented by the citadel and by the monarchs). In this way it was possible to catalyze the immense creative energy of the Neolithic culture and moreover to contain the floods, repair damage caused by storms, store water, reshape the landscape, build transport networks, canals and in general to promote collective activities.
However, as Lewis Mumford writes in the book “The City in History”²² there are also negative contributions from urban civilization: war, slavery, excessive professional specialization and, in many places, a culture permanently oriented towards death; the author calls it a “negative symbiosis”. This trend is still present today and, according to the author, even more intense as there is no longer a religious sanction that could contain its outbreaks.
The city has always been composed of its positive as well as negative aspects.
Mumford continues by arguing that the first mission of the future’s city will be to create a visible, regional and civic structure intended to put man at ease with his deepest self and linked to images of solidarity. The city must not only be the seat of business and government, but above all an essential organ for expressing the new human personality, that of the “man of the world”. The distinction between man and nature, city dweller and country dweller, citizen and foreigner, must leave room for a planet that has become a city, consequently, as Herman Hertzberger said during a conference in Brussels that struck me greatly, even the smaller building must be designed as a functioning model of city, but if the world is a city, we can now say that even the smallest building must be designed as a functioning model of the whole world.
But how do you design a home that is a whole world? Let’s start by trying to understand how we don’t design it.
In the volume “Abitare il futuro” (Living the future)²³, Carlo Monti supports a rather radical thesis, in fact he writes that any project of housing or urban spaces that the inhabitants have not understood, or adapted to their needs, is certainly wrong. But what happened? The author argues that many times the realization betrays the project, or the funding runs out and qualitative elements must be renounced; however, in most cases failure was already secured from the start. This occurs when the designer’s utopian charge suffocates any freedom of use for the inhabitants by producing unacceptable spaces, when too technical or too “cumbersome” solutions are adopted, when forced community spaces are foreseen, extraneous to the culture and interests of future inhabitants. However, while it is certain that a bad project will bring serious harm to the lives of the inhabitants, it is not at all said that a good project will produce social improvements. The author goes on to argue that a good project can achieve results over time, thus influencing people’s culture or future projects, however in some way it must be absorbed by the inhabitants to be considered as such. As is the case with the most valuable architectural works, which are accepted by people despite being completely innovative.
What innovations can be applied to the concept of “living”? The way of living has changed a lot over the centuries and the spaces of the house have adapted to different needs. Since this theme would require a separate article, I decided to investigate a single aspect of the house: the living room.
We can say that the living room is the community space par excellence within our homes, that is its main function. The “square” of the house.
Before the city was even invented, the house was a single open space, generally located in a cave or sheltered by a tent, then when we started living in the cities we had the need to divide the spaces, so the living area and the sleeping area, then the living room was the place devoted to the fire, consequently the group of inhabitants gathered around to consume the most important ritual of all, being together. The living room was also the space where guests were welcomed, because it was generally the largest room. Due to the presence of fire, this space assumed a fundamental role not only in individual life, but also in the collective life, alternating spiritual (telling stories) and physical (cooking / eating) functions.
To date, all its functions have remained more or less the same, except that the fire has been replaced by television, and the activities have been further fragmented and relegated to special spaces. However, the trend is still changing and it seems that the home of the future will need, once again, a living room as the open space in the center of the home, where objects and uses define the spaces, as happens in the squares. The kitchen, which until the last century had been segregated in a service space, has returned to the living room, cooking (also thanks to the numerous culinary programs broadcast on television, and therefore in the living room) has once again become a collective activity, not to be hidden, but to be put on display. But where is the innovation? I believe it is quite clear that television, as we know it, is dying, I refer to my generation that no longer watches it, therefore the generation that will inhabit the city of the future. We have excluded television in favor of other screens, smaller but even more immersive and interactive. So, the innovation of the home of the future will be to reinterpret the function of the living room, deprived of fire and television, which in any case must be replaced with something equally strong. Personally, I have already stopped designing the apartments with the canonical rectangle consisting of one/two or more sofas/armchairs oriented towards the television, but I am starting to experiment with new arrangements and uses. How would you reinterpret the living room of the future?
NETWORKS
In the editorial entitled “La globalizzazione e il futuro dei sistemi di città e delle aree metropolitane mondiali” (Globalization and the future of world systems and metropolitan areas)²⁴, Alberto Gasparini argues that interpreting the world starting from cities, whatever their size, means first of all considering them as a set of networks, organized in turn into systems, hierarchized and characterized by variable dimensions, oriented by different economic, community, political and cultural functions.
If the relational networks between nations lose importance, due to the weakening of the idea of state sovereignty, which is the artificial absoluteness of power over everything within the borders of the state, then the cities and the societies in them residents will have the ability to relate regardless of their status, in bonds so strong as to constitute another “order of world power”.
However, the author points out some variables that can define such a strong urban power network, the most interesting variable, in my opinion, is the identity of the network necessary to regulate such a system: a plurality of coexisting and closely collaborative cities or a single integrated city?
In the article ” Quattrocento città giganti come tetto del mondo” (Four hundred giant cities as roof of the world)²⁵, Mattei Dogan explains how in fact the first hypothesis contained in the previous question is being already generated, namely a network composed of a plurality of cohabiting cities, in total four hundred “giant cities” that are starting to experience deep collaboration.
The author underlines how territorial nations are becoming metropolitan states, in which mega-cities dominate economic, social and political life. Globalization and an intense network of communication and exchange of goods, people and ideas are developing across cities.
There are nine main points of view which, if dominated, define a “giant city”: demographic, industrial-commercial, financial, cultural, political, port, airport, international. For example, Tokyo dominates all these points, but it is not necessary to satisfy them all in order to be called a “giant city”. Rome is not an industrial city, Los Angeles is not a political capital, Shanghai is not a cultural center, Lagos is not a financial center, but all these cities stand out in other points of view. Let’s say that they are sufficient but not necessary conditions.
All the four hundred “giant cities”, contained in the author’s list, are characterized by a strong physical network, and an equally powerful virtual network, which connects them by binding them inextricably.
Concerning the symbiosis between the physical and virtual networks just mentioned, Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel analyze the urban developments in the book “The city of tomorrow”²⁶.
The book deals with the fact that in today’s reality physical and digital elements collide strongly, both coming out enhanced in a triumph of atoms and bits (I like to imagine the synthesis of what is happening in reality by comparing it with what we are creating at Cern in Geneva, where we visualize the impressive impact between two atoms through wonderful images made up of bits).
The advent of the Internet (the space of flows) has not eliminated the human need for physical proximity, indeed it has often nourished it, however it has influenced it without being able to do without it. The virtual network does not replace the physical one and the bits do not replace atoms, cities are a hybrid space between these two dimensions.
The authors capture the revolutionary spirit of Le Corbusier who had interpreted the spirit of his time with the iconic concept of “machine to live in”, defining the city of the future as a “computer to live in”.
Also in this book there is mention of the study of the technologist Mark Weiser, who coined the phrase ubiquitous computing, imagining that the screens would have disappeared entirely in favor of a technology that could have taken into account the human natural environment, allowing computers to act in the background. This concept has been widely included in augmented reality (augmented reality, not to be confused with virtual reality) and, as Ratti and Claudel argue, gave birth to the definition of the Internet of Things (IoT). The latter denomination theorizes that if all the individual objects were equipped with a digital connection element, they could create a complex network anchored to the physical world. Any object could be put on the net: the refrigerator could be connected with the carton of milk to check if it is still full or expired, send a notification to the grocery store if a deficiency occurs, ordering a liter of the same quality; obviously if programmed more thoroughly could even order an orange juice instead of milk because among the vital parameters provided by your “personal device” he verifies a lack of vitamin C or an intolerance to dairy products. This is just one example of the potential of the IoT, which could have individual, social, cultural, but also entrepreneurial and commercial repercussions. Within this dense network of objects, architectures could also be included, but more generally any urban element, which through sensors and a design based on a more active or passive digital interaction, could be part of this circuit of information, obviously without eliminating the physical interaction, simply by modifying it. But is systematic optimization really the most desirable outcome? Is it enough for a city to function perfectly to be called “smart”? Is this the criterion with which to guide urban evolution? The authors of the book ask. What if the city becomes so intelligent that it no longer needs us but only the objects that make it up, and therefore starts to act in their (its) interest rather than ours? I wonder.
Personally I do not support the “evil” version of technological singularity²⁷, rather the fact that we depend and will depend on technology (city) as it depends and will depend on us, especially if it continues to be increasingly integrated with our person, as it happens in everyone symbiotic systems, such as between the plover and the crocodile, the sea anemone and the clown fish, bees and flowers, buffalo and egret, human and bacteria; it is not important who is more intelligent, the important thing is the collaboration. In the perspective of technology (city) we are nourishment, a continuous flow of information that keeps the system active and alive, as far as we are concerned technology (city) is a source of unlimited relationships, experiences and communications, we could say that we are the creators of our own “Matrix”, for me it is exciting and positive, but we can talk about it.
However, in the meantime, different ways of applying new technologies and networks on an urban scale are emerging. Social platforms connect people in communities who gather around different ideas, positive or negative, leaving the virtual space and meeting in the physical one. For this reason, the authors of the aforementioned book transform the term “Smart City” into “Senseable City“, emphasizing the centrality of man in the urban process.
CITIZENS
Lewis Mumford, in the book “The Future of the City”²⁹, argues how the human being is naturally led to migrate and how this condition offers him the opportunity to renew himself and his institutions. The great internal and external European migrations towards America have been opportunities for migrants to break all ties with the past, changing themselves and experimenting new social conformations. The evocative image that Mumford offers is of a series of migratory waves in succession, and while a wave withdraws, the following advances foaming, the first nevertheless persists and mixes with the second.
Intelligence, according to the author, lies in taking advantage of these movements while they are still in their fluid phase, making them crystallize in a positive social order.
Having said that, the aforementioned book stops on the definition of the most significant migrations that took place in America until 1970, identifies three of them, and anticipates a fourth one due to the opportunities linked to technological advancement, basically predicting what we are experiencing in this historical moment. Now we are at the gates of the fifth migration, that will be linked to climate change, in fact, according to a study published in “Nature”³º, by the end of the century, 13 million US citizens will be forced to move due to climate change. The migration will be due to the rising seas and temperature, mainly involving the populations that live on the coasts of the country.
What is the future of migration? What effect will the migration wave linked to climate change have on cities? Will it be a wave or a tsunami? How to positively crystallize a tsunami? What will the wave after the migratory tsunami look like? Will it be another wave or a suck of people who will return to populate the lands they abandoned when habitable again? Will we make them habitable again? How can we go in search of a more human destination than all those we are blindly pursuing?
The citizen of the city of the future will be a cyborg. In the sense that, as Amber Case stated in a TED talk³¹ as early as 2010, every time you look at a computer screen or use your smartphone you are a cyborg. This statement may seem absurd, however if the cyborg is equipped with a technological extension of one’s body, the smartphone can be conceived as a technological extension of one’s brain. With the telephone you memorize, communicate, perceive, study, work, etc … therefore it replaces a series of biological mechanisms that have always been controlled exclusively by our brain system. Instead of having an arm extension like science fiction films imagined, we got an extension of the brain that incredibly enhances our capabilities, expanding it towards the achievement of a sort of telepathy (ability to communicate with the mind), of psychokinesis ( the ability of the mind to move and influence matter), clairvoyance (ability to acquire knowledge of events, places or objects, which may be distant in space or time), and many other potentials and applications still to be discovered. Then it is interesting to note how we are even trying to attribute an empathic dimension to communication via smartphone, in fact emoticons are an attempt, still clumsy and childish, to empathically communicate emotions and not only information, the limit is still the means but the will would seem that.
As I tried to express in the article published in Number 04, entitled “Culture of our Time”³², which was more an outlet rather than a lucid reasoning, I believe that the distinction between natural and artificial is destined to interpenetrate as we have seen previously for the concepts of local/global and virtual/real. I believe that the citizen of the future will no longer feel a clear distinction between what is artificial and what is natural, because the distinction between man and nature developed philosophically up to the 1900s no longer has the same attractive appeal. At this moment we have the intellectual need to make man coincide with nature again, and thus terms such as “Anthropocene”, which expresses the current geological epoch, in which the human being and his activity are the main causes of geological and climatic changes. So man returns to being nature, its layer, unlike what it was at the beginning of time where nature was man (the Gods had anthropomorphic characteristics), after killing the Gods and discovering that we are them, now man is nature.
The philosopher Leonardo Caffo, during a conference at the Milan Triennale entitled “Machine(s) of loving grace”, of which you can find an extract on our IGTV³³, further challenged my conception about this topic, claiming that as we consider the nest of bees something natural, because the result of bees that are part of nature, then if man is also nature we can consider the city as something natural, so technology, because natural productions of nature. In this sense, what is artificial coincides with what is natural, so the idea of cyborg citizens does not seem so strange.
POLITICS
Along the lines of the article “Appunti per una ricerca sull’evoluzione dei modi d’uso della città” (Notes for a research on the evolution of the ways of use of the city) ³⁴ by Fabio Naselli, I would like to underline the needs of the future that will have to be addressed by western politics:
1) The stagnation of the numerical growth of the population (where it is not a net reduction), reconsidering the built volume, the recovery and urban transformations in relation to the demographic decrease.
2) The presence of migratory flows from non-European countries requires us to go beyond the national and European dimension, embracing a globality that will reflect the society of the future, different in structure and organization.
3) Management of climate change and all the social, cultural, industrial and economic changes that follow.
4) Limit the exploitation of resources within the limits imposed by nature, with particular attention to the consumption of water.
5) The radical reform of the educational and working system, reconsidering the current model, personalizing teaching and the training path in order to face a professional world that will be completely different.
6) The reformulation of Welfare policies, implementing a progressive but constant reduction of state intervention in the life of civil society, in particular in the transformations of the urban territory and its management, stimulating participation and private intervention.
7) The transformation of lifestyles, the faster social and legislative absorption of new individual practices and collective attitudes. The politics will have to reconsider the needs of the citizen, no longer subject to imposition attentions, but an active subject in the interpretation of his own needs.
8) Reforming the economic dynamics linked to the land value, in order to rebalance the disparity between penalized subjects and subjects in advantageous conditions.
9) Reforming the economic dynamics linked to global financial markets through tools still to be identified, re-evaluating localisms and local identities, since as we have seen, the balance between local and global is necessary, while the imposition of one or the other two aspects can have negative effects.
In order to address these looming needs, it is necessary to act politically in a completely different way than has been done so far. Fabiola Fratini in her article contained in the book “I futuri della città” (The futures of the city)³⁵, suggests “reversible” political action. The author presents the following example: a new residential neighborhood for families should be able to be easily and programmatically adaptable to a future use, for example an elderly program, referring to demographic dynamics, or the hypothesis of demolition could be previously contemplated, knowing that in 50 years the Italian population is expected to drop from 60 million to 42 million. This practice can also be applied to political reforms, contemplating action through uncertainty and indeterminacy of future predictions, accepting the complexity of time, the ability of the context to absorb the proposal, the ability of people to adapt, the evolution and considering the effects induced by the action and not only the consequences of it.
In the article “La città comunicativa. Patrimonio culturale, conoscenza e comunicazione per i futuri delle città” (The comunicative city. Cultural heritage, knowledge and communication for the future of cities)³⁶ Maurizio Carta defines two possible attitudes in planning the future. The first of a “predictive” type, which presupposes a single possible future, inherent in the ongoing processes, therefore plans the territory by foreseeing its forms and adapting the policies to the transformations that the present will undergo as a function of reaching its next stage. The second of “visionary” type, which believes that the futures are manifold, numerous existing possibilities, therefore plans the territory by identifying the policies in order to build possible futures capable of satisfying the imaginaries and needs of the communities. The first road is easier to travel because it is already designed, it is only a matter of choosing the speed and the mode of travel, as well as the traveling companions. The second road, more arduous, has the seduction of being traced along the way, leaving further freedom to choose the destination, the route and the material characteristics.
Subsequently, the author takes into consideration the European Union document relating to the European Spatial Development Perspective³⁷ (ESDP), which indicates the need for cultural heritage policies aimed at raising awareness and protection of cultural capital as a fundamental element in the international competitiveness of European cities. The document defines a heritage-based devolopment, or a future development based on culture. The main points are as follows: the construction of networks between the places in which the cultural heritage is stratified (local and global network); the guarantee of economic sustainability, the protection and enhancement of heritage and cultural innovation through direct and induced economies that increase the quality of the territory; the development of permanent processes of knowledge diffusion, which guarantee the info-structure of sustainable cultural and economic development, encouraging the permanent processes of participation of the inhabitants; the increase of accessibility to knowledge through the enhancement of lifelong learning (including professional) capable of becoming an incubator of economies; the initiation of concrete political actions to strengthen the link between the population and cultural heritage and to initiate virtuous behavior towards the conservation and use of culture.
Somehow I have already expressed my political position on this issue in the article “Former Psychiatric Hospital of Genoa: Active Regeneration”³⁸, however I would like to analyze more deeply the idea of culturally based development offered by Maurizio Carta because it is particularly close to my heart.
The political future of the cultural heritage must be guaranteed through the assumption of responsibility by the local government. The conservation and enhancement of the cultural heritage must be an integral part of the governance of the territory. Urban redevelopment cannot and must not be a matter for experts only, in fact sharing with citizens is essential, they must have an active part in the planning phase also. The dialogue between the conservation guarantors, those interested in the valorization and those responsible for the redevelopment must be participated and effective. Conservation can be innovated, stimulating the launch of new activities capable of providing asset recovery and economic and social sustainability. Conservation of cultural heritage must be part of a long-term political approach, fueled by quality criteria rather than short-term quantitative assessments.
The administrative future of cultural heritage must be characterized by the respect for social realities and the acquisition of responsibilities by local authorities, who must: assign functions to buildings that respect their character and correspond to the needs of contemporary life; devote part of the budget to policies related to cultural heritage by stimulating the financial involvement of individuals; promote and bureaucratically facilitate social initiatives, associations, agencies that are active in regeneration and conservation.
The economic future of cultural heritage must tend towards public, but increasingly private investments, concentrating funding on defined and unifying projects, paying particular attention to the tertiary sector which can offer ample room for innovation and growth.
The technical future of cultural heritage must take into account a permanent enhancement that can support the long-term policies implemented. Permanent qualification and training programs aimed at young people must be implemented, creating a pool of designers, technicians, artisans and educators able to pursue the objectives of the creative enhancement of cultural heritage.
Saskia Sassen in the article previously cited “La città come contesto di globalizzazione e qualità della vita” (The city as a context of globalization and quality of life)³⁹, after addressing the topic of the topographical image, develops the hypothesis of the formation of new political actors. The author argues the possibility of an increasingly intense “presence” of all those realities that would seem segregated and excluded from the dominant “heart” of the city, but which thanks to new technologies have the opportunity to interconnect with all the environments in the same situation, but located in other cities. In this way, actors not considered politicians in a formal sense, acquire credibility and self-determination, moreover they can make politics in ways that are much more difficult to recreate at national level. However, this new political frontier is not part of the ordinary political mechanism, therefore it does not become part of the canonical electoral or judicial systems in order to carry out its activities, in fact it is invisible in the space of national policies and for this reason it is considered hostile and so opposed. Nonetheless, in this historical moment we are seeing the spread of this new policy in various cities and for various reasons: Barcelona, Santiago de Chile, Beirut and Hong Kong are just a few contemporary examples where urban space combined with virtual space is allowing political activities such as occupation of homes, demonstrations against police brutality, struggle for human rights, politics of cultures and identity, policies to protect sexual identity, and many other claims.
Thanks to the internet, these urban policies become concrete and independent with respect to mass information, moreover local initiatives become part of a global network of political activism without losing focus on local issues, indeed amplifying their attention. The locations involved in this “cross-border” activism are therefore connected to each other by a digital network, however the fact that the network is global does not imply that the problems they face are global. Furthermore, it is interesting to note how these new political actors also move to other cities not “personally” involved in the political claims made by the political activism in question, such as in Milan, where local protests organized to support these remote places because somehow considered part of a solidarity political network between cities. These local initiatives underline the loss of power at national level which entails the possibility of emerging for new forms of power and new policies at sub-national level. What urban consequences will this new way of doing politics in the long term have? How to develop an “urban-centric” political model using new technologies? What does “urban-centric” political model mean? Who will be the political actors of the future?
COCLUSIONS
The city of the future is not homogeneous, it does not answer a single question, but rather a plurality of questions. It is the key to all the possible futures that we can imagine, it would seem to be the direction in which to go to face the great planetary challenges that we face.
However, we must be careful with the future and with our fantasies applied to cities, because if we do not calibrate our imagination well, disasters can occur, especially if technological progress is involved. As Michele Bonino pointed out to me in an interview that will be published on this issue of “AGORÀ magazine”, the Smart Cities of the past are now our nightmare. I am referring to functionalism, to all those cities designed for cars, to entire uninhabitable neighborhoods made with huge castings of reinforced concrete because at the time it was considered a technologically advanced material. The premises were noble and right, as are our after all, but the long-term result has failed, today these examples are a warning that shows us how we should move when we are dealing with cities and with the future of them, urban transformations must be approached with caution and awareness.
Instead, as regards the forecasts of the future in the strict sense, I believe that they are essential but at the same time useless; anyone who tries to predict the future fails, yet contributes to the creation of a future that he has not predicted but which is somehow generated by his prediction. Think of George Orwell’s “Big Brother” and “Animal Farm”, Marinetti’s Futurism Manifesto or Sant’Elia’s Architectural Manifesto, the cinematographic examples mentioned in the “Image” chapter or the idea of cyborgs discussed in the “Citizens” chapter. All these visualizations of the future are right predictions, but from another point of view, from another angle, they have nevertheless contributed to building the present in which we live.
In conclusion, I would like to quote a phrase that has remained impressed on me and that I think can make sense of this research on the city of the future, it is one of those quotes that bounces from mouth to mouth and therefore you cannot identify who truly said it, it has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln, Peter Drucker, Alan KayAlan Kay, Dandridge M. Cole, and many others, however I have heard it from the greatest visionary of our time, the one who is planning to bring humans to Mars probably by the 30s: Elon Musk.
The only way to predict the future is to make it.
I thank the authors of the books and articles mentioned in the text because they taught me ideas and gave me “words”.
Translated into English by Marco Grattarola.
¹ Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili, Torino, Einaudi, 1972.
² A cura di E. Piroddi, E. Scandurra e L. Bonis, articolo di Patrizia Bottaro, I futuri della città. Mutamenti, nuovi soggetti e progetti, Milano, Franco Angeli, 1999, pg. 48.
³ Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudijic, Living in the Endless City, London, Phaidon, 2011.
⁴ Presentazione di: Silvano Panzarasa, Città del passato per il futuro, Roma, Centro Italiano dell’Edilizia, 1986.
⁵ Jean Gottmann, Megalopoli. Funzioni e relazioni di una pluri-città, edizione italiana a cura di Lucio Gambi, Torino, Einaudi, 1970.
⁶ Fausto Carmelo Nigrelli, Metropoli immaginate, Roma, Manifesto libri, 2001.
⁷ M. Bonino, F. Governa, M. P. Repellino ed A. Sampieri, The city after Chinese New Towns. Space and Imaginaries from Contemporary Urban China, Basilea, 2019.
⁸ François Dubé, China’s Experiment in Djibouti, The Diplomat, www.thediplomat.com, last modified 05/10/2016, date of consultation 06/10/2019.
⁹ Saskia Sassen, Futuribili. Sistemi urbani e futuro, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2004, pp. 279-291.
¹º Enrico Ercole, Futuribili. Sistemi urbani e futuro, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2004, pp. 336-348.
¹¹ Duccio Prassoli, The culture of our time: interview with Vittorio Gregotti, AGORÀ magazine, www.agora-magazine.com, last modified 01/05/2019, date of consultation 01/05/2019.
¹² R. Burdett and D. Sudijic, op. cit.
¹³ Grande Evento Ossidativo, Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org, date of consultation 15/10/2019.
¹⁴ R. Burdett and D. Sudijic, op. cit.
¹⁵ Migliore + Servetto Architects, Abitare il Paese / Open Nest. Milan, www.architettimiglioreservetto.it, date of consultation 12/10/2019.
¹⁶ Intergovernmental Panel on Cimate Change, Global Warming of 1.5 C, www.ipcc.ch, date of consultation 15/10/2019.
¹⁷ Massimo Sandal, Cronaca di un’apocalisse annunciata, Esquire, www.esquire.com, last modified 17/10/2018, date of consultation 15/10/2019.
¹⁸ Angelo Romano, Cambiamento climatico: media e politica hanno fallito davanti alla più grande storia dei nostri tempi, Valigia blu, www.valigiablu.it, last modified 13/10/2018, date of consultation 08/10/2019.
¹⁹ Morgana Nichetti, Smart and historical City, AGORÀ magazine, www.agora-magazine.com, last modified 01/09/2019, date of consultation 01/09/2019.
²º Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana, Principi Fondamentali, Art. 9, Roma, 1948.
²¹ Martin Heidegger, La poesia di Hölderlin, trad. it. di Leonardo Amoroso, Milano, Adelphi, 1988.
²² Lewis Mumford, La città nella storia. Dalla corte alla città invisibile, IV edizione, Milano, Tascabili Bompiani, 1987.
²³ A cura di C. Monti, R. Roda, G. Sinopoli, Abitare il futuro. Città, quartieri, case, Milano, BE-MA editrice, 2005.
²⁴ Alberto Gasparini, Futuribili. Sistemi urbani e futuro, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2004, pp. 5-9.
²⁵ Mattei Dogan, Futuribili. Sistemi urbani e futuro, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2004, pp. 15-30.
²⁶ Carlo Ratti e Matthew Claudel, La città di domani. Come le reti stanno cambiando il futuro urbano, Torino, Einaudi, 2017.
²⁷ Singolarità tecnologica, Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org, date of consultation 09/10/2019.
²⁸ Giuseppe Scidà, Futuribili. Sistemi urbani e futuro, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2004, pg 187.
²⁹ Lewis Mumford, Il futuro delle città, Milano, Il Saggiatore, 1970.
³º Mathew E. Hauer, Nature, www.nature.com, last modified 17/04/2017, date of consultation 15/10/2019.
³¹ Amber Case, We are all cyborgs now, TED talks, www.ted.com, ultima modifica 15/12/2010, data di consultazione 20/09/2019.
³² Marco Grattarola, La Cultura nel nostro Tempo, AGORÀ magazine, www.agora-magazine.com, last modified 01/05/2019, date of consultation 01/05/2019.
³³ Sofia Pia Belenky, Ippolito Pastellini Iparelli, Niccolò Ornaghi and Leonardo Caffo, Machine(s) of loving grace, Instagram, www.instagram.com, Triennale di Milano, Palco Giardino, date of consultation 23/05/2019.
³⁴ A cura di E. Piroddi, E. Scandurra e L. Bonis, articolo di Fabio Naselli, I futuri della città. Mutamenti, nuovi soggetti e progetti, Milano, Franco Angeli, 1999, pp. 224-228.
³⁵ A cura di E. Piroddi, E. Scandurra e L. Bonis, articolo di Fabiola Fratini, I futuri della città. Mutamenti, nuovi soggetti e progetti, Milano, Franco Angeli, 1999, pp. 707-711.
³⁶ A cura di E. Piroddi, E. Scandurra e L. Bonis, articolo di Maurizio Carta, I futuri della città. Mutamenti, nuovi soggetti e progetti, Milano, Franco Angeli, 1999, pp. 665-669.
³⁷ Committee on Spatial Development, European Spatial Development Perspective, European Commission, www.ec.europa.eu, Luxembourg, 1999.
³⁸ Marco Grattarola, Former Psychiatric Hospital of Genoa: Active Regeneration, AGORÀ magazine, www.agora-magazine.com, last modified 01/11/2018, date of consultation 01/11/2018.
³⁹ Saskia Sassen, Futuribili. Sistemi urbani e futuro, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2004, pp. 291-294.
