City and Territory. Lectures on Urban Evolution 1 + 2

The term “city” changed meaning throughout the 20th century, to the point of becoming almost unusable in the 21st. Rem Koolhaas, in Texts on the (no longer) city, stated: “The city no longer exists. Because the idea of the city has been distorted and expanded like never before in the past, any attempt to insist on its original condition – in visual, normative, or constructive terms – inevitably leads, helped by nostalgia, to irrelevance.” From the historical definitions of the city as an economic place par excellence by Carlo Cattaneo, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, through the regionalism of Patrick Geddes and the “urban ruralism” of Frank Lloyd Wright, to the zoning between the two World Wars, and finally the exponential urban growth in the “short century” with the creation of large, increasingly peripheral areas – alongside mass car use – the city has overflowed into the territory. This territory today represents the overcoming of the long-criticized conflict between city and countryside, as pointed out by Karl Marx and his followers. As André Corboz noted, being constantly rewritten, “The territory, overloaded as it is with traces and past readings, looks more like a palimpsest. To install new structures or make more rational use of certain lands, it is often necessary to modify its substance in an irreversible way.” Because of this, over time new words became necessary, such as sprawl, suburbia, diffused city, anti-city, hyper-city, non-city, or (no longer) city, to describe the great transformation that first affected Europe and North America, and later Asian megacities and African shantytowns. Reviewing some key moments of this evolution is therefore useful to better understand the scenario we are in today, and at the same time to reinterpret, from this perspective, some of the classics of international architectural and urban theory. As Giancarlo De Carlo said when retiring from teaching, it is simply impossible to understand a city and the architecture that shapes it if we don’t first deeply understand “the relationship of interdependence, necessity, and correspondence that exists between the city and the territory.”

1. Introductory lesson on the city and the territory
2. Utopian and scientific socialism: the housing question
3. The city in Carlo Cattaneo and Max Weber
4. Paris, Capital of the 19th Century: Georges Eugène Haussmann
5. From Ebenezer Howard’s garden city to Patrick Geddes’ regionalism
6. The Grosstadt of Otto Wagner and “Red Vienna”
7. The democratic capitalism of Frank Lloyd Wright
8. Ways of thinking about urban planning: Le Corbusier
9. Gustavo Giovannoni vs Marcello Piacentini
10. Ludwig Hilberseimer from Berlin to Chicago
11. Ernesto Nathan Rogers between corporatism and Adriano Olivetti
12. Learning to see the city: Bruno Zevi and the young Manfredo Tafuri
13. The city-region: Giancarlo De Carlo
14. The city-territory: Carlo Aymonino
15. The shape of the territory: Vittorio Gregotti
16. The image of the city: Kevin Lynch
17. Aldo Rossi as urban planner
18. Europe as a continent-city: Yona Friedman
19. Learning from Las Vegas: Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi
20. No stop city and the Continuous Monument: the Florence radicals
21. The genius loci and the territorial phenomenology of Christian Norberg-Schulz
22. André Corboz and Flora Ruchat Roncati: the territory as palimpsest
23. The (no longer) city: Rem Koolhaas from Singapore to the Countryside
24. A guest lecture

To acquire elementary knowledge about the nature of the modern city, its functioning and its relationship with the surrounding area through in-depth study of a number of books and by using indispensable tools of analysis such as photography, cinema and literature.

• Good health and well-being
• Quality education
• Decent work and economic growth
• Industry, innovation and infrastructure
• Sustainable cities and communities
• Responsible consumption and production
• Climate action

In presence

Lectures, class discussions, readings, writing task

Paper + 20-minute oral interview related to the paper