Post-Metropolitan Territories

Looking for a New Urbanity

Alessandro Balducci, Valeria Fedeli, Francesco Curci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138650480
• eBook ISBN: 9781317231592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Processes of multi-scalar regional urbanization are occurring worldwide. Such processes are clearly distinguishable from those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to the shifting concepts of both the city and the metropolis. International literature highlights how what we have historically associated with the idea of cities has long been subjected to consistent reconfiguration, which involves stressing some of the typical features of the idea of "cityness".

Post-Metropolitan Territories: Looking for a New Urbanity is the product of a research project funded by the Italian Ministry for Education, Universities and Research (MIUR). It constitutes a thorough overview of a country that is one of Europe's most diverse in terms of regional development and performance: Italy. This book brings together case studies of a number of Italian cities and their hinterlands and looks at new forms of urbanization, exploring themes of sustainability, industrialization, de-industrialization, governance, city planning and quality of life.

This volume will be of great interest to academics and students who study regional development, economic geography and urban studies, as well as civil servants and policymakers in the field of spatial planning, urban policy, territorial policies and governance.

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PART I

Building an atlas of post-metropolitan Italy

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1 Post-metropolitan territories as emergent forms of urban space

Alessandro Balducci, Valeria Fedeli and Francesco Curci

Post-metropolis: an inspiring conceptualization

Processes of multi-scalar regional urbanization are occurring worldwide, with characteristics that clearly distinguish them from those studied by nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban studies through the traditional concepts of both the city first and the metropolis later. International literature highlights how all that we have historically associated with the idea of cities has long been subjected to a consistent reconfiguration, which involves and stresses some of the typical features of the idea of “cityness” (Sennett, 2007) – in other words, what we consider the typical urban characteristics to be, what makes the city a specific phenomenon that can be distinguished from other forms of social life. Size, density and heterogeneity were accounted for by Wirth and the Chicago school as the distinctive characteristics of “the urban”¹ (Dematteis & Lanza, 2011); the processes that have occurred since the end of the twentieth century in Europe and in the United States have produced relevant challenges to these features. So far, literature has focused its attention on the description of the new forms and size of the city, elaborating a large amount of new terms to describe its new characteristics: conurbations, (global) city-regions, megalopolis, megacities, polycentric regions (Geddes, 1915; Gottmann, 1957; Borja et al., 1997; Sassen, 2001; Florida, 2006; Hall & Pain, 2006; Florida et al., 2008; Scott, 2011), and so on. At the same time, the international debate has also shown that, together with their size and form, the nature and identity of cities are being profoundly modified. In the European context, in particular, some historical characteristics seem to be at stake (Le Galès, 2002, 2006, 2011, 2015) – social heterogeneity, political autonomy and governmental asset, roles and functions, lifestyles and landscapes, political orientation – so much so that, on the one hand, urban multiplication and diffusion become categories no longer clear and significant (Amin & Thrift, 2005), while on the other, in the face of planetary urbanization (Brenner, 2014), the city appears to be just one of the forms of the contemporary urban condition. In this respect, the city has become, for scholars, politicians and policymakers, an ambiguous object (Martinotti, 1999), the description (and government) of which is particularly complex because it has become more and more difficult to isolate the contemporary urban fabric in terms of a stable and definitive socio-spatial fact that is clearly distinguishable from the non-urban realm.

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For many years, these kinds of processes have been interpreted in terms of decentralization, dispersion or even disloyalty to the constituent characteristics of the historical city, reproducing an interpretative model typical of the nineteenth century, counterposing the center to the periphery, concentration to dispersion, homogeneity to heterogeneity, proximity to distance. In this sense, according to several scholars, including Edward Soja, much of the literature that initially came to terms with the so-called new urban dimension has not really renewed the vocabulary and the concept of the city (Soja, 2011). Even when trying to describe the new metropolitan condition, a great part of the literature has simply expanded the “city” framework for the interpretation and judgment of processes that could not be framed anymore with the same concepts (Soja, 2011). Not only images such as that of agglomeration and conurbation (the former being the result of the growth around the compact city, the latter the result of the welding of neighboring agglomerations), but also the same idea of metropolitan areas seems, in this respect, still based on the idea of a clearly identifiable relationship between the central city and its neighboring territories, or an area of influence of the central city.

Such traditional interpretations of urban change have been questioned by a number of authors who have proposed thinking, a decade from now, in new terms about the contemporary urban, looking at the unfolding processes of regional urbanization that are completely reshaping the urban, but also looking at size, density and heterogeneity (just to mention some of these new definitions: the “città infinita”, introduced by Bonomi & Abruzzese, 2004; the “open city”, proposed by Sennet, 2007; the “endless” city, discussed by Burdett & Sudjic, 2007). The American geographer Edward Soja – looking in particular at urban phenomena on the West Coast of the USA, but extending his exploration outside of the United States – proposed in 2011 focusing on new socio-spatial phenomena that seemed to have erased or fundamentally altered the relationship between urban and suburban as conceptualized, first, within an urban model, and then within a metropolitan one. In particular, he proposed exploring and dealing with “the emergence of a distinctive new urban form, the extensive polynucleated, densely networked, information-intensive and increasingly globalized city region [ . . . ], to a polycentric network of urban agglomerations, where relatively high densities are found throughout the urbanized region” (Soja, 2011, p. 684).

Three epiphenomena, according to Soja, could be detected and studied under the concept of “post-metropolis,” as reformulated by the author in 2011: (1) the flattening and shrinking of the gradient of urban density; (2) the progressive erosion of the boundary between urban and suburban; and (3) the homogenization of the urban landscape as well as an increasing differentiation and specialization of the suburban. Among the effects, Soja (2011) listed: (1) the disappearance of significant differences in lifestyles between urban and suburban, with the emergence of different (sub) urban ways of life; (2) the mixing of urban and suburban forms; (3) the combination of paradoxical forms of decentralization and recentralization, tied on the one hand to the expulsion of some urban functions in peri-urban contexts, capable of generating new centers and, on the other, to the shaping of new geographies in the suburban and the reverse; and (4) the emergence of a new urban form, that of “polynucleated, densely networked, information-intensive, and increasingly globalized city region” (Soja, 2011, p. 684). In the post-metropolis conceptualized by Soja, the traditional density gradients from the center to the periphery get thinner; the boundaries between the city and the countryside fade away; peripheries become more and more differentiated and host strategic urban functions; decentralization and recentralization recombine and produce new sets of centralities and new systems of voids. These effects could express and configure not only a new urban form, but also a “new urban question” that reformulates, rather than simply amplifying some of the typical problems of the twentieth-century city, such as environmental degradation, social polarization, inequalities in the distribution of and access to resources. The new urban regional scale seems to behave like a constitutive element not only of spatial recomposition, but also social and economic processes. This element questions the idea of socio-spatial cohesion traditionally linked with the urban fact, and lets new destructuring and restructuring processes emerge, deserving new analysis, interpretation and policy approaches.

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We came into this reconceptualization of post-metropolis in terms of regional urbanization on the occasion of a seminar organized in Paris by the City Councilor Pierre Mansat, the purpose of which was to discuss the challenges of metropolitan governance in the case of similar urban contexts (Paris Metropole, Le defi de la gouvernance, 2011). We found it to be an interesting and challenging hypothesis of research to use as a starting point, a few months later, when we initiated a research proposal to be submitted to the national call for research projects published by the Italian Ministry for Education, Universities and Research (MIUR). The discussion that took place in Paris with Edward Soja seemed promising and stimulating. Once back in Italy and looking for a challenging research framework to propose, we suggested to other colleagues in Italy to assume some of the questions that the discussion had generated in our minds.

Could Soja’s reasoning be assumed also to explore the Italian context? Were Italian cities facing the emergence of new complex and diverse forms of the urban, characterized by the above-mentioned processes? Could this interpretative framework allow us to unveil a new urbanization phase and, together with this, help us identify new forms of social inequalities, a more heterogeneous and divided city, characterized by new social differentiation or plagued by significant environmental problems as proposed by Soja? Alternatively, was the Italian case impossible to describe according to the hypothesis developed with reference to the USA context? Was there the need for a specific and peculiar interpretative framework?

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In our minds there was also the idea that the last 20 years of research on regional urbanization in Italy had produced quite consistent results in terms of conceptualization of urban change (Boeri et al., 1993; Lanzani, 2003; Clementi et al., 1996; Secchi, 2005; Balducci & Fedeli, 2007; Balducci et al., 2008; Balducci et al., 2011), but with limited international resonance. Indeed, the Italian case could contribute to enriching the international debate, proposing possible alternative interpretations to international mainstreaming (Roy, 2009). Since the 1990s, the Italian debate has generously focused on the interpretation of the consistent processes of socio-spatial change occurring in some of the largest urban areas in Italy. And since the 1960s, in fact, a series of important changes have affected some of the most lively urban contexts in Italy, attracting the attention of several urban scholars (among others, De Carlo, 1962; Samonà, 1959; Quaroni, 1967; Indovina et al., 1990; Boeri et al., 1993; Turri, 2000; Secchi, 2005; Perulli, 2012). In particular, some of the concepts introduced in the early 1960s – in a dialogue with the international debate, by authors such as Quaroni, Samonà and De Carlo, for example the città-regione (De Carlo, 1962) – to describe the first evident effects of urban regionalization in contexts such as the Milan urban region have been reused and adapted to discuss more recent processes that occurred during the late 1980s and early 1990s and which have been interpreted through the concept of città diffusa (Indovina et al., 1990). This umbrella term is used in different ways by different authors to describe the contradictions and potentialities, the threats and opportunities of a kind of urban development with new forms, size and meaning, both in more typical metropolitan conditions (the case of the Milan urban region) and in non-metropolitan ones (the Veneto region). In this respect the Italian debate has focused on the one hand on the contradictions and potentialities of a diffuse urbanization, altering the traditional reference to the city, and on the other on the proposal of new urban landscapes and lifestyles, which deserved not only appropriate descriptions but also design attention. In particular, a part of the debate has stigmatized the externalities of a “diffuse urbanization” and suggested the necessity to govern the “urban diffusion” (see in particular Indovina, 1990). This part of the literature has at the same time clarified that the diffuse city was different in nature from the concept of sprawl: the Italian diffuse city was a mixed-use city, not necessarily low density and not necessarily rich and suburban. The other part has tried to acknowledge the dignity of this new form of urbanity, looking at it as a positive planning challenge (see Lanzani, 2003; Secchi, 2005), and in particular trying to produce new analytical categories able to grasp the new settlement patterns but also with attention to the socio-economic dynamics that produce them. In the mid-2000s the exploration of large conurbations covering entire parts of the national territory – in particular along the Turin-Milan-Venice axis in terms of città infinita by Bonomi and Abruzzese (2004) – further contributed to developing the idea of a new urban dimension, which is not only infinite, because it is lacking in boundaries, but infinitely complex in all its components – meaning in this sense that the complexity of problems and opportunities offered by the traditional urban areas can be found even in apparently suburban or traditionally peripheral contexts. The historical polycentric nature of the Italian context and the conceptualization of the Third Italy in the economic sphere have further contributed to the d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: Building an Atlas of Post-Metropolitan Italy
• PART II: Regional Portraits: Looking Inside the Squares
• PART III: Post-Metropolis: Looking Across the Squares
• Index