Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore a new notion of urbanity in the context of planetary urbanisation, through the investigation and analysis of the following themes: urban-ecology, urban-infrastructure, and new processes of urbanisation.

Paper long abstract:

In the last couple of decades, the interest in understanding territorial forms as operative design tools has been overcome by an unstoppable urban growth that has turned cities into metropolitan regions and subsequently in fully urbanised regions. As cities are dynamic processes and not static forms, contradictory phenomena have overlapped in time and space. Processes of expansion and contraction have redefined the edges of the city, its internal structure and dependencies, through establishing new relationships, connecting areas to networks and reconstructing fields and territories. The ever-expanding urbanisation process that we are witnessing has blurred the boundaries between the city and the countryside, resulting in a planetary formation of complete urbanisation that is being consolidated in the early twenty-first century.

This paper will argue that in order to understand the contemporary processes of urbanisation and to revert its lucrative destruction, the planetary dimension of the phenomena needs to be tackled, and the isotropic sea of urbanisation needs to be reconfigured into territorial ecologies. Strategies of intervention will be defined in order to reformulate a new model of urbanisation oriented towards a collective re-appropriation and democratic management of specific contexts, paying special attention to notions of (urban)ecology and (urban)infrastructure.