Mapping Time: Structures for the Imagination

Reading the Urban Form is a fundamental activity for identifying the structures that constitute it. The Archea research - funded as part of an Erasmus + Strategic Partnership program - has read and redrawn the Urban Space of two medium-sized European cities, Bologna and Aachen, according to 5 different interpretative approaches: Mapping Spaces, Mapping Places, Mapping Natural Space, Mapping Centralities, Mapping Social Space. The idea is that the different characteristics that make the European city particularly liveable can be traced back to the quality of its Urban Space. Mapping Time is added to these readings. The diachronic reading that Muratori makes of the San Bartolomeo district in its Storia Operante is assumed synchronously as the expression of a field of possibilities. In a figurative approach that refers to the Italian tradition of architectural and urban Composition, Mapping Time is understood in a synchronic way, in which the different configurations that the parts have gone through over time, unfold an open range of possible solutions and that we can imagine. In other words, the terms of the discourse oscillate within the relationship between Urban Morphology and Architectural Composition, the outdatedness of which alone allows us to imagine a better world than what it actually is.