Drawing the City: Form and Meaning

A whole generation of urban studies in Italy, of architects and professors of architecture, tried to establish a method of reading the city, according to which analysis and design are two aspects of the same moment: design as an instrument of knowledge of the urban phenomenon, and analysis as the result of an act of determination already intended by the idea of design. In order to do this, the reading of the city must involve a drawing in which the elements represented belong to architecture, seen as a discipline, and are included among the elements selected and classified in the course of its long historical experience: monumental elements, roads as generators of plans, the typological structure of residential areas, watercourses, and geomorphological elements in general. In this way, architecture fixes in a drawing the stable and permanent elements of the city, that is, the figurative structure from which to arrange the present and future transformation and development of the urban phenomenon. In other words, it is a thought and methodology based on faith in the ability of architecture and the urban form to syncretically represent the many instances – socioeconomic, urban planning, anthropological – that make up the city as an articulated and complex phenomenon.