Ricerc@Sapienza

Recent political and economical instability in the Middle East has revealed the fragility of the artistic and architectural heritage of cities. As in Europe following the Second World War, the systematic destruction of architectural heritage is sadly now common practice in territories afflicted by armed conflict. These circumstances push the architectural discipline to question how to reconstruct the architecture of the city.

Since the early 1990s, urban studies have been engaged with the issue of scale, so much so that the ‘urban question’ (Castells 1972) has also become a ‘scale question’, which means “systematically rethinking the relations between urban spaces and supra-urban processes of capital accumulation, political regulation and social struggle” (Brenner 2000: 361). In particular, the issue of scale draws attention to debates regarding changes in metropolitan areas and the role of political rescaling (Brenner 2004).

Transformation of urban areas satisfies hydraulic invariance (HI) if the maximum flow rate outgoing
the area stays unchanged. The HI can be respected by dimensioning appropriate water storage
volumes or low impact developments (LID) to balance the soil sealing and ground levelling effects.
In order to comply with HI, some Italian regional legislation and river basin authority provide for
the creation of storage tanks whose volume must be estimated through simple conceptual rainfallrunoff