Ricerc@Sapienza

The reading of the changes underway at the edges of contemporary
cities is one of the most difficult subjects To tackle methodically. Proof of this is the descriptive literature produced on the topic, where depictions of an inextricable complexity and the suggestion of fragmentation, particularly amongst architects, have become true literary genres in themselves. The obvious obstacle is that the forms in which expansion takes place continuously evolve in time and space and seem beyond any rational, general law, while following a comprehensible process is an essential condition for the construction of a study method that can be communicated (and therefore of a design).
The growing complexity of the phenomena that develop on the
edges of the built environment, where rural areas prepare for change
in ways that seem continually different, can be clearly recognised in
post-industrial cities, but the uncertainty inherent in the tools we use
to understand and monitor them was already apparent in the post-war
period: the very period that attempted to create a limit to the irrationality
of cities in chaotic expansion by developing new tools for understanding
them.