Ricerc@Sapienza

Italy and China are two countries that conserve many parts of territory that are essentially agricultural, with the populations strongly rooted to the idea of belonging to the place. This sense of identity descends in both cases from the small scale of the individual inhabited settlements, and this is in spite of the enormous scale of China’s urban settlements. Both cultural contexts, then, are witnessing a progressive abandonment or a loss of cultural recognizability of traditional settlements, however both cultures – the Italian one and the Chinese one – are strongly attached to roots and tradition.This allowed us to cross the analysis methods based on decoding the rules of the urban fabric, with analysis methods based more on assessing the current uses of the territory and the city, to work towards defining a common ground in which the exchange experience can yield new and long-lasting strategic prospects in education and research.