Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Giovanni Santamaria
The flow of people, resources, material and immaterial goods, and at the same time regimes and strategies of control, have always shaped/reshaped our geographies and processes of urbanization. Therefore built and unbuilt landscapes have been characterized by gradual or dramatic changes, leading to new architectural typologies and urban morphologies corresponding to the transformation of means of production, distribution, circulation, consumption and to the shift of political, economic and ideological realms. The effects of these processes on structure and quality of space and life could be described as part of a complex Urban Metabolism¹ which looks at the city and its territory as a complex organism. This dynamic landscape has reached a high level of complexity where natural environments (geology, hydrology, topography) and cultural environments (productive lands, urban settlements, infrastructural networks) need to be synergistically understood as part of an articulated ecological system, with both micro and macro implications. It is the synthesis of geographic-historical contents (collective values), aesthetic-perceptual contents (individual values), and ecological-natural contents (biological values)², influenced more and more by natural and man-made disasters caused by climate change and human conflicts. Since the city as a definable entity and product of predetermined models has become obsolete, we are now called to work with a collage of fragments, heterogeneous and dynamic, often in opposition and unpredictable, subjected to the balance of variable forces, with their own order and rules, and their own ways of evolving, which we have to understand and manage³. This determines the need for new tools and methods to observe, record and assess urban phenomena, and the data regarding them, towards more sensitive interventions.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2018.46
Volume Editors
Ángela García de Paredes, Iñaqui Carnicero & Julio Salcedo-Fernandez
ISBN
978-1-944214-18-0
