La morfologia della città contemporanea tra processi di de-urbanizzazione e di ri-urbanizzazione

Contemporary cities, in which the majority of the Italian population lives, have changed their shape. The empirical evidence of it is provided by the images, which show conformation and boundaries different from the past, as well as by the stories of those who live there, which describe the centre, the outskirts, and the activities in a more varied way. The shape of the contemporary city has been transformed because its morphology has changed, and so has the way in which populations and activities are distributed on the urban environment, with the latter being, in turn, the result of the great socio-economic transformations of the last centuries: industrialization, tertiarization and globalization (Martinotti 1993). What has remained unchanged is the assumption that the urban form, in the present as in the past, is the product of the encounter between the urbs (the built city) and the civitas (the society that inhabits it) and that the city continues to be the product of the society that shapes its structure which, in turn, influences its social, political and economic relations (Vicari Haddock 2013). The essay deals with the morphology of the contemporary Italian city, focusing in particular on the reasons that have changed its size and structure in the transition from the industrial to the post-industrial phase and on the consequences that this had in the urbanization process