PATCHWORK METROPOLIS. Un modello teorico per il progetto dei territori contemporanei

In 1989 the young Dutch architect Willem Jan Neutelings developed a project for the area in between Rotterdam and the Hague that was going to face, in the following years, a huge increment of population and activities. In this context Neutelings proposed his personal reinterpretation of the urban form called “De Tapijtmetropool” or “Patchwork Metropolis” . The analyses of his work has been the methodological pretext to further investigate the different declinations of the figure of the patchwork in the urban discipline from its origins, mainly related with the work of “The Regional Planning Association of America” and ecologists such as Richard T.T. Forman, until today. Interpreted as a general manifesto or as the explanation of a specific territorial configuration, the patchwork discourse crosses many of the preeminent topics of the modernity – the figure of the fragment, the issue of the peripheral condition and the territorial layout of the contemporary city – but also many other metaphors and researches – cities in between , the territory as a palimpsests , the city territory , the città diffusa , the archipelago city – preserving and enriching each time its precious ambiguity. The thesis is articulated in four parts that assemble a circular story that opens and closes in the same sector of the Dutch territory. Starting with a new reading of the Neutelings’ manifesto (I) and finishing with the analyses of the political, social and territorial configuration of the Netherlands (IV), the research demonstrates retrospectively the presence of an implicit project, recognizing the elements and the typical working mechanisms of the patchwork model. The central part of this thesis (II-III) questions the operational validity of the patchwork metaphor for the urban discipline, aiming to transform the six-pages long article of Neutelings into a more coherent and grounded paradigm to interpret and design the contemporary territories. As a project of coexistence, the patchwork deserves a preeminent role in the contemporary urban discourse, for the willingness to seek an order, even if a weak one, in a territory which is apparently missing it and to address one of the most important themes of the entire Western culture: the relationship between the one and the multiple .