The Urban Potential of External Territories

The urban potential of the territory seems first and foremost to evoke the rediscovery of an anchorage to the land, in the sense that the city receives an appeal from the territory to reflect on the sense of man’s home, as a quest for the primary elements of its construction, a search for urban essence. On a horizon that appears to be urging us towards environmentally-oriented urban life, promising perspectives seem perhaps to be opening up for the vast territories rich in nature and history for the construction of possible urban worlds. This book explores the current reasons for the relations between territories and urban settlement, outlining a perspective of environmental city that will retrieve the historic depth and sense of the territory to relaunch them in current terms. The authors highlight the original ways the territory is brought to the attention of an urban life that, precisely through these new relations, is renewed and finds the light of a perspective. The projects illustrated propose selective re-centring of the city on its environmental cornerstones, to some extent external to the usual dynamics of the city, highlighting structure-territories that reveal in their natural and historic wealth the generating force of a different kind of settlement space. In these territories the project, even with the smallest action, makes public contemporary space emerge, disclosing a common world of urban meanings in the territory of the city.