Frammenti della città in estensione

What is the role of open spaces in the contemporary city? These are places of promises and unknowns. To move forward, we turn, on the one hand, to other disciplines and, on the other, to the inheritance of the Modern Movement and the criticism that has been moved to it. We need to investigate some architectural principles common to the urban and rural design, in order to propose more inclusive and relational transformations. In particular, the essay collects some "fragments" included in the “Extending town” by Giuseppe Samonà. The roots of an unprecedented and, in some ways still current, alternative to the uncontrolled urbanization of the sprawl town have been explored. Samona’s reasoning on the architecture-urban unity went to this theory that proposed to give shape, and therefore strength, to the rural spaces at risk of urban erosion. Samonà found a possible dialectic between the parts of the territory recognizing an overall advantageous anthropization. Excluding the will (and the possibility) of a return to a phantomatic nature, a confidence in the architecture emerges. We are looking for specific answers in our disciplinary field to better understand some of the unfinished and highly topical intentions of the twentieth century that, progressively up to now, have helped to refine an overall sensitivity towards environmental pre-existences. The consideration of rural parts as architectural spaces (according to Samonà’s idea) inserts the book in that “awareness” which is being acquired towards the countryside and the soils also recognized by the European Commission. It consedered an “active conservation” of material and immaterial cultural, urban and agricultural heritage as the consequence of knowledge of identity values by the community.