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The future of the city: tomorrow is already yesterday

    • Meeting in digital format
    • 12 May 2021

          The health emergency of recent months has changed the needs of citizens, particularly as regards their way of living in cities and private homes. These changes have to do with multiple aspects of the urban environment. They can be traced to the influence of transversal themes that include the “green revolution”, digital development, new forms of socializing stemming from virus containment measures and changes in infrastructure. A continuing concern is the interface between cities and those suburban and exurban areas often neglected by public policy; domestic retreats where residents strive to construct a certain normality; and where revitalization plans are spawning cultural hubs parallel to those of the more central urban areas.

          Other changes in the city are the result of recent social and ecological transformations that express its dynamism and, at the same time, reveal the shortfalls that make revising urban regulations essential. All these changes call for a new vision of the city that must wholeheartedly embrace digital technology. 

          The pandemic has highlighted how the home too has developed new needs, and these have to do with flexibility. It appears necessary now to design houses according to new parameters, where spaces respond to the need to either isolate or congregate. One of the problems that emerged during the lockdown was the impossibility for everyone to have access to a rapid and efficient internet connection; a problem especially pronounced in the southern and exurban areas of Italy. Some experts suggest the possibility of a near-future wave of north-to-south migration in search of a “greener” lifestyle, and the consequent need for increased investment in renewable energy.

          The pandemic has also foregrounded the need to speed up innovation, starting with the country’s most fragile zones as well as some fundamental considerations on improving conditions in the country’s south, developing renewable energy sources and bringing the nation up to digital speed.

          Italy continues to have major demographic problems due, not least, to so many of its young people having to go abroad in search of work, which has triggered a sort of intellectual desertification that is not going to be easily stemmed. Policy must keep pace with innovation and interventions must be made in an opportune fashion.

          Can the architectural models of the past still serve in designing the cities of tomorrow? Italy’s architectural and historic wonders are envied the world over, yet this patrimony must not only be safeguarded and preserved; we must also make the most of that patrimony by adapting to these changing times. If we do not succeed, the only alternative is the inexorable deterioration and decline of those cities. Some past examples – from Haussman’s Paris to the Rome of Piacentini and Giovannoni – show that designing the city of the future inevitably means replacing parts of the city of the past.

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