Tremors

The "grammar" of the new city is built of elementary phrases, rather than articulated statements of clearly distinguishable categories. This is the effect of the invasion of a multitude of solitary and agglutinated built objects, produced by a society that has democratically constructed territories that resemble itself. A multi-dimensional interpretation of the contemporary city, however, reveals a territory which is not chaotic. If one observes the forms through which this pulviscular innovation condenses and coagulates into major tremors of physical space and major evolutional patterns, one immediately notices the importance that self-organizional processes take on in contemporary western space.

Self-organisation Changes

The contemporary urban realm brings together a multitude of distinct, asynchronous tremors within a series of regular movements - distinct in rythm, duration and intensity- of material. Each of these regular movements is replicated in distant, disconnected spaces and reveals, in the tension flowing in the physical material and its jolts, a certain specific self-organization of the social relations and decision-making processes. "Self-organization" in this context is not used to mean only spontaneity, informal or non institutional charatacter of the processes of territorial change. Rather, self organization - which often creates spaces of innovation- means above all that settlement rules (that give order to a certain set of individual tremors) are produced and shared by subjects that participate in the system itself. These are relational rules, designed and eventually readapted throughout time by the forces acting within the system; rules that often take on, together with the linguistic set appropriate to that system, a common and coded meaning.

Syntax

Thus, behind the aesthetic chaos produced by the apparently incongruous juxtaposition of monads aware only of their own individual trajectories, we witness the appearance of an entirely different phenomenon: the excessive power of a few principles of order.The "syntax" of the new cities consists of a limited number of organisational rules and a multitude of phrases; it is an impoverished language making ever repeated use of only small parts of its rich vocabulary.



Stefano Boeri teaches at the universities of Venice and Lausanne as well as conducting independent research and design. He contributes regularly to the cultural pages of "Il Sole 24 Ore", main Italian economic newspaper. His research centers around the interface of architecture and urbanism with a focus on new conditions for European City. With the photographer Gabriele Basilico, he is author of "Italy. Cross Sections of a Country" (Scalo publisher, 1998), an eclectic atlas of contemporary Italian urban landscape. Recently, his work has appeared in the Mutations exhibition in (AA.VV, Mutations, Actar, Barcelona, 2000), where –together with the Multiplcity research group- he exhibited the installation "USE-Uncertain States of Europe".His office is involved in many transformation projects in portual areas in the Mediterranean (Genoa, Naples, Mytilene, Salerno, Trieste). Recently, he has been invited to represent Italy at the 'New Trends in Architecture Europe-Japan' international exhibition (Tokyo, Porto, Rotterdam, 2001).