Metropolitan landscapes knowledge: metropolitan cartography to design urban-rural morphotypes

Abstract

In the contemporary metropolis, the impacts of Green-Grey Continuity Breakdown and Rural Neglection, from the territorial to the local scales, demonstrate how Metropolitan Landscapes are hybrid spaces as the boundaries between city and country no longer exist. The handbook aims to disseminate new theoretical and practical knowledge of interpretation and design of Metropolitan Landscapes. Metropolitan Landscapes are complex systems consisting of hybrid territories not yet connected to the metropolitan green and grey network. They are the synthetic result of the intersection of heterogeneous and interconnected spaces, shaped by environmental, cultural ecological and topological forces across time and spaces. They alternate the nature and structure of the urban dimension according to trans-scalar visions: from grey to green infrastructures, from countryside to historical centres, from districts to neighborhoods. Therefore, the scales of Landscapes undergo sudden changes; the semantic relationships between ‘local/global/hybrid’, ‘urban/rural’, ‘culture/nature, and ‘traditional/contemporary’. This is the starting point for the Experimental thesis “Metropolitan Landscapes Knolwledge. Metropolitan Cartography to design Urban-Rural Morphotypes”. In particular, the general goals of the research are: Reclaiming - Envisioning - Designing Metropolitan Landscapes through Metropolitan Cartography (MC), to build a new methodological approach and transfer a common knowledge of vulnerable landscapes through maps. Specifically, the research proposes developing and testing a cartographic methodology for mapping the transformation processes of Metropolitan Landscapes. Metropolitan Cartography is conceived as an open-source methodology to reconstruct a narrative of hybrid landscapes that can be easily interpreted, replicated and applied with maps. It is a methodological tool to support Metropolitan Architecture projects in heterogeneous domains of design: from the urban to the architectural scale. In conclusion, Metropolitan Landscapes Knowledge is a handbook that narrates and guides, through a sequence of powerful images, towards the readability of the morphological structure of landscapes in dynamic phases of transformation and change, opening the door to multiple topics of investigation in the field of urban and architectural design.