Between City and Nature: Grammars for the Urban Form

This abstract refers to theoretical and application research on the grammars of urban form that the author is carrying on into Urban and Architecture Design courses in dICAR Department of the Polytechnic of Bari and other design experience as the International Workshop Erasmus Intensive Programme "Re_Build The Urban Form" held in Monopoli (Bari) in 2013. The crisis of the contemporary city represents the occasion to redefine its form beginning from an idea of the city in which the relationship between the form of the land and form of urban settlements is recognized as a fundamental value. Disused urban areas have a central role in the process of "re-generation" of the form of the city for re-founding potentialities that these empty, wide and central space may have in the process of renovatio urbis. Compared to this problematic field, our disciplinary contribution is developed in terms of "form", both theoretical, individualizing in the idea of “city-territory” the field of application of the research, then from a design point of view, assuming an episteme able to recognize in distinguished way the morphological value of landscape and urban settlements. Case study cities are represented by Gravina and Monopoli, medium-size cities in South of Bari (Apulia-Italy). Identified project sites are crisis areas of urban form, connoted by the presence of abandoned buildings and empty unresolved spaces; they have a great value for the proximity to the ancient "compact" city and for the strong relation with natural excellence elements such as ravin and natural harbour on the coast-line. The aim of this work, both theoretical then didactic, is defining and new settlement/dwelling models as paradigms of a new idea of city-territory, using formal grammars of exemplary methodological value, able to express a meaningful relationship between the form of the land and the urban form.