The future of the city: The fragment and the sense of place

Cities that have arrived at modernity after having directly undergone the profound transformations of the last half century appear today highly fragmented. This fragmentation, directly related to the low quality of life of these urban realities, is intimately linked to a hypertrophic growth of cities compared to the actual “carrying capacity” of the territories to which they belong, as well as to an excessive simplification of their spatial structure. Contemporary cities, especially European ones, have increasingly confused the cause of fragmentation with its more general effect: the appearance of "urban voids". They have therefore begun, during the new millennium, to implement clogging processes aimed at sewing up and regenerating parts of cities and containing further forms of uncontrolled expansion of their limits. On the other hand, this phenomenon has not solved the problem of urban and therefore social fragmentation, especially in the more peripheral areas of cities, but only that of the continuity of the "forma urbis". The present essay wishes to highlight how the city of the future must face the problem of fragmentation by operating in the diametrically opposite direction: facilitating the expulsion of fragments. In this sense, it is fundamental to operate through three specific paradigms: 1) separating the fragments rather than merging them; 2) favoring the generation of new centralities in the fragments; 3) connecting the fragments with the complex network of the territory even before the city from which they were expelled.