The city structure in time and the “a priori” form of new urban configurations

The main trouble for a big city - as a megalopolis - is the disintegration of the traditional Forma Urbis idea and of the urban identity. Even if in the US metropolis is characterized by exasperated serial iteration, made in this way in just 3 centuries, is still possible to recognize the necessary relationship between different territory parts and it’s still clear the dialectic between buildings and countryside, between downtown and periphery, between housing and production area. While in new realities everything is uncontrolled and often reduced to shapeless heap of built up. The concentration of millions of inhabitants, as a result of an extreme process of urbanization producing an amplified confusion of urban spaces, is causing a new and unexpected level of use the area and the downfall of every social equilibrium. This kind of places are ruled by the indifference of the whole hierarchy built and lack an order well-balanced between housing, Tertiary’s sector areas, commercial areas, production areas in all urban space scales possible, as is made in the best tradition of the city (in metropolis too). This space is assuming the paradoxical “a priori shape” aspect and seems in lot of its parts equivalent and homogeneous. New icons of representation, the so-called “containers”, are accidentally put into the city, as effort to ri-polarize it. These are complex urban situations and architectures that seem to evocate today the fast dynamism condition, typical in the new millennium, showing ephemeral dimension and communicate the idea of transparency, lightly and movement. The courses “Typological and Morphological Characters of Architecture ” and “Architectural Design”, in the Department dICAR, Polytechnic in Bari, left to the writer, are focused on the research on the evolutionary process that recalls, generally, the urban complexity and also to spread the necessary knowledge to understanding urban development. Moreover the ways that urban organism shows itself, with its contradictions, considered in a conceptual "shape", are the beginning of the planning thinking. This attitude, especially reported to the complex urban situations, express our capacity of being able to be active in our epoch, through a critical and not parasitic exercise breaking with the past but in continuity with what has been historically transmitted and inherited. This idea is correctly explained by the German word Machenschaft.