Londra: fenomenologia di una metamorfosi urbana. Il palinsesto orizzontale della “città di recinti” = London: phenomenology of urban metamorphosis. The horizontal palimpsest of the “city of enclosures”

Ever since the Middle Ages, London has appeared as a “city by parts” that has expanded, over time, in an uncontrolled manner, mainly by juxtapositions and additions. The “urban enclosures” dotting the English landscape, starting from the archetypical forms of the precinct, the square, the crescent, and the circus, become devices that shape the contemporary metropolis, capable of drawing complex geography, a horizontal palimpsest. An urban structure substantially opposed to that of the historical city, which develops vertically, over the years, in a sort of geological overlapping of layers. In the third millennium, London’s powerful dynamics of growth reveals a “terrific” and prophetically cautionary urban text: one of the most organic and rational conurbations in the world, whose demographic expansion has always been accompanied by a remarkable topographical development. The city is a living body, with a complex and contradictory structure, which has expanded engulfing neighbouring villages and countryside and, arguably, imposes the need for rethinking the tools for reading and designing the urban form. Methods and tools useful to favour the understanding, the interpreting and the decoding of the complex phenomena of urban growth and transformation conditioned, from the origins, by numerous variables, as shown in the paper; tools useful to give new meaning to the fragments making up the contemporary city, in an attempt to transform the “margins” into “thresholds” of a continuous urban speech.