Critical cogito in urban design education. Method and architectural language

The aim of this brief reflection, which offers itself for debate in a rhetorical form lacking the contradictory, will be to discuss the teaching of the urban design through university didactics, practised in the wake of a tradition that, albeit with over-simplification, I must acknowledge for the most part to the ‘Roman School’. Before describing the contents and structure of method, I would frame the internal complexity of the theme by starting with a few questions. Does it still make sense to propose the study of urban form in order to grasp its essence for design purposes? In a world increasingly projected on paradigms that go in search of epiphenomena and elect as truth the tools, which have always been useful to man but today have become something else because man has shown himself incapable of controlling their effects and dominating the power they express in a technical-scientific key (Gunther Anders calls it Promethean shame), is it possible to oppose methods capable of transmitting those values of the culture that has produced the cities in which we live? How much do the fads that rage even in the academic world influence education, which is no stranger to complacently sharing short-lived, transitory, even ephemeral trends that have devastating effects on teaching precisely because they are fleeting?