The fragility of the in-between city

Abstract

The in-between city, in its various forms that sometimes highlight the settlement dispersion (widespread city), the metropolitan fragmentation or simply the presence of interstitial urban voids, represents the undesired outcome of the urbanization processes triggered by the industrialization of the last two centuries, showing the fragility of this kind of settlement: it is a fragility of physical territory, burdened by risks and natural hazards, and of social one produced by the exponential increase of degradation, unemployment, delinquency, and crime especially in the metropolitan outskirts.
Urban fragility is one of the basic issues of contemporary city, which has been studied over the past two centuries. It is a constitutive feature of modernity which refers to the difficulty of understanding and managing the urban structure. In fact, the industrial city, more than the historical one in the past, is expression of complexity. However, only in recent decades the “thought of complexity” has emerged attempting at the analysis of reality.
The city is basically a complex system composed of physical and social elements, under pressures and forces of different characterization and intensity which makes it extremely variable and dynamic, for which it is difficult to think of localized actions that can be implemented in restricted physical territorial spaces.
The in-between city could be analysed as a highly fragmented spatial phenomena, but for understanding the evolutionary processes and the reasons of nowadays condition it is necessary to refer to the “thought of complexity”. This awareness accounts for the fragility and vulnerability of the in-between city, and suggests to analyse it as a part of a interrelated complex system.