Reading the city, building the city. Reflections and manifesto.
One of the main questions that arises facing the discipline of the form of the city, or, in its more precise expression, urban morphology studies, is the relationship between reading, necessarily understood in an interpretative sense, and the construction of the city and its elements, components, spaces and buildings. Since the city is probably the most complex object of human production, its reading, global or by components, must necessarily be spatial-temporal and comparative. The reading must allow us to decode the object, understanding it in its existence and its dynamics. For this reason, we must be able to find an explanatory framework for all the operations we perform when we want to read or intervene in the city, and which in practice correspond to the reduction of a complex object to certain interpretative, simple and schematic components. The question of transposing the reading into the design does not, and cannot, contain any trace of a deterministic path or cause-effect relationship but, on the contrary, must always be based on the assumption that from any premise we can conceive different paths rather than different goals, considering the dynamism of the built environment. The design will always assume an eminently personal nature. In this sense we intend to approach it through two examples of mere illustrative value. The first is an intervention concept for a problem addressed in the abstract. The second one is the establishment of strategies for a specific case, from a range of alternative options.
Keywords: urban morphology, design process, research by design.
