The Narrative Structure of the Agro-Urban Metropolitan Territory. The Metropolis as Hypertext for the History of the Twenty-first Century: A Network of Middle Cities as an Operational Topography

Abstract

Hypertext is a set of documents placed in relation to each other using keywords. In the context of the metropolitan discourse, it can be considered as a network of emerging urban epicentres. The reading of a metropolitan territory can take place in a nonlinear way. The citizens’ self-consciousness and the ability to move around freely are the backgrounds for the metaphoric transposition of the hypertext concept in the metropolitan dimension. Reversely, to understand the metropolitan issues using the hypertext concept, the individual choices among a wide range of elements placed in relation to each other become significant. The relations of various types of space and nature are managed by a subjective mapping that is constantly updated. In the contemporary urban narrative, especially from the governance perspective, there is a lack of storytelling, to establish a new physical metropolitan paradigm and discourse. To introduce the metropolitan hybrid agro-urban territory to the new metropolitan population requires a process of building a narrative of the territorial identity and citizenship, through a powerful metaphor. The goal of a metropolitan project is to define a space with collective and public dimensions through the new hybrid urban forms that are public, common, entertaining or productive. In order to build this gradient of metropolitan space and define its functional and symbolic values and forms, it is necessary to develop new syntax and grammar for the design.