Abstract
This chapter describes the expansion of the human settlements at the scale of mega regions and the consequent dissolution of the city/country division. The text also analyzes the concurrent expansion of an idea of city over larger territories, specular to the retreat of the relevance of urban space in such expanded contexts. The text discusses the emergence of a novel form of diffuse urbanity, articulating the synthetic considerations in the previous chapter. The spatial production overflowing the physical perimeter of the urban walls and, beyond those walls, trespassing the limits of a space commensurable with that of the urban paradigm, generates a distinct environment. The idea of a set of novel attributes defining the new form of citizenship is outlined, opening a vast field of future research work. The potential for the formation of a novel semantic and mythology, to endow the expanded territories with a new sense, is debated through the compared analysis of a set of spatial paradigms, such as the world city, city world, cosmopolis, and postmetropolis. Among these, particular attention is reserved to the model of the ‘opposite but accessible shores’ and its world-making ability. The bearing platform adopted for the compared analysis is constituted by a free reading of Rowe’s ‘middle landscape’ construct, and its evolutions, such as the ‘emergent architectural territories’ that have been rising in East Asia, interpreted as a humongous experiment for the implantation of a fabricated mythology for a novel citizenship.
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Notes
- 1.
“[…] the concept of the urban agglomeration, [referring] to the population contained within […] contiguous territory inhabited […], is favoured over other concepts” (UNESCO 2015, p. 4).
- 2.
In 1915, Patrick Geddes had described the emergence of regional conurbations that he calls ‘city regions’ in the chapter ‘World Cities and City Regions’ of his Cities in Evolution (Geddes 1949, pp. 22–31).
- 3.
With the plan for the creation of the Pearl River Delta administrative unit, north of Hong Kong, englobing 50 million inhabitants stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen, including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou, and Zhaoqing, the Chinese government has destined financial resources to launch a real-life experiment on the socioeconomic competitiveness of mega-regional entities under a socio-political regime whereby a ‘creative class’ is not officially contemplated.
- 4.
‘Metropolis’, conventionally referring to a city beyond the threshold of 1 million inhabitants, defined by UNO ‘middle-size city’ up to 5 million; ‘megalopolis’ (introduced by Gottmann in the ‘50s for the Great Lakes agglomeration, owing to MacKaye’s research of the ‘20s and ‘30s and later elaborated by Doxiadis), an urban aggregation with multiple centers of metropolitan level; ‘mega city’, recent upgraded category for monocentric systems over 10 million, a metropolis on steroids, counting 28 centers worldwide according to UNO’s World Urbanization Prospects 2014. See also Carbonell’s Introduction to America 2050 Project Report (Carbonell 2007, p. 5).
- 5.
The figure includes the population of Greater London (49.1 millions), Greater Paris (14.6 millions), Euro-Lowlands (50.0 millions), Euro-Sunbelt (24.8 millions), Euro Heartland (22.0 millions), Urb-Italy (46.9 millions), as broken down in table ‘Megalopolitan City Regions’ (Soja and Kanai 2007, p. 63).
- 6.
See previous Chap. 2 of this book.
- 7.
According to Pushkarev’s own reconstruction appeared in RPA’s website in October 2015, the authorship of the work has to be attributed to Tunnard with the exception of Part Three dedicated to the infrastructures for motorized mobility, The Paved Ribbon, that he had personally written.
- 8.
Part Two, The Dwelling Group, and Part Three, The Paved Ribbon, are dedicated to housing and motorized infrastructures, while Part Four, The Monuments of Technology, combines both industrial and commercial uses under the aegis of a novel monumentalization of technology.
- 9.
See sub-chapters ‘The Pastoral Perspective’, ‘The Modern Technical Orientation’, ‘Modern Pastoralism’ of Part Three ‘Poethics and Making’, Chap. 7 ‘Myths and Masks’ in Making a Middle Landscape.
- 10.
See sub-chapter ‘Paradise and Pandemonium’ in the same book.
- 11.
Saint Augustine’s The City of God was composed to confute the diffuse belief attributing the capture of Rome at the hands of the Visigoths to the demise of the ancient pagan cults in favor of Christianism.
- 12.
- 13.
Quoting Leo Marx.
- 14.
- 15.
See previous note on Hassinger’s Vienna in sub-chapter ‘Applying attributes’.
- 16.
Pirenne powerfully evokes the image in which the Pope makes of Rome the center of Christianity by continuing to live in it when it has been abandoned and, in turn, Rome’s historic prestige makes Saint Peter’s successor appear larger in his isolation.
- 17.
See sub-chapter ‘Historical continuity of landscape’ in Chap. 7 of this book.
- 18.
See in particular chapter ‘g. Type and Urban or Territorial Morphology’, (Rowe et al. 2013, pp. 127–43).
- 19.
See maps on pp. 260–1, 272–3, 288–9, 320–1, 336–7.
- 20.
See in particular Part Three, Chap. 2 ‘Crossing the Boundaries between Christendom and Islam, 900–1050’ (Abulafia 2011, pp. 258–70). There, Abulafia reconstructs the weft of ‘a Mediterranean society’, using Shlomo Dov Goitein’s definition derived from the exploration of the Cairo Genizah collection of Jewish traders’ documents. As Abulafia explains, the Ben Ezra synagogue of Old Cairo was rebuilt in the eleventh century by the Jewish population of ‘Palestinian’ liturgy (ancestor of the liturgy used by Italian and German communities and rival to the ‘Babylonian’ liturgy adopted by the Sephardi), incorporating a storeroom, genizah, on an upper floor only accessible through a ladder. The genizah was used to stuff discarded documents, mainly commercial papers, bearing Hebrew characters whose destruction would have been sinful. The Cairo Genizah collection of traders’ documents is a chaotic assemblage that, after Goitein, Abulafia calls ‘the opposite of an archive’. However, the Cairo Genizah collection replots that mosaic of cross-boundary connections conforming the varied mosaic of Mediterranean society coincident with its geographic space. The analogy between the geographic vision derived from the apparent chaos of the Cairo Genizah collection and the explorations of the geographic space through apparently illegible ‘big data’ is quite manifest.
- 21.
In literature more commonly transliterated as Ibn Jubayr.
- 22.
- 23.
See map (Abulafia 2011, pp. 306–7) and Cfr. Viajes de Benjamin de Tudela.
- 24.
Chapter 5 of Abulafia’s book is titled ‘Ways across the Sea, 1160–1185’.
- 25.
“Deterritorialization is always double [exhibiting] a deterritorializing force and a deterritorialized force” with the relative roles of “expression” and “content”. We can identify the mentioned ‘deterritorialized force’ with a ‘recessive force of reterritorialization’. See ‘Theorem Five to Theorem Seven’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 306–7).
- 26.
Edwards and Woolfs quote Aelius Aristides praising in the second century “the Romans for extending the security associated to urban life through the empire” and Rutilius Namantianus considering in the fifth century that, by expanding justice over the lands, the Romans “have made a city of what was once a world” (Edwards and Woolf 2003, p. 3).
- 27.
Dating back to the last years of the first-century BC, often cited by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, and probably the base for the Peutinger Table as for many other Roman and medieval maps (Friedman and Figg 2000 , p. 8).
- 28.
Beginning of the third century.
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Pasini, R. (2019). The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat and the Attributes of a Novel Urbanity. In: Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_3
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