Roy Wroth Adjunct professor, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. roy@wroth.co
Quando l’umano supera il reale L’adattamento descrive il nostro “annidamento” nel sistema biologico terrestre e le nostre radicali capacità di superare e trasformare quello stesso sistema. Le nuove teorie sull’adattamento emergenti nel dominio della biologia si dimostrano promettenti contributi a un approccio sistemico alla città e a nuove metafore con cui immaginare e intervenire nelle aree urbane. L’adattamento come metafora urbana possiede un passato travagliato, che necessita di riconsiderare i modi in cui il linguaggio capitalista ha influito sulla città. Gli attuali modelli, tra cui l’“approccio per capacità” di Amartya Sen, anticipano le opportunità che questa nuova prospettiva potrebbe offrire all’urbanistica.* n L’architettura della città, Aldo Rossi went out of his way to signal disapproval for some terms that were just entering wide usage and have since become nearly ubiquitous: “urban organism” and “urban fabric”. It seems Rossi felt that the city lacked a specific kind of self-unity and organic animation that the analogies suggest. If anything, he was drawn to the exquisite corpse as a metaphor; with the Analogous City he was concerned not with finding totalizing myths to describe the city, but with understanding the city’s many analogical patterns as they emerged over its history (Rossi, 1982).
The urban organism, a tangential element to the “naive functionalism” Rossi critiqued in the 1960s, has now taken a central place in our imagination and conceptualization of the city. The idea of the city as an organism following natural laws, or natural processes, such as decay, contagion, or adaptation, has a troubled history. Natural metaphors may be helpful in building a science of the city; but it is certain that they also become players in the urban dynamic, and take on lives of their own. The study of urbanism reaches a sobering moment of maturity when it realizes that such ideas are more securely
placed among the materials studied than among the tools of analysis. To frame something as “real” is not an objective or timeless scientific determination, rather a bracketing within currently accepted terms of a human conversation. Humans contribute to the real, imagining and then making artifacts that did not exist in, and could not come from, any process in nature. When we make new artifacts, we fundamentally change the world around us, both its contents and the procedures of its operation going forward. Even as every creative act and every human product may advance the state
01. Guancheng district, Dongguan City, Guangdong, China. Roy Wroth
When the Human exceeds the Real
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L’IMMERSIONE
