Weak urbanism. The contemporary relevance of an Italian vision

Charles Waldhein, collecting Barthes’s assumption that « interdisciplinary begins effectively when the solidarity of old disciplines breaks down in the interest of a new object », have recently highlighted that contemporary alternative futures place us today across various spaces of disagreement that have the peculiarity to cross disciplinary and professional borders. Andrea Branzi's well known discourse, describing the contrasts between disciplines such as architecture and urbanism, might be found relevant to the emergent interdisciplinary debate on the contemporary city.

Since his 1968 typewriter diagrams for a « No-Stop City », Andrea Branzi relentlessly worked upon the idea of a horizontal surface shaped by the forces of economic and ecological flows. His interest in the horizontal spread of capital across thin tissues of territory, renewed in several other projects as « Agronica » (1995) or « Philips Strijp Masterplan » (2000), will drive him to theorize the emergence of weak urbanism. Two important assumptions, implicit in his vision, have captured the interest of many landscape urbanists in the last two decades: that cities will continue to decentralize, and that landscape is the primary medium of urban form. Thus it seems that Branzi's radical vision may have a fundamental value in bridging contemporary interdisciplinary theories and rapidly developing urban contexts. Recent studies carried out since the 1990's on Asian extended metropolitan regions seem in fact to validate the pioneer character of the italian designer's hypothesis.