Ciutat real, ciutat ideal

Whether we like it or not, the processes of formalisation and transformation of urban space not only meet specific instrumental functions and/or a certain formal, aesthetic concept of planning. They also act as a basic mechanism for expressing and transmitting collective codes and references, of possibilities for meeting, exchange and coexistence... or conflict.

They not only respond to a functional programme, but they themselves become the programme, a device for ordering and interpreting reality.

Any analysis of the city that overlooks the decisive importance of the cultural and symbolic components of urban life is condemned, in terms of knowledge, to a sterile reductionism and, in practical terms, as a possible theoretical instrument of a planning strategy, to the most radical failure.

It isn’t a question of recovering old utopias but of rethinking the city in its whole complexity instead. Let urban planning be an instrument of urbanity at one and the same time.