Urbanism has taken a century to mature as a privileged field for interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation, essentially in the social sciences. Contrary to what was initially thought, technologies only serve the socio-political dynamics of transforming the territory, which is merging with the urban.
In an effort to compare these emerging paradigms, the city is also a concept in transition. The habitat of domesticated man, the city is everyone’s property and thus a collective production in constant mutation. It is alive, which blocks any chance of returning to the past, although history is the main subject of its theory, that is, interpretation and subsequent projection, programming, planning and management.
The urban is, par excellence, a collective heritage, a first-rate community asset that, for reasons of well-being and long-term survival, we have to cherish and develop, using the instruments and tools at our disposal, i.e. knowledge and its sharing. From different perspectives and in different ways, it was with these objectives in mind that the texts gathered here were written over the course of a decade. It is hoped that their interaction will mean that, as in the city, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
