Suchergebnisse

Italy is a society with a long history of urbanization, which reflects on the present. Urban growth has gone on uninterrupted from the Unity to the present day, but the traditional contraposition between town and countryside has disappeared, substituted by a novel type of sprawling urban settlements. Not differently from what happened in other countries, but with a more negative impact on social and political institutions, large part of the urban settlement has now taken the form of a sprawling periurban. In the Italian literature on politics there is little consideration for the relation between urban or spatial morphology and political system. Politics as such is highly valued while urban geography, aside from the traditional regional differences, is hardly considered more than an inert frame of reference. The main contention of this essay is that, having disregarded the mutations in the urban settlement patterns, or even worse, having misrepresented them, often through obsolete ideological frames of thought, people not only has prevented a sound administrative handling of these changes, but it has contributed considerably to let them become unmanageable. This work will sketchily trace the main trends of urbanization from the Italian unification to today. For reasons of space, however, it will above all concentrate on the post WWI period with the two major interrelated cycles: that of the creation of the "first generation metropolis" in coincidence with the so called "economic miracle" and that of the formation of the "second generation" metropolises or meta-cities that characterizes the present time. Adapted from the source document.