No. 07 (2002): Territorial Dispersion, Landscape and Constructed City: Objectives and Challenges of Urban Planning

The knowledge field of Urbanism, academically speaking, is currently being debated between two instrumental lines of work. On the one hand, that which explores matters related to the Landscape and Territorial scope, closely linked to the recent theories on Sustainability. On the other hand, we find a specific Urban field that tries to expand and overcome, methodologically, its original nineteenth century origins. It’s in this sense that we can say that many of the issues that are currently being assumed on the Urbanism field come from the dialectic encounter with the contradictions that become manifest in the use and abuse that landscape-territorial areas suffer as they are thought to be unnecessary to be subjected or engaged with concrete urban developments.

We mustn’t forget either that from their origin, even if it was shyly at first, Urbanism wanted to be responsible and take charge not only of the Planning of proper urban spaces, of those that were more involved with the problems generated by the inner changes of the city, of its growth, expansion and development but also of the singular special fragments identified with a part of the surrounding territory. Even so, Urbanism is defined from its beginnings as a field eminently “urban”, that is to say, committed to the Planning of “built spaces” or those that are in a position to assume a main role on the extension of that which was already consolidated as urban. Urbanism assumed, above all, its role as a discipline interested in the future construction of cities, without showing special interest in the other kind of Planning that affected non-urban territories, even if it didn’t completely ignore it.

The thematic thus presented justifies the generic title give in this occasion to the Magazine, “Territorial Dispersion, Landscape and Constructed City: Objectives and Challenges of Urban Planning”, a title with which we wish to show, simultaneously, the content and an opening towards new proposals on the specific field of Land Planning of the Urban.