Spatial Design for new typologies of places: in-between urban spaces (original) (raw)

The territory of the third millennium is transforming the ways in which the users inhabit the space. Our contemporary dynamic condition of urban spaces and places calls the need to identify new design tools, as advanced as the context where applied, that must be capable to express new poetics/qualities/meanings for the nowadays widespread territories, their various urban environments generated and their configurations. The formal deconstruction of the contemporary metropolis is a direct consequence of the processes of social and economic transformations currently underway. Our Age of Access provides the transition from an economy largely dominated by the market and the concepts of goods and propriety, in an economy dominated by intangible values such as culture, information and, mainly, relational aspect activator of new qualities. In this scenario the Design challenge is to understand the meanings, roles and the inter-relations of: man (concept of identity), post-industrial society (global/local), city (multiple civitas) and places (hyper/hybrid). The post-industrial development has created undecided spaces, no purpose oriented, which can be called other spaces, areas of refuge for diversity, places of strong dynamics. Places continually subject to new programs of use, often through processes of spontaneous re-functionalization. In this typologies of queer spaces, involving a departure from the notion of technical functionality of spaces to that of a dynamic semantic system of liminal places (concept of cultural geography of travel), there is potential for the in-between spaces -particular urban environments, marginal and residual, produced by the urban sprawl -to become new meaningful places and hence new types of public domain. In this sense the article wants to show how Spatial Design stands as a privileged design activity for the design of spaces (interior/exterior) and its related tools/equipments system through innovative environmental relational and logical configuration strategies -progressive and regressive, even systemic.