Re-generating the cities

Abstract

Even when they seem closer to the end or they experience moments of crisis, cities have the quality to regenerate. As history testifies, their tracks, streets, monuments become the seed of a new life: they born on the ruins of other big cities which continue to preserve memory. The new takes origin from what was already there, alternating end and rebirth in which fragments, spaces, shapes emerge as a program for perpetuity, urban forms that survive the change of the functions and new phenomena. This reflection leads us to think that the reading and perception of built form continues to be an indispensable tool, even if on operating plan, to update methods and strategies able to express aesthetic substance and contemporary forms of development. Complexity of our time requires an adequate theoretical framework and new tools have the capacity to meet with different elements, but not confusing the contemporary social changes with the spatial scenarios in which people moves. Thus the changes occur quickly, leaving no trace, and the instantaneous consumption of the images that characterize contemporary society, are not directly related to architectural and urban forms which respond to quite different laws and rules.