Old and New Towns: Architecture, Languages, Discourses.

Many cities are born from an original project and a 'foundational discourse'. In Italy, we have several examples: in Sardinia, Carloforte, colonized by the Savoy (1738); in Campania, the social and technological experiment of the paleoindustrial settlements of San Leucio (1750); in Lombardy, the company town of Crespi d'Adda (1878); in different parts of our territory, the new urban settlements founded under the fascist administration, as Latina and Sabaudia in the Pontine Marshes, Carbonia and Arborea in Sardinia. There are also the (re)foundation of whole urban areas, as the different Chinatowns, or the construction of new neighborhoods, as the workers suburbs in Turin or Roma, built between the end of second World War and the beginning of the Seventies, culture heritage of the years of the economic boom and today challenge and resource for the cities itself. A common denominator binds (re)foundation cities and districts: the migrations in its various forms (colonisations, diasporas, refugees…). Our work proposes a reflection on the link between the‘foundation and (re)foundation discourses’ and the architectural projects defining and characterizing these cities or parts of them. Special attention is deserved to the second half of the twentieth century, when to face massive migration flows new neighborhoods have been planned and new settlements have been built. Today, these urban areas are often undermined by deep economic, social and spatial transformations, but at the same time, they constitute a fundamental step toward a possible urban future. In particular, we are interested in investigating under which discursive conditions a relationship between urban-architectural projects and anthropization of the territory is established. We focus on the mutual influence and impact of the architecture of the city and the migrations flow, looking especially to the organization of public spaces, the rules of coexistence, the symbols, and the words/terms/concepts defining them. Discussing contemporary architecture and their underpinned ‘discourses’, we wish to bring out how the migration flows contribute to map and translate the urban territory.