The street as a layer representing transitional processes

The map is the representation tool used in urban morphological studies to make the transition process of city tissue explicit. The urban transition process in analysis occurs through catalysts that have a tangible impact on the urban fabric. Therefore, the city is a complex system, and its representation needs to be decomposed into parts: the blocks, the streets, and the buildings that all together compose the urban tissue. The following contribution focuses on studying the systems of representation of transition by analysing the maps used by the master of urban morphology school in Italy. In this context, the street and its identification in maps highlight the limits of urban changes. The research is conducted on Venice’s map by Saverio Muratori (1959) and on Como by Gianfranco Caniggia (1973), which shows how different methods of representation of the street system lead to different understandings of the historical stratifications and thus the transition of the city. As a connecting element represented within the map, the street allows us to relate the different scales of the city. Besides reflecting on the street within the map as a system of representation of the urban layers, the analysis sets the goal towards different representation systems able to recompose what was previously decomposed: the diagrams. The methodological outcome provided through a critical analysis of the studies defines the street as a tool to read the urban systems.