Description and Prescription in the Historical Centre of Rimini (Italy)

A prescriptive act (such as a rule) cannot exist without a descriptive act (of restitution of form) that constitutes its founding relationship. Urban morphology, within a geographical and historical tradition, focuses on the rigorous and systematic description and explanation of the urban landscape (Oliveira, 2021), while urban codes are primarily in support of an urban vision (Dutton, 2000) from a prescriptive sphere-oriented perspective in the regulatory sphere. The relationship between description and prescription is the subject of a long debate in urban morphology. One of the central questions is how to derive prescriptions for regenerating the urban environment based on descriptions of the existing and its historical development. The debate today tends to focus on the need to make the descriptions provided by urban morphology more objective and scientific, with the expectation that an objective and scientific description should not, in principle, already be normative (Kropf, 2021). The city has long been the subject of studies involving different disciplines, and some works are based on the concept of the science of the city (Batty, 2013; Mehaffy, 2014). It is impossible to determine how cities will or should be built in the future, yet it is possible to outline the contours of urban rules and how their effects have influenced the city’s shape. This research places current issues on urban coding in the context of studying the physical city (form) using the historic centre of Rimini (Italy) as a case study. The study offers an analysis of the evolution of the urban form of the historic centre of Rimini and its urban rules, reasoning on a broader discourse concerning the reform of urban codes. Through a morphological analysis based on traditional assumptions, this study uses design as a bridge between the study of urban form and the prefiguration of urban codes in the context of Italy’s historical centres. The proposed result is a draft of urban rules that accommodate the flexibility of past and future urban transformations.