Metropolitan Landscapes

One of the main objectives of the book is to open a dialogue amongst cross-cutting discipline experts to discuss approaches, tools, and case studies focused on the coexistence of urbanity and ecology. The book focus is on case studies at the metropolitan scale and discussion about toolkits, based on the reading of the territory with the geographical, urban, architectural, economic, environmental, and public policy perspectives. It introduces the concept of Practice of Metropolitan Discipline, something which is new. The specificity of the new discipline is in its field of action, where the starting point is higher than the local case. The idea is to bring the local case to an absolute generalisation, as the level of awareness of the local policymakers and civil servants must be raised to the complexity of the metropolitan phenomenon. The necessity of a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach and the Prac-tice of Metropolitan Discipline became a common ground for our academic ex-change in the past years. The Practice of Metropolitan Discipline supports the construction of the metropolitan spatial structure with organisational and technical expertise, proposing the big projects of the metropolitan urbanity. It is based on the physical and virtual network between the new city shape, the interfaces among built capital and natural capital, and the new forms of conviviality. The rapid urbanisation in the past few decades changed the scene of urban life on a global scale radically. Many critical issues have arisen within the physical and spatial transformations of the metropolitan regions. Social and economic inequality, the fragility of environmental systems caused by global climate change, the emergence of the political idea of the metropolitan dwellers as global citizens, the preservation of cultural heritage, and the governance and policy issues are only a few of the challenges that frame what we call 'the Metropolitan Complexity'. These issues cannot be addressed with a single, static, and traditional disciplinary approach, but instead, require a comprehensive and multidisciplinary vision to understand them. According to some scholars (e.g. Monte-Mor Roberto Lu s, 2014), we need to develop a different way of conceptualizing the new metropolitan territorialities. Metropolitan experts have to shape the city dimension starting from an environmental perspective (the environmental question in its urban and metropolitan dimensions), to evaluate the relationship between city and countryside, and subsequently, the links between the metropolis and the region, as well as the settlement patterns in contemporary metropolises. Our book provides metropolitan key studies as generators of theoretical contents and approaches, data, experiences, good practices, and tools to remove or avoid obstacles in order to plan the metropolitan city/region. Metropolitan solutions are focused on pragmatic integrated strategies as tasks that the current city must adopt.