Metro-Scapes: Metropolitan Cartographyfor Mapping Hybrid Landscapes

Nowadays, the metropolitan process of spatial fragmentation and spatial heterogeneity demonstrate how Metropolitan Landscapes shall be understood as spaces for changing the practice and cultural expression of those who inhabit them. At the metropolitan scale, hybrid landscapes are plastic spaces and transitional membranes that connect nature with territorial infrastructure networks according to trans-scalar visions, from a rural environment to historic centres to urban districts and neighbourhoods. The Supra-scalar dimension of Metropolitan Landscapes undergoes sudden changes: the spatial relationships between 'local/global/hybrid', 'urban/rural', 'culture/nature', and 'traditional/contemporary; this is the investigation issue of Metro-scapes through Metropolitan Cartography maps. Specifically, the research aims to dynamically set up open-data and open-source Protocol Maps to make them interoperable, combinable, and scalable through modelling Metropolitan Landscapes. They are Figural Landscape Units since they are defined by their geographical structure (section) and durable cultural permanences (name). Therefore, Metro-scapes propose a new taxonomy of Metropolitan Landscapes in which the metropolis's tangible and intangible cultural heritage declines according to new spatial categories aimed at shaping Metropolitan Landscapes of Infrastructures, Exchanges, Transitions, and Obsolescences. In conclusion, as Metropolitan Landscapes are complex systems of space networks, Metropolitan Cartography contributes to rethinking the spatial form of specific hybrid urban-rural metropolitan contexts, their spatial ecology and public spaces' average linkage according to new land-use patterns of URLs. These new spatial interactions thus open up the city's design to a range of creative agents and to an array of new spatial typologies and their corresponding effects able to stand despite the incidental spatial pressures generated by physical phenomena of uncertainty and vulnerability from the metropolitan scale.