COEVOLUTION THROUGH METROPOLITAN CARTOGRAPHY. AN EPISTEMOLOGY APPROACH TO UNDERSTAND THE METROPOLITAN COMPLEXITY

The image of the city, its morphology, territories, and biography, concerning spatial, social, and economic dimensions, have radically changed in recent years, determining a new idea of urbanity spaces. Today, metropolitan areas have an incommensurable dimension compared to human measures. New rules and paths of knowledge are needed to manage the impact of human development on regions and landscapes and to create new relationships with the natural world. For the authors, the culture/nature linkage is a cultural change. ‘Natural’ is opposed to ‘artificial’, ‘conventional’: what do they mean for mass phenomena? It is a matter of how interpreting the city image changes in its dichotomous and interdependent relations with new technologies, throwing a new light on landscape and its values. Through ‘Metropolitan Cartography’, the construction of information spatialisation competences for transitioning metropolitan systems can be envisaged, to provide a multidisciplinary and vivid knowledge synthesis of the physical space. In this framework, coevolution becomes a cultural factor, involving territorial transformations and the ability to evolve traditional tools to analyse, understand and design the complexity of metropoles in the second modernity. The result is a new informational ecology to produce ‘sensible’ images that activate landscape knowledge in the interweaving of different scales.