POPULATIONS AND MOBILITY FOR A NEW URBAN SYSTEM

This research aims to underline the rise of a new urban system, based on the overlapping of complex and multi layered relations. Thanks to the growing importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), we can consider contemporary cities as hubs raised from the intersection of different flows. ICT, in fact, make possible in contemporary urban systems, the simultaneous presence of two different phenomena: concentration and dispersion (Castells, 1996). In this contest, technology has to be considered as catalyst for movement and flows and, at the same time as an attractive factor for people and knowledge. As a consequence of ICT development and because of multiple populations that inhabit, use, or pass trough our territories, the city overtakes its administrative boundaries transforming itself in an unbounded entity. As matter of fact, the dense frame of mobility spaces (including ICT and high-speed communication network) supported, during last century, the development of a city of distant relations. The observation of everyday mobility is a fundamental tool to analyse and interpret contemporary city transformations (Urry, 2000) and to look for solutions to the conflicts rose among different urban populations. Mobility, as the set of practices that allows to connect temporal and spatial resources (Pucci, 2007), represents a valid tool of analysis that help us to understand, from one side, which populations are inhabiting this new urban context; from the other, what are the spaces shared by these multiple inhabitants. Consequently it is a useful device to reconsider the role of administrative boundaries and their unevenness, since inhabitants go trough different spaces in different times. Besides, and looking at those processes from the point of view of urban design, mobility projects exceed administrative border because of their own nature, as they are trans-scalar and borderless. The investigation focuses on the planning improvement for achieving viable possibilities to manage and design contemporary cities, considering, furthermore, the deficiency of current planning tools. Methodologically, the proposal is based mainly on theoretical survey, related to the main key issues: the configuration of a new urban system, the existence of temporary populations who inhabit the same territory following different time schedule, the fuzzy boundaries and the mobility behaviours.