"La tradizione del disegno urbano negli anni ‘80"

Faced with the consolidation and fragmentation that characterizes the contemporary period, and that does not fail to invest the field of architecture, speak today about urban design means to reflect on the relationships between the parties, enclose within a single, complex reasoning that in recent decades sought increasing autonomy and wonder about the operating prospects of this instrument as part of the architectural and urban areas. In this context refer to the experiences of urban design, that characterized the urban policies of the‘80s as the practice of renovatio urbis, is an essential moment of deepening for what about his understanding as an interscalar and interdisciplinary instrument, through which decisions are made, amongst economic, structural, formal and political choices. Emblematic case studies for the definition of urban design will be analyzed, where in the last few decades of last century, this coincides with the moment when, through the urban regeneration of the city rebuilds itself: the transition from the design of suburbs to the loss of urban design for the study of architecture increasingly self-referential, and incapable of intentionally changing urban space in which they are located. Hence the experience of the new urban policy adopted since 1980 in Barcelona, which sees the head of the new Town Planning Commission for the catalan architect Oriol Bohigas, constitute the paradigm for analysis. Through the study of this experience it can be understood how urban design has been defined as an instrument, but at the same time as a practical approach, in a disciplinary space between plan and project, and active on an intermediate scale between the urban and the architectural.