URBAN LANDSCAPE AND NEW VENUSTAS

For a long period, town planners didn’t wonder anymore about the aesthetic value of the city. This lasting omission has manifold and complex causes. But it isn’t so much the analysis of these causes that is important, but starting to see in beauty again - if we are able to - an important, maybe essential requirement of the city. Nevertheless, history teaches that in realizing beautiful cities men and ages took into account some rules, some canons that - even if not codified - were however shared and that strongly reduced the subjectivity of the esthetic judgment. In fact coherence making any beautiful city unique and recognizable lies in the relationship of tight integration between the parties and the whole. After the long lethargy of a town planning founded on quantitative and distributive reductionist often ineffective rituals, it is the moment to search and pursue urban beauty by trying to identify few but clear rules and above all by stopping project individualism that makes many post-industrial cities an unbalanced stretch of ugly things or of mediocrities surrounding events drawn by big names, but completely and often constrainedly self-referential. We must return and reason on beauty in the cities and on what kind of beauty, for whom and how to obtain it, with the awareness that the achievement of beauty is a casual event, since it depends on many luckily concomitant and hardly programmable causes, but also with the awareness that to obtain beauty in the cities we need to develop methods (urban aesthetics) like tools in order to ensure at least minimum conditions.