The Mega Events in the processes of foundation and transformation of the city

Abstract

Every city arises from an event, an individual decision supported by a collective engagement, disciplined by rules defining technical and legal norms for implementing and managing, breeding customs, traditions, rituals and shared behaviours, as roots of culture and civilization. The origin of the foundation city, both in the ancient time and in the medieval and modern ages, represents the first major event for the city which resumes, in its physical and management setting-up, the matrix characteristics of urban planning complexity, putting into a dialectic comparison not only “where” (place and space), “when” (age and time) and “how” (form and behaviour), but also “why” and “for whom”, turning out as the dominant subjects of the residential making-process since the beginning of civilisations.

“Why” resumes the ambit of needs, material and spiritual instances, concrete and abstract instances, strictly connected with the ambit of will, wishes and ambitions, leading decisions and policies at the basis of plans, programmes and projects dominated by “must-can” binomial dialectics.

“For whom” determines the transition from the material to the immaterial, from the concreteness of actions to relative aims, from the object to the subject, from the operator to the addressee of the operation, recalling the “ethical reason” which finds its deepest roots in the ideology of “idea” sublimation, fulfilled by new linguistic assumptions, symbolic messages aiming at exalting the membership extension from the family, brotherhood and tribe to the native land, to the territory and the city. In this perspective, the pyramid verticalisation of social relationships, disciplining the urban order, finds a convenient and comfortable acceptance for a faithful commonality (which guarantees trust relations) and a progressive process of “civic sense”, which makes the general particular and the particular general, connecting rationality and emotional make-up within a unification of understandings.