Urbanistica e progetto di comunità

The process of formation of the disciplinary corpus of urbanism coincides with the representation of the drama of the loss of the community, which develops from the last two decades of the 19th century until the 1920s; a coincidence that has effects on the nature of the discipline and on the ways of its legitimation, precisely from the community-society oscillation as the main field of experimentation of the reformist project. The site of this experimentation is the metropolis, as a phenomenon at that time unheard of in the history of urbanization. Without any apparent continuity, we also propose to investigate Adriano Olivetti's contribution on the relationship between community, territory, urbanism (and politics) in post World War II, neo-democratic, Italy; and, subsequently, the contributions to the debate on the relationship between urbanism and community by Herbert Gans and Melvin Webber, who sanction, from two different points of view, the definitive dissolution of the discursive (and disciplinary) assumptions of the idea of community promoted by the “reformers” throughout the long formation cycle of Anglo-American urbanism.