摘要：In the past few years, urban population has outnumbered the rural at global scale, andcities, especially in developing and newly industrialized countries, are experiencing aconsiderable expansive phase. This expansion is often uncontrolled, and it isaccompanied by an increase of poverty and social disadvantages, perceived particularlywithin urban peripheries where, in addition, urban sprawl is causing severe lowqualification of the environment. Thus, if, on the one hand, cities can be represented asdevelopment drivers, nodes belonging to networks that overcome national boundaries,places where knowledge is produced and re-produced and innovation is generated andtransferred, on the other hand they represent the context where unsustainability derivingfrom this kind of development is most evident, together with its huge range ofenvironmental, economic, social and also cultural contradictions. Degraded green areasin the peripheries act as counterparts to urban parks; the architectural beauty of the citycenters, periodically exposed to restyling processes, or areas involved in urbanrequalification programs, though accompanied by gentrification, contrast with run-downneighborhoods where buildings’ low quality, lacking services and inadequateinfrastructure levels cause the wide spread of social deviance and poverty in its diverseforms. Not less evident are contradictions on cultural ground. Cities that should promotetheir own identity and glean the key from their own development from their culturalpeculiarities, are very often inclined to emulate other cities which have achievedmeaningful competitiveness performances on international ground, but through logicsand planning goals which cannot be replicated in every geographic context. Thus, thistendencies, besides being ineffective and unsustainable in the medium or long term, arethe tangible expression of cultural homologation processes that absorb urban identity andwaste its endogenous development potential.
