Urban disorder and vitality

Abstract

The concepts of order and disorder applied to urban and territorial issues involve complex definitions. Why do cities, in spite of the effort made to give them order, even though from time to time this order has been codified in different ways, end up being untidy? In the context in which the two concepts will be used in this paper it is not possible to imagine them as alternatives, but they are taken as dialectically constituting territorial reality. “Order” and “disorder” oppose each other but do not clash with each other. In the hectic organisation of urban and territorial reality one stimulates the other and each, in opposing, determines change. The inclination towards order (or tendency towards order) tends, on the one hand, to “repair” the disorder but, on the other, brings out the conditions for disorder to show itself again and materialise with its problems but with the vitality implicit in change. Change brings disorder but public commitment through institutions cannot but aspire to recover a level of order, hopefully, more advanced. Order and disorder are closely linked with each other, one producing the other in a circular process. The urban, precisely because of its constituent construction (social, productive and economic variability; clash between powers and options of models of society) cannot be stable, but the continuous recovery of “order” responds not only to functional needs, but also to ethical options: we should not consider all urban “order” as positive, compared with negative disorder; there are experiences of oppressive and coercive urban order. It is always disorder that determines better levels and quality of order. Though it may be the dynamic factor of every urban condition, we must remember that it always requires new order from which to start out again. Disorder, however it is identified, constitutes a permanent fact, inherent in the urban condition; it is neither the result of wrong planning (sometimes also this), nor of a perverse will, but rather of the dynamic mechanisms of the city itself.