The Geographic Prospects of Human Habitat and the Attributes of a Novel Urbanity

This chapter describes the expansion of the human settlements at the scale of mega regions and the consequent dissolution of the city/country division. The text also analyzes the concurrent expansion of an idea of city over larger territories, specular to the retreat of the relevance of urban space in such expanded contexts. The text discusses the emergence of a novel form of diffuse urbanity, articulating the synthetic considerations in the previous chapter. The spatial production overflowing the physical perimeter of the urban walls and, beyond those walls, trespassing the limits of a space commensurable with that of the urban paradigm, generates a distinct environment. The idea of a set of novel attributes defining the new form of citizenship is outlined, opening a vast field of future research work. The potential for the formation of a novel semantic and mythology, to endow the expanded territories with a new sense, is debated through the compared analysis of a set of spatial paradigms, such as the world city, city world, cosmopolis, and postmetropolis. Among these, particular attention is reserved to the model of the ‘opposite but accessible shores’ and its world-making ability. The bearing platform adopted for the compared analysis is constituted by a free reading of Rowe’s ‘middle landscape’ construct, and its evolutions, such as the ‘emergent architectural territories’ that have been rising in East Asia, interpreted as a humongous experiment for the implantation of a fabricated mythology for a novel citizenship.