Another Urban: Considerations Across Solà-Morales and Careri

Abstract

This article brings other ways of inhabiting the city based on Ignasi Solà-Morales' reflections about the contemporary urban phenomenon, aiming to put Francesco Careri's nomadic walkscapes as translations that incorporate and territorialize them as a counter-hegemonic spatial praxis. For this purpose, anchored in a literature review of Careri and Solà-Morales, and their critiques of contextualist urbanism and urban design, we seek to present the reflexive vocabulary power that both provoke and enable. More than delimiting structures, their placements open the horizons of the urban field in a rhizomatic way that does not find an end in itself: rather, they inscribe the urban exercise beyond a (neo)liberal production of the city spaces. Through the concepts of mutation and terrain vague, the Catalan researcher makes it possible to tension the thought about urbanism and architecture interpreted here through Careri's wandering walkscapes. The Italian architect began to experiment with Deleuzian smooth space, traversing through the peri-urban regions of Paris and Rome as a practice of displacing the material urban framework of the cities’ urban fabric. Both Solà-Morales and Careri find in environments of indeterminacy –intellectual and materialized– that the uprooting of urbanism provides them with other ways of thinking and practicing spaces.