Radical Lessons for a New Rurality

At the beginning of his work, in the mid sixties, architect and designer Andrea Branzi was yet hoping for the dissolving of the physical and figurative bounded Metropolis and the emerging of an increasingly dispersed, introflexive and immaterial one, founded on a solid alliance between town and country. In No Stop City (1971), Archizoom's most popular model, the liquefaction of the solid bodies in a diffuse and isotropic territorial system was yet complete, entailing the total replacing of strong and compact urban figures with weak ones, governed by increasingly horizontal, system-type logics. Today low settlement density landscapes, in which rural and urban realms are increasingly interlinked and interdependent, account for the most consistent and quantitatively important part of the contemporary city. They are the most glaring expressions of the self---constructive capacity of the subjects inhabiting the same and appear extremely eloquent in announcing the evolution towards a completely new form of city. Contemporary urban figures as “Città diffusa” in Northern Italy, “Zwischenstadt”