Spatial Dialectics in the Contemporary City and the integrative power of urban design

Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of the dynamics of urbanization emerging from the structural transformations of post-Fordism. It examines the formal aspects of the reorganization of urban space and the contradictions inherent to its current production in a context of "postmodern" urbanism. In view of the increasing depacialization of the public sphere and the increasing privatization of public space, we propose to recover the spatial morphologies rejected by modernism as a fundamental contribution of contemporary physical planning to the reinforcement of communication and social cohesion.