Places identity and territory transformation: the "sensitive relief" for a cultural and sustainable approach to the contemporary city construction

The change of interpersonal relationships and intergenerational gaps, the new demands connected to this change, the technological development, the globalization process have caused a transformation of the places of the city. New typologies of spaces were born and the way of utilisation of those already existing has been modified. The new urban facts of the territory are not easily identifiable through a traditional planimetric relief; as a matter of fact, most of the phenomena of the city construction were not realised thanks to the addition of new homogeneous parts, but rather as a result of a multitude of small construction events often without any sort of combinatorial logic. In addition to this type of phenomena, there exist others where the identifiability is entrusted only to the sensitive perception which, however, contain in themselves all potentiality to represent analysis tools and references for planning. In such a complex and diversified contemporareity, the sensitive relief represents a methodology of analysis aimed at producing a sensitive map that provides a complex knowledge of the sites, and at creating proper indicators able to transform the facts contained in the relief into active indices. The final result is a tool for the rereading of the territory and for supporting the different typologies and different scales of the contemporary city construction.