Territori contemporanei: metodi e strumenti per una lettura complessa

The new urban features are not easily identifiable and cannot be easily represented through traditional cartography and tools of representation. To study the transitoriety and the complexity of these urban facts, new typologies of analysis and supporting tools are, at present, under elaboration and experimentation. The questions connected to the study of aspects that are not univocally translatable into objective facts regard in particular three appearances: the scientificity, and so the objectivity, of the results and the repeatability of the method in different kind of contexts; the updating capability, and so the possibility to add new data, to modify the existing ones, to obtain other results; the times, and so the sustainable possibility of using the results respecting the evolution of a sustainable programming and town planning process. Two main distinctions can be operated about the contemporary methods of analysis of the city places, concerning the theoretical approach and the type of instrument used to make explicit the results. Some of the principal types of approach to the analysis of the places are represented by the virtual, multiscale, lateral, configurational and nomadic approaches, that can be split into two categories. The first category of approach, which includes the virtual, the lateral and the nomad, make use of atlases, maps, schemes, video to represent the products of their analyses; the second category, which includes the multiscale and the configurational approaches, is based on data processing tools and, in particular, software tools for the collection and the management of the data. The study of these approaches has motivated the development of a new approach, that can be defined complex-sensitive, based on PlaceMaker method, investigated in the context of a broader research project carried out by a Convention between the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and the Dipartimento di Progettazione Urbana, Università di Napoli Federico II. The complex-sensitive approach can be included into the first group with respect to the adopted methodological tools, but also in the second group as regards the supporting tool used for the analysis. The two principal categories of approaches, and the relative tools of representation, are described in the following. Then, the complex-sensitive approach is illustrated with particular attention to a new software tool, which is under development.