new foundation cities

Abstract

As part of the Italian tradition related to urban projects, some experiments throughout the twentieth century have shown, in the comparison between the different possibilities, the specific ability of architecture to lend concrete form to the living environment of a civilisation in a specific age. The design of the city, of its way of expanding, has outlined, in the succession of examples built or even only conceived on paper, the possible prerequisites for the definition of some principles aimed at the determination of sections of the city, or in the most virtuous examples of new foundation cities. Every latitude, just as every epoch, enjoins in this sense the need to re-examine these principles, which, if on the one hand express universal and timeless values, on the other hand, search for increasingly greater relevance to specific cultures as well as to needs and demands associated with one's own time. Africa's living future rests on a recent past already quite rich in experiments, on a founding custom that in the previous century has built new urban centres, capital cities, transfers of centrality to regular federations of states. Living in Africa, besides contemporaneity, represents from this point of view the most extreme modernity; living consistently with the culture, history and traditions of a country that has forever portrayed in Western imagination no more than the mystery and exotic dream of a continent that is still unknown if not actually stigmatised in its most conventional characters