Lettura di permanenze e mutazioni. Rappresentare la città, il territorio, il paesaggio

The complexity of reality and the vastness of the issues relating to the use of the territory require an increasingly in-depth knowledge of the peculiarities of the places and the factors that can condition their design and development. For these reasons, the design of urban and extra-urban areas increasingly assumes a role that goes beyond the simple representation of places, objects and phenomena. Firstly, by describing the investigation process of the territory in all its forms, drawing is configured as a tool for knowledge of the present condition, which requires a prior analysis of the data to be represented. With this aim, the representation of the city, the territory, the landscape is a synthesis operation carried out through a discretisation of reality that depends on what one wants to tell about the territory. In order to understand the transformations of the urban and extra-urban territory over time, drawing assumes a fundamental role for the knowledge and memory of a past that no longer exists. To this end, the construction of digital models for the representation of configurations that no longer exist is very useful. In fact, digital tools offer the possibility of creating, even in a relatively short time, three-dimensional models of large portions of the territory, useful for planning, managing and monitoring its resources. Drawing is, finally, a tool for controlling the transformation process that planning wants to implement and the development called upon to combine different elements and actions, morphology, places and inhabitants. Since the territory is constantly changing, its design requires a dynamic and updatable representation, which describes the identity of the settled communities and goes beyond the limits of a defined and closed graphic transcription. The contribution brings together three case studies that can help to grasp the plurality of themes concerning the representation of the city and the territory.