Settlement unit as constitutive form of the contemporary city “Terre” in Southern Salento, Italy

DOI: 10.5176/2301-394X_ACE13.117

Authors: Michele Montemurro

Abstract:

This article deals with the central theme of every reflection on the architecture of the city: the necessity of defining the principles and the ways of the construction/reconstruction of the contemporary city and of the research of the most appropriate forms for its development. Recognizing the impossibility of thinking the city in a unitary way, for the complexity and the lack of homogeneity which characterize its form, the model of the city for parts, referred to different phases of growth of the city itself, appears the most appropriate to interpretate its development. The settlement units of ended form, to the scale of the district, represent the new constitutive units of forma urbis in the continuity with some settlement/living models of the history. One of the most interesting models in this sense and able to strongly connotate an entire territory as the Southern Salento (Apulia, Italy) is the «terre», morphological residential ended units, in direct relationship with the productive country and the nature. The article presents some results of this completely original study, conducted through two thesis workshops of the Polytechnic of Bari which, beginning from the individuation of fifteen examples of Terre dealt with a type-morphological study and the planning experimentation applied to two cases study as the city of Castrignano del Capo (Lecce) and Ruffano (Lecce).

Keywords: city form; urban morphology; urban design; settlement unit; “terra”; founded cities