ABSTRACT
More recently, a number of Italian universities founded Urban@it, a national center for urban policy, in order to reinforce the debate on the urgency of a national urban policy, which is also connected with the European debate on an urban agenda. At a national level, the National Statistics Institute (ISTAT) and the National Council for Economics and Labor (CNEL) have recently been working on the production of indicators focused on the urban condition, elaborating the so-called BES. By crossing traditional urban data with less used ones, the Atlas aims to identify ways to measure and assess the emergence and consistence of new forms of 'urbanity' and 'cityness'. The Atlas aims to build a multifaceted portrait of contemporary urban processes, making them comparable. The geometrical, symmetrical and Cartesian choice is dictated by the awareness of geo-morphological differences that characterize the Italian territory: the 'obliquity' of the peninsula, the plentiful presence of seas and mountains, islands and sub-peninsulas.
