ABSTRACT
Between 1958 and 1963, Italian society was thoroughly modified by the consumerist culture that had been enabled by the economic prosperity deriving from unprecedented industrial development. At the same time as social habits changed, the country became increasingly divided between a rich and urbanising north and the continuing depression of rural southern regions. Alongside this widening developmental gap, Italy was consistently depicted – in films, literature, and popular music – as a country experiencing anxiety about its own urbanised future. During the same period, the Italian architectural community joined forces to discuss how to turn an out-of-control situation into a governable project. Just as 1963 might be considered the highpoint of the Italian ‘economic miracle’, so too was it a watershed for architectural discourse. That year temporarily put on hold a line of thinking about the urbanisation of the country that had been under discussion since the late 1950s and had fixed on some central notions – nuova dimensione urbana, città regione, and città territorio – and a few paradigmatic applicative test beds – quartieri, centri direzionali, and centri universitari. The latter succeeded one another between the early 1950s and the 1970s as the spatial products through which the architectural community could prove a thesis. According to this thesis, the expanding urban condition could find in a set of exemplary large-scale architectural interventions its critique of the prospect of private-led urban growth so widely denounced in movies, music, and literature.
