Stepping Stones, a new paradigm of territory and urbanization: the city from outside

Abstract

We conceive «Stepping Stones», jumping from stone to stone to cross a river that
runs tempestuously, as a way to assume the urban growing with urban stations in the natural
and rural territory. The idea was to affect the territory as little as possible, and to dismantle
the big metropolitan scale with all its unsustainability consequences. In this quest, the main
agent to be reformed is market, in order to guide a more harmonic growth, instead of passively
accepting the growing suburbs. Fractals have been the bio-psychosocial and economic agents
that explain this fragmented explosion of the territory urban occupation, creating
unsustainability everywhere. Halfway through this thesis, we have understood that rurality is
something that we have to defend and recover, where the polis becomes once again the base
of an organized intelligence, a cautious use and a controlled growth, or, at least, guided by a
new human ecosystem wisdom. The preserved rural territory is the continuum that connects
an invisible civilization. A city that is everywhere, close, kind, based on knowledge, but a city
that is not a burden anywhere because its ecological footprint is light and mild, one of Calvino’s
principles for the composition in the XXI century.