Genius loci and composite cities: the cultural identity conflict in architecture

The city is the object on which several disciplines converge, from those related to the physical structure to those that highlight the social and cultural fabric of an urban organism. The city is open in time – underlines Leonardo Benevolo – it includes the past and continues in the future. The best modern town planning – continues Benevolo – is the one that makes better use of the legacy of the past, reflecting the constitutive principles and adapting them to contemporary realities. Recent literature shows the limits of the modern urban theory given the complexity of a new world that is the result of changes in political, economic and social issues. The genius loci in the historical dimension of the city is what survives to the evolving functional structures and confers an indelible character to the city and the landscape through different urban phenomena. The contemporary size of the historical city, namely the genius saeculi, requires a continuous update of collective themes, public spaces and contents that are assigned to the historical forms by people who live and inhabit those places, and the insertion of new meanings, new values, new forms of social life. This, then, is the challenge for the new millennium: to combine the spirit of the place, the genius loci, with the spirit of the time, the genius saeculi, retrieving the values of history through their preservation and their combination in the present tense following a sustainable model. It seems clear that it is more than ever necessary a critical reflection on the meaning of the city built according to two major points of view: on one hand the planned city, or the urbanist and the architect city; on the other hand the city analysed to be experienced, or the city of the anthropologist, sociologist and semiotic, this starting from an analysis of the rich literature on the concept of place, in order to investigate the various cultural dimensions of contemporary cities and how they can live together in a transdisciplinary project of preservation of cultural identity.