Local urban morphology vs globalized identity: DiverCities around the railway stations in Turin and Lyon

The research carried out aims to suggest a reflection on the urban form of contemporary cities, product of the emblematic dualism between globalization and local identity. The phenomena of transformation which affect the big metropoles are investigated in their collision with the place. History and memory clash with technology and change, and the results are not at all predictable. The urban morphology is the main parameter of comparison to take as staring point in the analysis of typologies, space, movement, and human habits. The purpose is not to provide answers about the criticality of the city, rather an observation through perhaps a renovated awareness about weights and measures on which the city of today takes shape, alters, and becomes something. An important index is represented by the railway stations, constant protagonists of the urban progress, able to generate around them new realities, pieces of cities. The analysis of the urban fabric allows to the identification of some peculiarities, which describe districts with specific characteristics: these therefore define the area of interest of the project proposal. In particular, Turin and Lyon are the references of this study, objects of a – still open – social, economic and political debate around high speed connections. Their territories also reveal some common denominators, and Porta Susa and Part-Dieu stations become the pivots of the project. The resulting methodology is the development of two parallel, multilayers analyses, from which to simultaneously get data and considerations. Reading the urban fabrics also leads to understanding the interstitial space: this is possible by framing the respective matrixes, their permeability, the shape of the void. The adopted strategy is voluntarily based on a series of provocative scenarios, in order to test what is called globalized identity, contaminated in its referential typologies. The purpose is therefore to realize one single square for two stations, an apparently identical place, where distances are reduced, time is annulled, and France and Italy share a precise image of the city, an experience. Four typological forms, outputs of the third millennium city, crown this urban paradox, declaring precise functions and connotations. The research continues considering different directions of development: coherence, perception, and finally personalization. If a first vision confirms the rules of the global cities, pursuing the standards, categories and a compositional uniformity, the following perspectives give way to a more anthropological aspect. Learning how people occupy space, move within it, determine ordinary paths, relationships, empty areas and urban condensers, inevitably leads to dwelling on crucial meanings: architecture is this through the perception of who interacts with it and with it creates relations; otherwise it remains only a building. It results thus essential understanding how the inhabitants use the space and how they exploit, from a place, more functions and opportunities. Starting from a pure, uncontaminated design environment, it is finally explored its personalization. The space is now made private, customized, in a word: identity. More perspectives do not want to identify one solution, but rather a world of possibilities. The context is confirmed as an unquestionably key factor with which architecture, either by detachment or continuity, will always have to deal with and to draw its compromises.