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Abstract

What if the city of the twenty-first century was not as we have imagined it? What if the culture of congestion was swept away by an isotropic, weak and diffused urban reality; by the culture of dispersion? A nebulous and potentially limitless city freed from any physical and symbolic centre, where uncertain attempts of urbanity overlap with the idealised landscape of the countryside. From this perspective, the central area of the Veneto region in Italy can still be considered a laboratory that produces urban and architectural forms for the contemporary city. The Veneto territory is here considered as a palimpsest, as the product of a slow and incessant process of accumulation of traces, elements, attempts, which have been overlapping throughout centuries. This article presents only a few of the layers that compose the image of this region; they serve as evidence in the investigation of the role that anthropisation processes have played in the continuous modification of the landscape. Within this frame, the ‘architecture of logistics’ is presented as one of the elements that have imposed a pervasive economic-political control of the territory, to the point of producing specific forms of living.