DESIGNING TERRITORIAL METABOLISM

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INTRODUCTION
ATLAS AND DESIGN AS
INSTRUMENTS OF KNOWLEDGE
Maria Chiara Tosi, Carles Crosas, and Geoffrey Grulois
The difficulty of understanding a territory has often led
researchers to experience it through tools and research
practices based on direct observation.
In Western culture, it is in fact not uncommon to feel,
in the face of major changes and transformations in the surrounding
world, a need to step outside of libraries in order
to experience forms of knowledge that lie not in books but
elsewhere (Blumemberg, 1989). Among these, experiencing
places directly, describing and measuring them, comparing
their essential characteristics, and designing their future
are perhaps the main ways of acquiring this knowledge, by
drawing heavily on the language and analytic categories
that arise from physical experience (Zumthor, 1993).
Dense/sparse, near/far, big/small, empty/full—these
are just some of dichotomous pairs derived from the experience
of a physical body in space that enable us to recount
and discover a territory’s characteristics. Using these and
other categories to draw maps of the area can reveal surprising
connections and also dispel false images or common
rhetoric. And in this sense, this kind of mapping can
produce new knowledge for formulating interpretative
hypotheses and for defining strategies of intervention.
Since obtaining specific and precise knowledge of
the three metropolitan areas we examine in this book—
Barcelona, Brussels, and Venice—seemed as urgent as