2026: Special Issue. Urban and Territorial Resilience. Urbanism Facing Crisis
Special Issue. Urban and Territorial Resilience. Urbanism Facing Crisis

Staying With the Urban Disruption to Break the ‘As Usual’

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  • Marco Ranzato
Marco Ranzato
Università degli Studi Roma Tre
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/contest-16593

Published 2026-01-29

Keywords

  • disruption,
  • resilience,
  • social learning,
  • agency of the world

How to Cite

Ranzato, M. (2026). Staying With the Urban Disruption to Break the ‘As Usual’. Contesti. Città, Territori, Progetti, 96–115. https://doi.org/10.36253/contest-16593

Copyright (c) 2026 Marco Ranzato

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Revealing the massive, often invisible, complexes of contemporary urban infrastructure that carry energy, communications, transport and water, urban disruption also exposes the social control of nature that is exercised through technology. At the same time, urban disruption is a sign of the world's vitality and its constant transformation. But what role does disruption play in making the territory more resilient?

In Brussels, at the Marais Wiels, and in Rome, at the Lago Bullicante, bulldozers carrying out new land transactions remove the topsoil and reach the water table, which flows up and fills the excavations. Two new urban lakes have emerged in areas that were previously floodplains. These two disruptions are inhabited by multispecies ensembles, and the social learning that is essential for evolutionary resilience is routine here.

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