Irrelevant Cities: Immaterial Surveys

The act of surveying makes you think about the “Positive Spirit” by Auguste Comte. In fact the survey, through a few codified steps, is able to distinguish the “real from the chimeric, useful from useless, certainty from indecision, precise from vague” is, overall, the contrary of negative: it tends to describe, with a critical and metaphysical spirit, the description of reality. The city, morphologically complex and multiform, is chimerical, indefinite and vague; in one word: unfathomable. For this reason the association between the survey and the knowledge of the city could be an oxymoron, set against the immanence of the positive spirit to the transcendence of the unfathomable. In this study the instrumental survey of some little cities of the Sicilian Ionic Coast, singularly irrelevant for dimension and consistency, is set against the description of inconsistent, temporary and trifling phenomenon which, after all, give identity to these places. The challenge, through the “survey of immaterial elements”, is to show the hidden side of the urban space with representations which connect matter and spirit (soul). The research analyses three centres, Itala, Casalvecchio and Fiumedinisi, with the “Both _And” strategy, placing side by side the architectonical surveys to the perceptive, dynamic and vital ones.