La Forma Urbis

Good part of the relation which we have with the world of the things, is carried out through the perception of the forms. Also, the relation which we have with the inhabited space materializes using formal codes: the amplitude of the path, the small seat of the corner, etc.. In spite of it, the aesthetic one of century XX is mounted in a minimización of the formal arguments. After the manifesto I ornament and crime of Adolf Loos, was tried to simplify the relation of the individual with the things by means of arguments of simple geometry. Villa Saboya of Him Corbusier and some units of the expresionista architecture summarize the formal proposal of the architecture of the first decades of century XX. Nevertheless, which had been born like a reaction against the excesses of the academies, it began to journey by map courses near the figurativismo . The worse thing of the vanguards is to fall in the same lack that as reaction motivated their birth. Aesthetic the machinist and of the material - the brutalismo , to mention some justifiable at the first moments of the architectonic speech of first half of century XX, entering second half, seemed weaknesses more than strengths. After it, still by the end of century XX is difficult to explain the development of a centered investigation, as this one, in the subject of the morphologic impacts promoted by the planning instruments. In this country, for or or badly, the morphologic thing is only understood under its formal or pictorial meaning, to the way of as it raises the urban decorativismo of Camilo Sitte. The morphologic thing never transfers towards the location forms that adopt the occupations of the ground, for example. Thanks to it, it is necessary to clarify that when we spoke of urban morphology - urban forms logics we are analyzing the space configurations that adopt the different uses from the urban ground.

In order to exercise the exploration of the morphologic content of our cities, we suppose departure that the formativo process of the city or it is been from multiple superposed historical actions or is the product ex--I novate of a rational action sustained by an urbanism plan. Thus this way, when the city is the sobreposition of historical remainders that become presents in the present configuration, we denominated cumulative phase of the morphologic process. In the case of Santiago of Chile, it is possible to identify the ortogonalidad of the colonial grid, neoclassic the architectonic interpositions between barrocas and of Joaquin Toesca. Both two as well, contextualizadas in the republican city of century XIX Remainders all together ones that are juxtaposed in the modern city. When the city arises like a new fact from a global action, to the way of Brasilia, its formativo process constitutes a modelística phase. At these precise moments, deep structural changes are pronounced like leading of new styles of life. In the urban plane, great real estate projects are developing. In spite of the existence of recent plans, no of these projects presents/displays some relation or responds to the effective city-planning ordering. Still more, we do not know the impacts that the urban form of our cities experiences, as a result of the new processes of political and productive development of the country. We in front of were a matter that it requires to be debated publicly, in order that their results promote the improvement of the quality of life.

For it, it is necessary to delimit a theoretical and instrumental field that affects the specific knowledge of the urban space as much, like in the technical ways of decisive and proyectual intervention. The exploratory incursion in the morphologic knowledge, tries to understand the territory from its specific formal structure. The data with which we worked are contained in the historical analysis and the critical study of the instruments of metropolitan and communal city-planning ordering of Santiago and Maipú, respectively. On general, the city-planning one is based on the development of a science that it looks for to include/understand the logic of the urban processes, their structures and their morphologic formativas and transformativas. To this formed analytical science to a large extent by originating particular pieces of other disciplines of the knowledge, a technique is united that takes part and uses these processes like transformation vehicles. This technique has been, so far, catched in a exasperante normativismo that to fuer of punitive allows everything it. But, he is incapable to dominate the sustantivas transformations that develop in the taken part areas.

Of the awkward people agrarian to the telos urban. In the grounds that get up new uses, crossings of agrarian geometries in the incipiente urban configuration are observed. These crossings visualize in the transformation of the rural way in urban street and of the agricultural plan predial in the configurantes pieces of the new structure. From it, the question is to know if the ground also is a morphologic dimension. We know much of economic, social, normative, environmental the dimensions, etc., of the ground. But although it seems contrasentido, little or nothing we know of him as formal dimension or in other words, little we know of the architecture of the ground. A route of urgency by history, illuminates the understanding of the city, rendering attention to the constituent logical layouts of its form urbis. The ordering of the Greek city of the times of Pericles is in favor strongly conditional of the geography of the place. In the mind of the Greek developer a clear disposition exists to consider the geographic and topographic variety like a capital factor of urban location. It is more, we could arrive at the end to think that in classic Greece city without a commitment with a arquetípica geographic form did not exist or geoforma . This geoforma ordered and hierarchized the internal social relations and the external capacities to influence a certain geographic area culturally. Mountain and sea, that is just like height and distance, represent geoformas that built-in as urban supports, transform into the logical elements of the form urbis . The Greek city settles in front of on the mountain and the sea.

The Greek urban process initiates a combat operations that arises from the natural form of the territory, projects in the inhabited establishment and returns like a new organization of the nature. The Greek mundanidad is born taking care of a natural topography, but it generates as a interchange, the rationalization of the topography. It is not, as in the Roman case, the farmer who cultivates the Earth, what can be removed from naked rocks and a dusty and dry ground? The one that cultivates the Earth is the city planner who transforms this action into a religious act. The forces of the nature still to dominate or simply indomitable, are the basic material of myths. Already later, in his mature stage, they are the essential materials of the religion. Through myths and of the religion, the hidden Earth forces can more be understood and partially domeñadas by the belief than by intelligence. In order to happen from the dark of hidden it to the knowledge, locating itself in the plane of the cult, it will have to assume geometries or forms human logics. Otherwise, these forces of the nature will remain in the world of inculto or, in other words, in the impure thing ( of Latin immundo). Not in vain, the contingent of deities founds its existence on a human or anthropomorphous morphologic formality or. The Greek wall remarca the inclusion of the form urbis in the topographic logics. This way, in the elevated point more of the awkward people the Acropolis settles, place where the cult of hidden it is exercised; between the residential Acropolis and districts, in the level one, the ágora like lugaridad of the word is located that reveals hidden it, as it is the water source or battery in the cities of the African Atlas. The Greek city city-been is located in a urban-rural and contextualizada dimension in the distance that the cult separates and hidden it. This relation of the Greek city planner with the awkward people natural, projects in the modern city in the relations of geometric negotiation that they establish by pure proximity, the agriculturist and the urban thing. In the modern city, the encounter of the perimeter constructed with agricultural grounds of uses generates a collision. This is a situation not very often treated, but nonfree of negative repercussions for one and another one.

In the end, it is the cultivated or ordered nature and not the other way around, the one that transfers hierarchized conditioners as forms logics to the urban ground. It is so, the rural ways happen in dimension and layout in urban streets; the rural tree-lined avenue that is transformed par excellence into the urban stroll; the structure predial of the property and the cultures reorganizes and projects in the geometry of the predial or urban manzanario, call thus to establish an approach idea with which it is understood like title. The avenues settle on the channels of irrigated land or the natural water channels rains, or they control upon the arms that use the rivers to direct the winter swellings. Not in vain this one denominates avenue, as avenue is denominated the sudden swelling of a river or the unmanageable increase of the water of one quebrada. En the case of Santiago of Chile, the avenue Tree-lined avenue B. O´Higgins is juxtaposed on the winter avenue of the Mapocho river and constitutes as well a rural and urban tree-lined avenue between in its ends; the Bilbao avenue, is located on the short cut that took waters rains from the gorges of the hill San Ramon.

This participation of geometries of the water in the layouts of the cross-sectional ones of the Chilean cities, becomes present of important way in the city of Valparaiso. For want of river, this city has gorges, that is just like to have many small dispersed rivers by the urban skin. Main the cross-sectional ones which they unite hills with bordemar, are installed on natural gorges. To difference with which it is possible to observe in the city of Santiago of Chile, the these cross-sectional - Argentina avenue, among them has solved to this juxtaposition burying the water channel. In Valparaiso, logical geometry that it emanates of the hidden nature, forms the cross-sectional weave of the avenues by means of its concealment of the vidente world and return to the buried world of the evident thing (what it does not need presence to be seen). Beyond the particular differences, in each Chilean city the Earth he is longitudinal and the water is cross-sectional; the Earth is, the water comes. On both orders it is located by pure logic, our form urbis. We know much how to grow, by means of houses and streets for example. But nowhere one says what is what must grow. The modern city has rested long time in the lack of contents of politeness of its growth. It is more, when in the central areas it has grown on if same, has done it as if one was a perimetral growth with subpoliteness characteristics. It is left patent in the new real estate developments that are inserted of the District the West of Santiago without no architectonic resolution and city-planning proposal of the new resulting morphologies. In such sense, where the form is present urbis as result of the imbricaciones of the cumulative phase of the city already constructed and the modelística phase of new ciudad?

The form urbis as art work. Better to include/understand this imbricación, bástenos now to happen to the culture of city of the Roman world. The mythical origin of the Roman city also has an own ingredient of the rural culture. The one is a farmer that draws up the contour of the city, by means of a plow, introducing a new use in the rural territory by means of a squared agricultural geometry. In this case, how one ties with the established use and what responds to a transformation. Once drawn up the apparent border between rural and the urban thing, the ground by means of the identification of the center is hierarchized, that is from the crossover between the two main arteries of the city. This it is original ground zero, umbilicus mundi within as the Earth fruits and the manufactures of the man will be introduced ceremonially. The agricultural reasons that they found the urban thing, are built-in in within the city. Great part of the previous acts to the foundation of a city during the westernization process of the American territory, comes from this Roman civilidad. In this one, the city no longer is one city-everything like was it in the Greek culture. Rather, the city is an element that interacts with other cities to form the politeness of the imperium. The urban order prevails on a territory that turns on the Roman large city. When asola or the large city is destroyed, also alter the hierarchic relations of the imperium. To take care of the values that are transferred like morphologic elements from the territory to the city, does not involve to not know the participation of the arterial system and the infrastructural system in the configuration of the forms logics of the Roman city. In such sense, it would be possible to be assured that both systems make rest their effectiveness in the capacity to form a talent: the urban arterial system is a grid; the territorial one draws a centralidad from which they derive so many radial routes according to so many geographic points constitute connection objects.

The infrastructures of the water articulated the urban logic by means of the supplying of the great vital, playful and social necessities of potable water, that characterizes the Roman mundanidad. Many centuries later, Renaissance geometries bring the centralidad like factor of urban composition. The ideal cities of the 1400 not only denote the idealistic content that tolerates the new time in opposition to the medieval idea of living. Also, they indicate a morphologic one of the city. The cities barrocas introduce the vegetal nature in the interior of the urban organism by means of their geometric rationalization and they assign perspective reasons to him and convergencia. Estas geometries transfer the ruralidad towards the politeness in an attempt to make reality the old dream of the humanity: to form a nature rationalized like life support. The German city of Karlsruhe is the classic expression of this crossing. With the development of which it has occurred in calling the industrial revolution and its later expression machinist, the urban one is altered morphologic. We located ourselves in a period whose Maxima expression is conjugated with the verb to accumulate, imposed by the new productive systems. The cities happen in simple supports of an activity that having bonds with natural means does not manage to transfer its productive values to the urban configuration. Rather, the organizations train and city is in permanent conflict, in a coexistence of backs that is environmentally deteriorante. Of the industrial revolution great patents take control social and sanitary problems. But, also conflicts of morphologic character are demonstrated. It does not interest the form of the industrial, single product interests his capacity to offer a certain function. Important artistic movements led sometimes by the englishman William Morris and the German architect Walter Gropius, others, are based with only the eagerness to correct the divorce between the industrial product and the forms. With the arrival of Le Corbusier an aesthetic one will prevail that will transform the house and the city into a machine to live, moving eternally in a roundtrip between the form and función. Hoy in day, the architectonic persistence goes to the configuration of a new urban morphology whose point to begin with sometimes is the alteration fractal that inexplicably happens in a gargoyle that crowns last rascacielo without constructing of Mies go to der Rohe; in others, it is the impostura of the fiction of comic on the urban weave or in rentrée of the constructive techniques and the new materials in the architectural forms.

Between the norm and the form. Great part of the architectonic debate of century XX been has monopolized by the dialectic one of the function and the form. It is more, the functionalism also identifies what one has occurred in calling the architecture of the modern movement. In the city-planning plane, this debate has been sometimes by the ways of growth, if concentrated or extensive; in others, in case the urban ground are a limited resource or no. Sin embargo, the debate about the contradictions between the norm and the form has been avoided inexplicably. Actually, the transformation of the ground arises as a normative act and is pronounced like a morphologic fact. That is to say, it has a city-planning origin and an architectonic development. As soon as basic support of the occupations and the volumetrías, this morphologic one is to the city which is the architecture to the building. Being the regulating plan a proposal written up by city planning architects, paradoxicalally does not set out to us like an expression of urban architecture. Rather, it is a predictive document more than prospectivo, than one settles in the field of the legislation and the constructive conditioners, but it is pronounced far from which gradually is it needing to our cities: urban architecture. This lack of attention of the mediatiza morphologic structure the content of city of the perimetrales areas of new urbanization, and destroys corpus constructed when it is taken part upon the weave already consolidated. In both situations, the ignorance of the production morphologies and reproduction of the urban ground, reduce the results to the configuration of incomplete qualities.

The planning of presumably metropolitan scale became present in Chile, by the end of the Fifties with the formulation and later approval of the Regulating Plan Intercomunal of 1960. Previous to that date, document the accumulated writing practice of city-planning ordering was an exceptional fact, since it had only allowed the writing of a short number of plans for the few cities of the country that presented/displayed some socioeconomic spread. In spite of this shortage, great part of them was catched in the stage of studies or simply they were not executed by instrumental or competential conflicts. In the end, like can be managed city-planning a plan that sets out to us as a regulatory document of a ground already occupied? The metropolitan conception generates in the years 30 North Americans, in the necessity to understand and to think - that it is just like to analyze and to project the urban system like a globalidad: a powerful and multiple centralidad, and nuclei of functions specialized located in its area of influencia. Como so many other city-planning and architectonic proposals, in Chile the interpretation of the metropolitan has not gone beyond proponérsenos as I mend administrative of the inabarcable extension of our ciudades. Entender what it is known like the metropolitan, involves to analyze under a morphologic lens the arisen communal limits in the times in which the city was administered as if it was a quarter. The dividing one between metropolitan communes appears us like the first pernicious element that attempts against the constitution of a culture of the territory that prohangs in its mature stages to a morphologic structure. From always, the urban perimeter has used the rural runners like natural axes of the growth, to the point to visualize the first developments like populated ways. Thus, he is reasonable to think that a greater conscience of territorial unit between inhabitants located to both sides of the route exists that the located ones between back medianeras. Then, why are used the main avenues like communal limits?

The morphologic structure. From always, the transformation process that experiences the perimeter of the city, uses the agrarian forms as initial forms of urban geometries. The crossing that for that reason takes place, is possible to visualize it in the reproduction of the agricultural structure predial in the surface and the division of the constituent cloth of the new developments and in the morphology of occupation of new urban grounds. Great part of the perimeter is an urban and rural zone between, whose tipología first antejardín is identified with front estate ordered from one, a house and a back patio. Tipología that in the average premises it has given in identifying like district residencial. Más suburban that urban themselves, the new perimetrales uses is located in an orthogonal apple weave opened, discontinuous facade and straight streets Unlike the proposal of city English and North American garden that formulates its own weave, the project of Chilean residential district settles on the perimetral reproduction strongly conditional an orthogonal plan by the geometry of the runners of regional access. It is from this establishment which we can identify the morphologic one of the urban growth of the Chilean city, according to the following types:·Growth on itself, by means of the renovation of the city already constructed. One characterizes by the increase of the troop density of the ground and the change of the architectonic tipología;·Annular growth, by means of gradual aggregations of the perimeter. It is the type of development that characterizes the republican city of century XIX and the modern city, until the Forties. It is characterized by a homogenous growth of great located ground cloth in the rural suburbs; and·Linear growth throughout the runners of regional access. It is the type of extensive development that becomes present from the Forties in ahead and is impelled by the paving of the regional routes and by the industrial location, throwing radially the city towards the outside. Of this tipología, the growth of greater repercussion are those than they are pronounced from the metropolitan centralidad towards the perimeter, as if centrígufo was a movement phenomenon. Nevertheless, the functional dynamics of the city is expressed from the perimeter towards the center. Not in vain, every day they converge towards the central city around 2 million people.

Then, we were with a contradiction between the form of the physical growth and the form of the functionality, which constitutes a perverse factor of the urban development. From always, the city has been thought from within towards it never go and to the inverse one, from the perimeter towards the center. The urban perimeter has been considered never as a proyectual dimension of design. Aspect that never transforms this urban piece into a territory in permanent transition and like a finished dimension and completes from the initial moment. In the case of the intercommunal planning of Santiago of Chile of 1960, the expression of the form urbis of the perimeter is mediatizada by erroneously considered innobles uses of the ground: industry and economic house. First locating of radial way in grounds with regional accessibility and the second falling back towards the interior of the great interstitial cloth gauges. The conflicts that arise between both uses, are solved by simple uncultivated walls or. The absence of design of the together perimeter incompatible uses that in the long run are settled with environmental deterioration, noises, bad scents and not not very often, with human lives. Case this last present in the wrecks triggered in the Commune of It Mirror. The mass media denounce the presence of industries in residential areas, not knowing that the house has been located after the industrial fact. Analyzed from the morphologic slope of urbanism, the Metropolitan Regulating Plan of 1995 (PRM), gets worse not solved by the PRIS of 1960. With the pure legalista and environmentalist intention to eradicate the industrial uses of the inner city, it locates in the first metropolitan strip or avenue of circumvallation Américo Vespucio, without no intentionality morphologically to solve the functional and environmental conflicts that will arise to constitute this strip already a residential fact consomme'. The use of belts or green screens of separation between these incompatible uses, for example, is catched by the lack of a proposal that the city thinks as it is and as it will be: a morphologic device of three dimensions.




For citizen of classic Rome, the form urbis was the physical expression of the different functions that converge on the city: the house, the transport, the infrastructures, the functions of government, etc.. For an inhabitant of our time, the urban form is the result of the construction of the city as a device of forms logics. To enter in the knowledge of the forms logics to us supposes not not very often, to fall in present reduccionismos in the analyses that understand the form under the empire of the analogies. This last one prevents that the attempts of conceptualización of the term be considered like bottom subjects . The applied approaches by the progresismos fashionable, in its presumption of austerity, has generated an artifice dry in attributes of design from the same proyectual and incapable instance for that reason, of to constitute in the suitable nexus between the citizen and the politeness. This article presents/displays the partial results of a Fondecyt investigation , that treats on the morphologic impacts of the instruments of ordering in the urban ground located in the metropolitan perimeter. The practical purpose of this study is the identification of proyectuales instruments that are gotten up in the regulating plans, with the purpose of having a greater dominion on the final result. In other words, it is a conceptual and operative bridge that persecutes the coherence of the city-planning norm in the architectonic form and vice versa. With it, we hoped to surpass the reaches of a normativista planning, that does not go beyond considering the city like simple arterial layout and a public work.