Writing and rewriting of open spaces.

Public Space. An Issue for the Contemporary City In a monographic double issue of Casabella magazine in 19931, entitled ’The Design of Open Spaces’, the theme of open space gained importance within the practices of the contemporary city. At that time, architecture’s journals played a pivotal role in shaping the disciplinary debate and professional practice by presenting key issues that demanded reflection. By doing so, they helped reasoning before issues became theory, maintaining the fertility of confrontation, of dialogue between knowledge, and, at the same time, defining a disciplinary thematic field. At the end of last millennium, a renewal of architecture and urbanism positions — prompted by the themes emerged from the contemporary city planning — found nourishment in the confrontation between Vittorio Gregotti, the magazine’s editor, and Bernardo Secchi, an author who was often invited to the magazine to present themes and comment on them through the results of competitions, projects and completed works. The open space was articulated within different research programmes: the Modern and the codification of open spaces, from the Cartesian and isotropic dimension of the principles of the Athens Charter to the monumentality of new cities such as Chandigarh, Brasilia; open spaces and the crisis of public space, as a reflection of the crisis of the public sphere in contemporary society and its practices; the large empty monofunctional spaces, enclaves resulting from the relocation of urban functions out of the city, creating internal margins and offering new opportunities for permeable spaces and new vegetation; new spaces in the widespread city, a theme that will eventually open a deep discussion about the themes of urban dispersion, demanding for a landscape vision within the themes of the city and new relations with the countryside;the regeneration of resulting spaces, introducing the Third Landscape poetics. Cities and territories have become collections of spaces with