Urbanalisation: Common Landscapes, Global Places

Abstract

Discourses on urban globalisation have been considering the homogenisation of the built form as evidence of the impacts of internationalisation of economy on the city space. This is a statement that follows other similar approaches: the existence of a global architecture, the global domain of mass-media or the imposition of homogeneous lifestyles all around the planet. However, despite the fact of the repetition of some key spaces which are similarly replicated in cities around the world, it is also clear that differences between cities still remain. This paper suggests the concept of urbanalisation as based not on the homogenisation of cities and places but in the management of differences among them. This is to say, urban landscapes are not identical but they can appear as similar as the management of local special features allows. Thus, the explanation of the relationship between globalisation and the built urban environment focuses on the development of standardisation criteria that make differences between cities less evident. Architecture and urban design are used in this way as a real transformer that locates differences and peculiarities into a much simpler and understandable built form without any need to erase them. From this perspective, urbanalisation reveals a process of simplification of the city in which urban diversity and complexity are reduced to fit into a common visual order.