ROAD INFRASTRUCTURE:

DESIGN APPROACHES AS LESSONS FOR THE CONCEPTION OF THE CONTEMPORARY CITY

Abstract

This article promotes a review of different approaches, in the fields of architecture, urban design and planning, to road infrastructure, recognised as an opportunity for a design undestanding in dialogue with the landscapes and forms that mark contemporary urbanization. Beyond
excessively normative parameters or instruments and idealizations of compact cities, potentialities extracted from a propositional framework are discussed. Works, paradigms and practices carried out, tested and built in different cities are contrasted in its virtues and qualities, indicating, finally, the need for a conceptual review, emerging from the description of spaces and forms that, both at an amplified and a local scale, are marked by excessive specialization, but which, for better or for worse, act as inexorable vectors of urban growth.