The Joint Cities

Abstract

The new connections, which high speed train allows to activate among the metropolitan systems, seem to be able to give life to new urban macro-structures for which the transfer time, among the main poles of the railway segment, becomes comparable to an inside moving into the city and therefore considered as an inter-functional mobility. The tunnel effect generated by the high speed connection seems to be able to allow a new temporal and functional joint among the metropolitan systems consequently supporting the possibility, for the users, to move themselves among the different urban functions belonging to the different cities. The birth of these urban aggregations seems to drive towards new megalopolis, which we can define for the first time with the term: joint-city. For this new metropolitan settlement it seems to be very interesting to investigate the constitutive peculiarities, the systemic articulation, its relational structures, the evolutionary scenarios, and so on. The urban functions (activities) can be considered as structures of relationships between people that allows to define "organizational links" inside the community; the urban functions are located in specific places inside urban container or in open spaces. The urban functions represent the urban engines and the functional system can be thought as the “soul of the city", abstract but essential to its survival. In the definition set out here the analysis is carried out for many interconnected urban functional system points (specifically those in Rome and Naples). The new high speed railway has to be considered not only as a new channel of mobility between cities, but as a real possibility of joint between the functional systems of the two centres. A final consideration can be carried out in relation to the possibility of implementing new measures of governance of urban transformations considering the new macro-city: the "Joint City".