The territorial Turn

To succeed the turn regarding the climate crisis we are facing, cities may not longer be considered as machines but must be treated as an organism, whose metabolic systems are fundamental elements for dealing with climate challenges while focusing on resource efficiency and the quality of life. Water, vegetation, waste, etc. are systems that go far beyond the boundaries of the city - they belong to the order of the territory - although have great influence on spatial conditions in a city.
How can these systems be integrated into space without creating an urbanism “rendered more with the arm than with the hand" as castigated by M. De Solá-Morales, or systemized solutions that were introduced by information-and-communications-technology (ICT) companies in contemporary sustainable projects?
A constant exchange between the scale of the territory’s plan and that of the profile of the space between buildings, the interstitial space, should be focused on, to achieve context-related, sustainable solutions with improved spatial quality for its inhabitants. This "back and forth" between the scale of the territory and the scale of the interstitial space of the city permits an improvement of the built environment to meet current ecological and social challenges. Thus, the city as machine, product of modernist urban planning, may give the way to a city as organism where the interstitial space becomes vivid.