Generative history: Marcel Poëte and the city as urban organism

The joint contribution of grassroots artistic practices to the alternative and vital city. The case of Bologna and Venice (Italy)

“…In the organicist approach, opposed to the mechanistic view that sees the city as the result of a series of planned actions, thus making it known and controllable (as in Le Corbusier's elaborations), the city exists somehow independently from individuals, it is conceived as a spontaneous order based on interconnected relations, similarly to Adam Smith's conception of the invisible hand in markets (Adams & Tiesdell, 2007). Cities are complex, large-scale organisms, whose distinctive features of vibrancy and vitality do not originate from the top-down mechanistic inputs but from the processes and relational interactions which have a generative power (Periton, 2018) and which confer the city its ability to adapt and transform according to its own needs and the changing environment. While planning has seen the city as a progressively more predictable entity, vitalism places an emphasis on its evolutionary nature and on its creative élan (élan vital, as Bergson put it; Bennet, 2010) -in other words, "The default state for a city [is] not one of quiet equilibrium which planning was intended to restore, but instead one of constant turmoil" (Amati, 2021: x).…”