Overlapping cities: Trans-urban augmentation in the digital era of western cities

Abstract

The digital revolution has produced and is still creating new lifestyles that are being reflected in a new urban revolution which sees the overlapping of different environments to enrich the urban experience and respond to emergent necessities. It leads to a dissolution of the strictly defined spaces and uses to create hybrid places that colonize the urban environment. The dualities of public and private, of exterior and interior, of work and leisure, of man and woman, of house and city, are then changing, and with them also the traditional pillars of the modern society. The digital is overlapping the material, changing the urban organizational structure through new relationship between people, city and technology in a new reality recently dubbed the “metaverse”. Most of the spatial needs are then transformed, opening up to a profound rethinking of the structure of places and of the meaning itself of urban environment. The article analyses the current relationship between the material and the virtual by identifying the possible resulting spatial emergencies.