Creating figures: why re-imagining urban structure supports a regenerative urban model

Some authors describe the contemporary metropolis like the field where co-exist simultaneous strategies of exploitation of fragmentary opportunities provided by the specific conditions of places (Florida, Bagnasco, Solá-Morales): physical (geography, infrastructures, etc.), social (people, culture and local values, etc.) and economic conditions. In their opinion, the causes of the ‘lateral’ development of the city could be (i) the relationships between the different elements of the land mosaic (Forman) and (ii) the fragmentary logics of the current urban realities. This important process of transformation would integrate the classic ‘lineal’ growth, more related to the urban rising along infrastructures. The result of these interactions is the change of scales in the performing of contemporary urban phenomena. Several authors have been interested in studying this new reality, called ‘exopolis’ (Soja), city-region (De las Rivas, Portas & al.) or metropolizated territory (Indovina, Monclús). Those not-conventional approaches are necessary to understand the contemporary urban condition and its complex, unstable, transient dynamics. Nowadays, several traditional concepts and ideas have become less useful and too rigid to achieve this target. This lack of effectiveness regards the discipline as a whole, divided between sectorial analysis and fragmentary solutions. In our opinion, using figures as ‘images with the potential to represent new territorial realities’ is one of the most important steps to produce an innovative and non-conventional understanding of post-metropolitan (Soja) urban space. This paper is aimed at explaining why figures are more useful than images to understand the complex urban pattern of current territory, as well as demonstrating this idea with the case studies of Valladolid and its emerging urban area. The result is a way to show the structure of this territory, which is more coherent with a contemporary narrative of space, and closer to its spatial and temporal dimensions. This is something not completely original but in this paper we present our views on it.