Urban-ity: Reframing Metropolitan Legibility. Proximity Structures and Distributed Centralities. (Research Notebook Series, No. 01.1)

This notebook introduces Urban-ity, a spatial concept that investigates how metropolitan territories can remain legible at the scale of everyday urban experience. Contemporary cities increasingly operate through infrastructures and systems that exceed the perceptual limits through which inhabitants orient themselves. While these systems enable metropolitan connectivity, they often weaken the spatial intelligibility necessary for civic life. Developed through a design-research study of Rome, Urban-ity proposes proximity structures as a framework for reorganizing metropolitan territories into distributed constellations of urban centralities. Using a 2 × 2 km Cartesian grid anchored at Piazza Venezia as an analytical device, the metropolis is interpreted not as a hierarchical center surrounded by peripheries but as a network of accessible nodes structured through walkable proximity. Within the Research Notebook Series, this notebook develops Urban-ity as a spatial translation of the civic condition described as urbanĭtas (Notebook 01), exploring how distributed structures of proximity can support metropolitan legibility, orientation, and collective urban life.