Ecopolis vs Megacity: A Post-crises Regional-Urban Vision Towards 2050

This paper supports the idea that the too big urban agglomerations (and in particular the so called “megacities”), which exploded in number over recent decades in the Far and Middle East, are among the causes of the current interwoven crises. In less than one hundred years (which is only a very short period in the history of the city), megacities have transformed themselves from the promise to become polar stars of innovation, to places where the violence of urbanization -at the expense of nature, ecosystems and humans- has become one of the causes of the current environmental, social and economic disasters. We wonder if the time has come to free ourselves from the illusion that megacities still represent great opportunities for human prosperity and if it is not the moment to seriously begin to impeach these creations as one of the main causes of the devastating current crises (as well as of their combination): “The reconstruction of the planetary biophysical balances requires a slowdown, better an inversion, of the urbanization process (...) also in consideration of the substantial ungovernability, on an environmental as well as social level, of the large urban conglomerates”. The ideal type of Ecopolis has, therefore, been taken (Fabbro, 2021) to define a spatial vision coherent with, at the same time: the humanistic regionalism of the RPAA (who was the first, in the twenties of the last century, to criticize the emerging metropolitanism); the European vision, of ten years ago, named “Ecopolis” (Espon, 2012); and the «ecopolitical» perspective indicated by Morin (2020). Ecopolis makes reference to the structure of the “Regional city” of the RPAA, but it is not to be considered as the blueprint of a new town, or of a cluster of new towns, as has often been proposed, in the urban thinking of the last century. Ecopolis is more a territorial ecosystem resulting from a long co-evolution process between human communities, settlements and natural environment which, as such, has generated that degree of variety necessary not only to preserve its structures and identity, but also to pursue that degree of complexity (of its control system), as well as to cope with the complexity of the surrounding environment. In order to pursue now a future not subordinated to the forms and dimensions imposed by megacities, the first step could be, at least in Italy, that of embedding Ecopolis into the reform of the territorial institution, named Provincia, which currently has the duty to manage the Italian “non-metropolitan” territories. In fact, for various reasons, the profile and the duties of this institution are no longer fit to address the ecological transition in the territories (Fabbro, 2021). This is the reason why a radical transformation of the Provincia should be undertaken in the form of a new territorial institution as it happened, in 2001, with the "Metropolitan City", introduced by the Italian Constitution to replace the Provincia in the municipalities belonging to the metropolitan systems.