Victor Gruen is the pioneer of the regional shopping centre, he is the “Mall Maker”, which, is also the title of a book by M. Jeffrey Hartwick about this Austrian-born architect. Well known for his first commercial projects, which have been copied and analysed worldwide, mostly negatively influencing the structure of cities and societies, Gruen had focused his attention on the importance of the environmental crisis in his both theoretical writings and projects as early as the 1960s. How can Gruen be personified as both the “Mall Maker” and the “Architect of the Environment’? In the early 1970s Gruen presented Die Charta von Wien, as an attempt to readapt the CIAM`s Charte d`Athenes to the contemporary conditions, with a brand new emphasis on the ecological environment as well. This paper will deal mainly with these contradictions and synergies between “consumeristic” architecture and its role in the city in relation to the environmental issues posed by its inventor. The complexity of the connections between consumerism and ecology and the references to CIAM and Gruen, appear to be important themes for a discussion on public space and our contemporary urban condition.

The paper is focused on the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural paradigm of ‘habitat’ – as the anthropological and ecological interdependency between domestic space and its environment. Since the mid-twentieth century, our built environment has faced a long totalizing, planetary urbanization process, which urges us to review the old conventional urban-architectural categories we use to describe and understand our cities and countryside. Faced with the urgency of a more inclusive understanding of our built environment, this paper sheds more light on the paradigm of Habitat as an interdisciplinary urban lexicon, as it gained momentum in post-war urban thinking and has influenced urban design ever since. The paper holds that the post-war discussion on Habitat represented a unique moment in which interdisciplinary thinking on the built environment became central. The paper shows alliances and resonances between the post-war CIAM’s discourse on Habitat and other coeval sociological and philosophical studies to delineate a complex theoretical framework. Beyond the parameters and boundaries that have been considered and presumed conventionally within ordinary urban design and social science, the paper focuses on the complex interdisciplinary meanings, interpretations, and translations regarding the paradigm of post-war Habitat as a complex social and spatial notion.

The “Heart of the City”, title of the 8th CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne), held in 1951, is a contradictory and pervasive figure of speech which has marked a thinking and urban transition after the 2nd World War and still affects our contemporary urban and social condition. In 1951, two opposite urban conditions are considered by Sert, President of CIAM, as main issues which the Heart discourse should face: from the disappearance of city centres because of the destruction of the War to the negation of the urban centrality because of urban sprawl and the infinite constant enlargement of city boundaries. But the Heart itself also represents two different figures of speeches, the symbol and the metaphor: from one side it becomes a humanist symbol “which springs directly to the senses without explanation”, in opposition to the “mechanized killing”, to the “tyranny of mechanical tools” as stressed by Giedion during CIAM 8; from the other side the Heart still keeps its anatomical metaphorical organic meaning translated into a presumed right physical form and dimension of the city. These oppositions - from annulled bombed centers to infinite urban structures, from metaphor to symbol, from pro-urban to proto-urban Idea are the main causes of the complexity and of the stratification of several different layers of significances of the Heart of the City, since CIAM 8 until the present. Starting from CIAM 8, the paper investigates this Post-war urban tension, which lies at the crossroads of intellectual-theoretical and architectural-design worlds. On the one hand, there is the resilience of the decontextualized social-spatial tabula rasa created by the dangerous mechanical progress which led to the blood and horror of the War. While on the other, the resilience of embracing, stemming, and compressing the Galileo scandal, “the constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space” (Foucault, 1967) which was, for the first time, mirrored in the urban sprawl. The aim of this paper is to focus on the complexity and the difficulty of interpreting the Heart of the City, from the tangible Janus-faced binomial reconstruction-recentralization of the urban Core, to the symbolical abstract resilience of the Heart as a constituent element at the foundation of the urban structure and anticipator of an anthropological idea of Habitat as an integrating part of the human settlement. From this analysis, the paper states that the Heart does not only concern the Post War reconstruction of the cities as has been generally thought. On the contrary, the Heart of the City is still a valid issue in our contemporary urban condition and it deals with the progressive, contemporary topic of a correct synergy between social and physical space, between the private and public sphere.

This chapter offers a thoughtful reflection on the extreme condition of our future environment: the flooding of the world due to climate change and environmental abuse. Facing this emergency, our proposal seeks to investigate and speculate on one of the first floating cities experiments — the Metabolism of Kikutake’s Marine City (1958) — in order to propose a flexible and innovative floating typology and to propel insights about new floating ways of living. Imbued in a rising extreme “risk society”of a flooded world, or waterworld, we state the importance of the utopian speculation of the Metabolist movement as a provocative approach for investigating possible futures of the Anthropocene. <!----> <!----> <!----> <!---->