Using the areas situated around Limbara mountain as a paradigmatic example, the course aims to reflect on design in terms of the role internal areas can play in re-evaluating the actual urban dimension. It is assumed that the great expanses of empty, silent land characterising this territory constitute important elements for re-evaluating not just the Gallura territory-city, but the idea of urban itself. The course thus intends to provide students with the instruments to explore the new kinds of use that are beginning to become established on this territory and which seem to outline a different idea of possible city. An idea of city that goes beyond the well-defined, compact image we are accustomed to giving it.
To respond to these assumptions the course will be divided into two modules.

First module: History of the city and the territory
Starting with the assumption that a single idea of city does not exist but that the ways in which societies have, over time, built up “topographic and social devices able to make the meeting of and exchanges between men as effective as possible”, the course aims to follow through some of the forms in which the actual idea of urban has been manifested, replacing the concept of city with a more general reflection on spatial forms and their relationship with society.

Second module: Design in the social context
The second module will be based on this general framework, and will be devoted to constructing a sort of atlas of innovation in urban content. After reinterpreting the environmental structures and historic processes that have contributed to determining the specificities of the Gallura context, students will dwell on the new forms of use characterising this territory, following a constructive type of methodology. These areas contain, in effect, a variety of subjects who have begun to experiment with new ways of inhabiting and building up small economies, trying to imagine possible routes towards a new urban horizon for the particular territory. Through immersion in the territory and exploration of the signs of new things in motion, they will work with various instruments and languages (writing, digital cartography, videos, photography) to create an authentic experimental Atlas of the new forms of territoriality underway.