How can we question the spatial images of urbanisation?

There are two ways of approaching the spatial images of the city which geographers and cartographers produce and which the media, urban marketing experts and politicians use increasingly as a surrogate for analytically founded discourse.

The first way consists in accepting the evidence and the presumed referentiality of the images which, representing precisely localised individual objects, appear to us to be true as a whole, i.e. even for the not strictly geographical relations and meanings that they imply and suggest. For example, the ‘European megalopolis’ dose not only say that between London and Milan lies the greatest European urban concentration, but also that this forms a system, which generates force fields and gradients, so that the destiny of cities depends on how they are placed compared to it: this is a partial truth, which hides many fundamental aspects of the problem, with the result that it legitimises distorting territorial and urban policies, such as those that make everything depend on major transport infrastructures.

The second way is conscious of the fact that spatial images do not reflect reality as it is, but are a mental construct, a means to highlight certain facts or certain relations that are more or less consciously linked to certain intentions, or at least a certain general vision of the problems. This second approach moves in two directions. One, which we could call deconstructive, aims to investigate not what is represented, but the social relations (in the broad sense) of which they are (or could become) the matter, means or conditions.