Shared spaces interviews Francesco Indovina, one of Italy’s most distinguished urban planners and author of several influential works on the processes of urban sprawl.

Francesco Indovina visited the Centre of Contemporany Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) in November 2012 to give a public lecture on the occasion of the launch of the book Francesco Indovina: Del análisis del territorio al gobierno de la ciudad (Francesco Indovina: From Territorial Analysis to City Government, “Espacios Críticos” Collection, Vol. 4, Icaria Editorial), by Oriol Nel·lo. Shared spaces took advantage of the occasion to speak with him about the situation of public space in the heart of the contemporary city. Indovina believes that the metropolitan archipelago does not entail the negation of the city but, rather, the quest for another kind of urban dimension. People who live in areas of urban sprawl “live in the city without having a city” because the urban morphology required to contain a city’s social relations is missing. He therefore calls for the invention of a new kind of metropolitan public space. In any event, “you can’t have a city without public space and the new metropolis still has to find that”.