In the 2oth century city, where the undeveloped urban land expands and avoids a mere road use, the open space becomes a connective tissue in which buildings find place in relation to criteria not deterministically linked to accessibility. The distance between the buildings increases, the open space is permeable to the eye, to pedestrian walking as well as to water. It represents a new opportunity for the activities that cross it, for their invention, their hybridisation between domestic and collective dimensions.

Thanks to the oneness of planning and the centralised development process, in San Donato the company project of Metanopoli manages to define a city where continuity of  the open space represents a masterful infrastructure and, at the same time, the signature identity of a unique livable space, which reminds of Tapiola, the ‘forest city’ of Otto Meurman. However, Metanopoli didn’t have the strength to become a model, its ways, its identity depend linearly on its origins, on proprietary state that determined its creation, on it being a company town.

The city that in time neared it is therefore fragmented, as have been the planning  and development processes: parcelled out and decentralised. They, together with the rhetorics of privacy and security, imposed other materials to the planning of the open space: fences and gates divide the space, they make it disjointed e and specialise its activities.

And so, in San Donato, as elsewhere, the continuity of collective space is an interructed project.