Between Metropolitan Archipelagos and Patchwork Metropolis. The dimension of the urban project in the neoliberal period.

The latest stage of global capitalist development is producing several important changes in the European urbanized territories and in the way in which they are managed. The shift between Fordism and Keynesian mixed economy and the neoliberal system have produced significant changes in the theory and practice of urban planning and urban design. From one side privatization, deregulation and decentralization are becoming the key goals of global neoliberalism and, form the other, the production of ’Large Urban Projects’ the distinctive device trough which new urbanization is produced and transformed. Within the broad spectrum of concepts and metaphors that have been used to represent and deal with these processes, this paper will investigate the relations between two case studies: (1) the Dutch Patchwork Metropolis (Neutelings 1989) between the Hague and Rotterdam and (2) the Venetian Metropolitan Archipelagos (Indovina 2009). Trough a discourse analyses the aim of this study is twofold: from one side to highlight how the new dimension of ‘Large Urban Projects’ can be discovered in regions and territories with very different history and development level and from the other to clarify how different urban systems have differently answered to the neoliberal stimulations.