Unimaginable hence unmanageable: new names for invisible urban places

Abstract A name cannot change the city and our relationship with places. However, new terms for now-nameless spaces will help to change people’s perception and their capability of seeing what they have never seen before. The geographer’s taxonomic effort to re-designate urban places and typologies involves a political and ideological content. Most urban spaces are unmanageable because they fit neither with current technology nor with the social organization. Urban design requires new interpretations of and ideas about the awareness and form of settlements. Elaborating on what we learnt in the past is no longer enough to kindle creativeness and innovation. In the tradition of classic geography, I call for a new classification of urban places, which is meant to find names for places we do not “see” and therefore we cannot catalogue. A new classification of human settlements is a step forward on a new path to perceive, define and eventually plan them. A new perception of metropolitan areas leads to a different relation between area and administration; hence between urban places and representation of citizens.