Students: Fabian Lauener, Patrick Meng

The term ‘Adriatic city’ has become a widespread indication for the phenomenon of linear and continuous form of urbanization along the Adriatic Coast. The infinite urban waterfront, connecting the south Emilia-Romagna, with Marche and Abruzzo, can be conceived as an outcome of economic and social forces, in particular tourism. The Adriatic city shows all the features of contemporary dispersed urbanism: infrastructure networks and private housing as a base; shopping/leisure malls and museumlike historic cores as centralities; generic industrial sheds on agricultural plots as forms of production; and fluid social processes, in housing neighborhoods for instance, that now work both as permanent residences and as summer houses. Due to its linear character, this form of urbanization functions as non-centric or polycentric, comparable to a «strip-type» urbanization.