Horizontal Metropolis: A Tool for a New Kind of Territoriality?

The EPFL Latsis Congress demonstrates that the notion of Horizontal Metropolis, which Paola Vigano first put forward in the context of Brussels2040 (Secchi and Vigano 2012), then theorized by a retroactive genealogy based on Gloeden’s cellular model (Vigano in Images Mid-Size City OASE 89:94–111, 2013), also raises many echoes in other quite diversified disciplines. It would thus have the potential to become a way for reconceiving contemporary spatial changes in a multidisciplinary way (with economics, ecology, philosophy, politics, engineering, architecture, urban planning and landscape). As a result, it could also become a collective construction, which the success of the congress sketches out. My contribution to this joint elaboration could start with a reflection on what that notion should not be, to then discuss what it could allow us to think in another way.