Cities Beyond the Visible

Delimiting constitutes the initial phase of composition (Crupi, 2022), signifying that architectural design is inherently a project of limitation. This contribution reflects on the limits of the “terrestrial city”, understood as an architectural-natural palimpsest defined by the tension between the consolidated historical core and the dynamics of contemporary expansion (Tornatora & Crupi, 2022). The present study hypothesises that the rarefied traces of archaeology, and in general, the subsurface morphology, represent the founding value of the urban form, as opposed to the idea of a “Promethean city” (Assunto, 1983) doomed to oblivion and removal. The objective of the present research is to investigate the potential of archaeological heritage to function as a necessary condition for urban renewal. In order to ascertain this limit, a methodology of Earth observation is adopted. Specifically, the utilisation of very high-resolution data from satellite constellations facilitates scientific and geometric mapping of Ichnoi and discontinuities (Orusa et al., 2011). The objective of this study is to illustrate the significance of acknowledging this archaeological constraint in order to facilitate the preservation of cultural heritage and facilitate urban renewal processes. The results demonstrate that urban architecture functions as a pivotal intermediary between buried memory and contemporary design, thereby transforming the archaeological constraint into a morphological resource. In the context of future planning, the knowledge acquired from the analysis of morphological data mining processes (Pandey et al., 2021) and the management of stratigraphic constraints on Earth provides an essential methodological paradigm for the rational planning of extraterrestrial cities of the future.