Diemlach is a paradigmatic suburban extension. In contradiction with its rural morphology, it is a deeply urban place: the diffuse limit of a diffuse city, structured by one-family houses, fences and allotment gardens.

In such a contemporary typology, it is possible to read a legitimate option of the inhabitants, who choose to abandon the modern city, stunned at its thunderous failure. They become then somehow ex-citizens, and inhabit what we (from the city) call the sub-urbs.

This work tries to give some answer to the dissolving city, and also to the ex-citizen who, running away from a city in which he does not believe anymore, seems to be entering an even worse net of ultra-privatisation and dissolution, not only of the urban, but also of community itself.

 [BORDER]

In the border of the city the ex-citizen is looking for nature. But his ‘lost innocence’ is irrecoverable, and the result is that he brings the urban into the natural.

The limit is not clear: Who colonises whom? Here, the crash of a suburban structure with a radical natural environment is deliberately not solved, and the question remains alive.

 [PROPERTY]

Fences subdivide the territory in small properties, substituting the lost order of the city. But community gets also lost here, because it cannot exist without public space.

In Diemlach private property is atomised, discontinuous and dispersed: being brought to its last consequences and so downplayed, it becomes extremely interchangeable. The suburb becomes alive in its very heart, in property relationships themselves.

 [DISPERSION]

The fundament of suburban dispersion is the market’s obsession for the object. A product is that, what can be sold, and a product is always an object.

The dispersion is here brought to its last consequences: a new texture arises and objectuality is placed in its right place, becoming the fundament of interchangeability. The whole becomes a field where the relations of the (ex)citizens can configure a new beginning for their community.

 [URBAN LIQUIDITY]

The result is somehow an improvement of the post-modern suburb. House and city are no more mere products: they are (again) open to a process; they become themselves a process, a liquid that adapts to their changing social reality.