Report from the edge

Alessandro Guida’s photographic research investigates the liminary territories of Rotterdam, those beyond the borders of the administrative city, the uncertain space that separates the city from non-city.

“Report from the edge of the city” is a project of documentary photography that investigates the administrative boundary of a city in relation to its actual “border”: those areas at the fringes (industrial areas, brownfields, port areas, green fields, suburban neighbourhoods, productive lands), that are the object of the most recent changes of the urban configurations as we know them.

The project is an exploration of those spaces of misty identity in a liquid territory, where people and goods, services, economy and territorial governance go far beyond the municipal limits. Territories whose representation is still missing. The emerging challenge of contemporary ar-chitecture and urbanism is often the reorganization and the inclusion of this peripheral space. With this project, we would like to take on a very specific angle and explore the edge of the city looking at the cases of Rotterdam, Madrid, Turin and Milan. These territories are on the way to change now. They are the territories at the center of strategic and long-term transfor-mation plans dating 2040-2050. They are the future. It’s about understanding what will be the city of tomorrow as a whole and how the urban patterns, in particular, those at the margins, will change in the years to come.

This project is a catalogue of those territories and landscapes: each city represents an episode and, city after city, we will build a narrative about those realities at the margins, still unknown.

Alessandro Guida was born in Turin, Italy, in 1976. Architect by training, he graduated in Turin, where he practices until 2008, when he moved to Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Since then, and after some collaborations with Dutch Architectural offices, he started his own company offering services of 3D visualization and commercial photography in the architectural field. Since 2015 he devoted himself to the creation of personal photography projects, related to architecture and landscape. They have been exhibited and published at the Architecture Festival of Turin (July 2015) and the XV International Venice Architecture Biennale (May-Nov 2016). In 2017 he co-founded Urban Reports, a collective formed by photographers-architects based in different cities in Europe using documentary photography to explore and report the transformations of contemporary urban landscapes.