The city is culture! Blueprints and strata of the European Ecumenopolis

This essay frames the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) as a conceptual and operational tool for reading, designing, and regenerating the city through culture. Drawing on the architectural metaphors of blueprint and stratum, the European city is interpreted as a living palimpsest — a complex organism where memory, form, and transformation coexist. Venudo theorizes the ECoC network as a dispersed but coherent urban system: a cultural ecumenopolis composed of layered cities, each embodying a dense morphology of public space, typologies, and civic inventions. Through references to authors such as Benevolo, Poëte, Choay, and Rossi, the essay argues that stratification — in its physical, historical, and compositional dimensions — is the distinctive trait of European urbanity. Culture, in this framework, is not added to the city, but constitutes its spatial logic: a projective infrastructure for democratic experimentation and a catalyst for long-term urban innovation.