Abstract

Networks, city-regions and urban archipelagos are some of the representations of contemporary spatial configurations. On the one hand, these images try to describe urban settings rendering a vision of the world on the basis of principles of differentiation, hierarchization and the distribution of subjects and places in space; on the other, they produce a naturalization of the spatial process. According to Lefebvre, the "perceived space" and the "conceived space" are only two of the dimensions of the production of space. There is, indeed, the "lived space": the actual deployment of forces in the field. The paper focuses on the theoretical frameworks of post-metropolitan network representations. Referring to the metropolitan area of Naples as a case study, it investigates the gap between the representation of urban space as a network model and its concrete realization as a field of forces.