The projects illustrated here exemplify the way contemporary urban planning is moving in practice, and how it is precisely in the effective transformation of cities and landscapes that it is finding the theoretical and practical forms of its action. An urban planning that, as has recently been pointed out, having emancipated itself from the typo-morphological tradition focused on the built, is now coming to embrace the open spaces of the city within the horizon of the landscape, allowing it to incorporate infrastructures and other complex systems once considered incompatible with the urban character. From this is emerging a set of attitudes and fragmentary reflections that in a process of trial is defining lateral approaches, routes that cut across the habits of design and planning. A research that does not set itself poetic and stylistic goals, but manipulates building, landscape, geographical and infrastructural materials as an inevitable condition of operation.