This book constitutes the second chapter in the dissemination of 

a research conducted by Maurizio Carones, Hang-Joon Gio and Luca Scalingi for several years at the Politecnico di Milano. The work has 

-as its subject the contemporary city – in this case applying to an urban area of Seoul – and aims to propose effective descriptive tools useful 

for design and teaching. In relation to the tradition of urban studies, 

the relationship between place and project is addressed, indicating 

how the project is an opportunity to describe places and define 

their condition of “context” each time. Every place becomes a context only when it is described by the design process. The representation 

of the territory declines in multiplicities determined by the intersection of design problems and descriptive techniques. In this sense, 

the contemporary city is both an object of study 

and a descriptive parameter of the territory.