Fundamental Trends in City Development (Urban and Landscape Perspectives)

Urban and Landscape Perspectives

Volume 1

Series Editor Giovanni Maciocco

Editorial Board Abdul Khakee, Faculty of Social Sciences, Umeå University Norman Krumholz, Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Ohio Ali Madanipour, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University Leonie Sandercock, School of Community and Regional Planning, Vancouver Frederick Steiner, School of Architecture, University of Texas, Austin Erik Swyngedouw, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester Rui Yang, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Department of Landscape Architecture, Peiking

For other titles published in this series, go to http://www.springer.com

Editorial Staff Isabelle Doucet Paola Pittaluga Silvia Serreli Project Assistants Monica Johansson Giovanna Sanna Translation Christine Tilley

Aims and Scope Urban and Landscape Perspectives is a series which aims at nurturing theoretic reflection on the city and the territory and working out and applying methods and techniques for improving our physical and social landscapes. The main issue in the series is developed around the projectual dimension, with the objective of visualising both the city and the territory from a particular viewpoint, which singles out the territorial dimension as the citys space of communication and negotiation. The series will face emerging problems that characterise the dynamics of city development, like the new, fresh relations between urban societies and physical space, the right to the city, urban equity, the project for the physical city as a means to reveal civitas, signs of new social cohesiveness, the sense of contemporary public space and the sustainability of urban development. Concerned with advancing theories on the city, the series resolves to welcome articles that feature a pluralism of disciplinary contributions studying formal and informal practices on the project for the city and seeking conceptual and operative categories capable of understanding and facing the problems inherent in the profound transformations of contemporary urban landscapes.

Fundamental Trends in City Development

Giovanni Maciocco

Giovanni Maciocco

ISBN: 978-3-540-74178-7

e-ISBN: 978-3-540-74179-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007938163

c 

2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Cover-image selected from: “The Chinese Dream” by: Dynamic City Foundation. Printed on acid-free paper. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com

To Mariangela, Caterina, Maria Antonietta and Sara

Contents

Three Categories of Utopia ....................................................................... 1 City Adrift............................................................................................... 1 Conservative, Liquidatory and Resistant Utopias................................... 3 The Discomposed City ............................................................................... 7 The Formless City .................................................................................. 7 Crisis of the Context of Proximity.......................................................... 9 Crisis of the Ethics of Proximity .......................................................... 18 Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity............................................ 22 The Generic City...................................................................................... 41 The Revenge of Functionalism............................................................. 41 Thematisation of the City ..................................................................... 44 The City as a Simulacrum..................................................................... 53 Desired Landscapes .............................................................................. 57 The Segregated City ................................................................................ 67 The Urban Project of Inequality ........................................................... 67 Elitist Segregation as Global Identity ................................................... 72 Flat Man................................................................................................ 79 Reinventing the City ................................................................................ 97 Externity................................................................................................ 97 Recovering Sensitive Knowledge of the City..................................... 103 Walking is the “Speech Act” of the City ............................................ 112 “Dynamic Traditionality” as a Requisite of Urban Innovation .......... 116 Narrating the City Means Designing its Possible Future.................... 120 Artists Take the City by the Hand ...................................................... 123 Horizons of Contemporary Public Space: Intermediate Spaces ......... 133 Counterspace and Disenchantment with the Modern City ................. 138 The “Void” and the City Project......................................................... 150 … and the City was Born of Chaos: Designing the City at its Edges ......................................................................................... 155 vii

viii Contents

The Territory of the City .................................................................... 160 Towards a Reinvented City ................................................................ 165 References............................................................................................... 183 Index ....................................................................................................... 199 Name Index............................................................................................. 217

Three Categories of Utopia

City Adrift What do phenomena like sprawl, the “generic city” or urban segregation have in common with the concept of city? The issue is not so straightforward: Madame, vous n’auriez pas une question plus petite! replied Matisse to a woman who had candidly asked the master at a lunch what he thought of art. The same question, applied to the field – moreover uncertain and not easily defined – of the city, is not exempt of the same risks attached to the vastness and complexity of the theme and the dangers inherent in eclectic, linear, reductionist approaches to problems. This, in any case, is the query this book departs from, principally due to the bewilderment we feel in the face of these phenomena found throughout the urban world, which put our concepts of city to a hard test, or at least those concepts we consider inherent in the city, such as: interaction between men, proximity between men and places, solidarity systems, social mediation between individuals rather than individualism, etc. We think of sprawl as liquefaction of the city, urban growth without shape, “the explosion of the city”. The generic city is seen as a phenomenon of standardisation of life and the space produced by shopping,1 a primary way of urban life. Urban segregation2 is considered a phenomenon produced by spatial agglomeration of the new urban elites that create social spaces which are powerfully structured and separated like fortresses.3 We are adopting these expressions as the conceptual space for exploring the “city adrift”, but simultaneously as a space in which to record new stimuli for the regeneration of that environment which is propitious for organized life, which still remains the city. This is a space where urbanists’ utopias unfold, the last to preserve the utopian plea, as David Riesman maintains in his famous essay The Lonely Crowd (Riesman 1950). In spite of its age, this is a premonitory essay, where Riesman inquires into the American social character – and to a large 1

2 Three Categories of Utopia

extent that of all the developed Western world – which was formed in the mass society. Its current interest lies in the introduction of the theme of inclusion or exclusion of man in the metropolis, pursued by a sense of solitude and anxiety for fear of not being accepted. This is hetero-directed man, guided from the outside, whom Riesman saw emerging in that America on its way to becoming a mass organised, consumer civilisation. In hetero-directed man the category of failure is fear, as in fear of exclusion. Just as in the self-directed Renaissance man and man of the Protestant Reform, where the individual found his own compass and his own objectives within himself, the category of failure is guilt. Whilst in man directed by tradition in the Middle Ages, an immobile society, where children continued doing the work of their fathers, the category of failure is shame. One of the main forms of spatial instability of the city is produced precisely by the consumer society and mass organisation, dealt with in Riesman’s theories and presented in contemporary terms by Koolhaas in the generic city of pervasive shopping. It is a spatial tendency that in its turn generates loneliness and a loss of public space as a place where personal uneasiness may be transformed into a social project.4 This is the thesis Zygmunt Bauman develops in his essay In Search of Politics (Bauman 1999), placing himself as Riesman’s successor in our times. The forms used to explore types of sociality change: people, in the pre-industrial epoch, crowd, in the industrial epoch, (dismayed) multitude, in our post-industrial epoch. To explore what we call the city adrift, we will analyse some of the urbanists’ positions, but more generally, those of scholars of the city, using as analytical category the utopia5 with which urbanist flirting, referred to by Riesman, continues, and which Bloch describes as an internal path, preparing the meeting with the Self: after this internal vertical movement: may a new expanse appear, the world of the soul, the external, cosmic function of utopia, maintained against misery, death, the husk–realm of mere physical nature. Only in us does this light still burn, and we are beginning a fantastic journey toward it, a journey toward the interpretation of our waking dream, toward the implementation of the central concept of utopia. To find it, to find the right thing, for which it is worthy to live, to be organized, and to have time: that is why we go, why we cut new, metaphysically constitutive paths, summon what is not, build into the blue, and build ourselves into the blue, and there seek the true, the real, where the merely factual disappear 6 – incipit vita nova. (Bloch 1918).

Conservative, Liquidatory and Resistant Utopias 3

Conservative, Liquidatory and Resistant Utopias Here we refer to three categories of utopia, conservative, liquidatory and resistant, that can perhaps significantly characterise the different positions regarding the spatial tendencies we wish to deal with. The first type is that of the conservative utopia, almost a contradiction, an oxymoron. We may take as a model La Città del Sole,7 in the critical interpretation Alberto Savinio8 gives of it. La Città del Sole, written by Tommaso Campanella, a Dominican friar, a philosopher from Stilo, Calabria, is a programme for politico-religious reform dreaming along the lines of a utopia, and on the historico-practical plane materialises in the vision of politico-religious unity between peoples under the guidance of the Roman Pontiff, for whom the King of Spain and the King of France should act as secular support. In the dazzling preface to La Città del Sole, which goes back to 1944,9 Savinio describes his idea of utopia in contrast with the text he is presenting: “as a model of a republic to be imitated, the Città del Sole is a model not to be imitated”, he writes insolently. Because – he notes – there is no utopia unless all religious or political authorities are renounced; there is no utopia if the idea of a better life remains inevitably relegated to the memory of a mythical past; there is no utopia if the hope of future life excludes happiness in the present; there is no utopia without liberation from the “material slavery” of the machine; there is no utopia without “the opening of minds” to suppress iniquity, without justice at work, the abolition of prejudices that hinder “human progress” as the progress of relationships between men. The second category is the liquidatory utopia. Let us borrow this expression from a recent article by Roger Caillois in Le Monde, which attributes the quality of liquidateur to Picasso for, according to Caillois, all his “doing” is based on arbitrariness that profoundly ridicules the organic shape of what is natural. This article by Caillois is taken up again by Placido Cherchi in an essay on Picasso (Caillois 1975; Cherchi 2001b). The liquidatory utopia ridicules the lasting continuity of tradition, like that of the Futurists, who were the first to totally, methodically refuse the hegemony of cultural worlds and stereotypes of the past. Once the social barriers had fallen, the masses had to organise the world in a different way. The new dynamism led to rules and ancient social categories being transgressed to back up the “already become” (even though the “already become” produced injustice and alienation in man). The liquidatory utopia is therefore a reproduction of the “already become”, a historically ambiguous relationship with the dialectics of

4 Three Categories of Utopia

development since it reproduces its progress with surprising accuracy, an ontology that opposes the Blochian ontology of the “not-yet-become” (Bloch 1918, 1986). The liquidatory utopia is an a-critical position, an absence of heresy in respect of a world that produces injustice and alienation in man, as happened with the change in production methods in the modern city. In this sense functionalism was a liquidatory utopia as it was a “stabiliser” of a representation of the functionalist cult of the life of man. The liquidatory utopia may be understood as a “utopia of escape” in the sense Mumford attributes to this expression, in particular as an escape from the need to resolve the social conflicts of an “already become” world (as the city is). It is similar in a certain sense to the phenomenon of “reflective sliding”, being a reflection of the contradictions of the world, without addressing the problem of facing them.10 The third category is the resistant utopia, a plea for reciprocal integration of past and present, the will to demonstrate that past experience continues to give evidence of values that keep intact an internal susceptibility to reconsideration, as the need to prove the analytical fecundity of the languages of our time in the languages of tradition.11 To define the process of “summing-up” the previous historic and social events which is at the base of innovation of meaning, Steiner coins the expression “dynamic traditionality”, referring as support for this thesis to some of the artistic biographies among the most innovative of the modernist movement: Will this ‘dynamic traditionality’ so distinctive of Western literacy persist? There are indications that we have become acutely conscious of the question. We know now that the modernist movement which dominated art, music, letters during the first half of the century was, at critical points, a strategy of conservation, of custodianship. Stravinsky’s genius developed through phases of recapitulation. He took from Machaut, Gesualdo, Monteverdi. He mimed Tchaikowski and Gounod, the Beethoven piano sonatas, the symphonies of Haydn, the operas of Pergolesi and Glinka. He incorporated Debussy and Webern into his own idiom. In each instance the listener was meant to recognize the source, to grasp the intent of a transformation which left salient aspects of the original intact. The history of Picasso is marked by retrospection. The explicit variations on classical pastoral themes, the citations from and pastiches of Rembrandt, Goya, Velasquez, Manet, are external products of a constant revision, a ‘seeing again’ in the light of technical and cultural shifts. Had we only Picasso’s sculptures, graphics, and paintings, we could reconstruct a fair portion of the development of the arts from the Minoan to Cézanne. In twentieth-century literature, the elements of reprise have been obsessive, and they have organized precisely those texts which at first seemed revolutionary. ‘The Waste Land’, Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos are deliberate assemblages, in–gatherings of a cultural past felt to be in danger of dissolution. The long sequence of imitations, translations, masked quotation, and explicit historical paintings in Robert Lowell’s History has carried the same technique into 1970s. The apparent iconoclasts have turned out to be more or less anguished custodians racing through

Conservative, Liquidatory and Resistant Utopias 5 the museum of civilization, seeking order and sanctuary for its treasures, before closing time. In modernism collage has been the representative device. (Steiner G 1975).

But anti-classicism, heresy is also the resistant utopia. If Picasso and Kandinski shared the deep sense, the choices and interests of their times and can therefore be considered classical in that they codified those times once and for all, Paul Klee is a heretic: profoundly immersed in his times, but at the same time on this and that side of them. He is rigorously anticlassical, for the unsettling irony of the heretic is antithetical to the decisive codification of what has become, that the notion of classicism appears to demand. A resistant utopia is Klee’s lack of contemporariness, already living in anticipation of the future, while his penetrating glance manages to lacerate the false conscience of the present (Cherchi 2001a). It is Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1959), which highlights how the whole structure of Blochian philosophy tends towards the future and on the strength of this aims at recuperating the elements of hope contained in the past. These founded hope on objective bases, showing that reality itself, in its deep structures of possibility, is hope: in this is resolved the Blochian ontology of the “not-yet-become. Man, not yet complete, lives looking towards the future: his full realisation has not yet happened, so that for now man is a homo absconditus, whose true reality has yet to emerge. These three categories of utopia enable us both to study the urbanists’ attitudes with regard to the emerging phenomena of the urban world, and to focus better on these phenomena.

Notes 1

For bibliography on “thematisation” of the city, see, among others: Augé 2000; Banerjee 2001; Sorkin 1992; Glaeser et al. 2001; Warren 1994. 2 For bibliography on the subject, see, among others: Caldeira 2000; Elias and Scotson 2004; Lefebvre 2003; Low 2003a; Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1997; Young 2000. 3 For bibliography on the subject, see, among others: Agamben 2003; Bauman 1988, 2005; Davis 1990, 1998; Ellin 1997; Lyon 2002; Virilio 2004. 4 An interesting analysis of the economic and spatial effects of consumerism from the second half of the 17th Century to the present can be found in the book Il significato sociale del consumo, edited by Egeria di Nallo, a collection of articles by contemporary scholars like David Riesman, Pierre Bourdieu, Edgar Morin and Claude Lévi-Strauss (cf. di Nallo 2005). 5 “The utopia gives a sense to life because it requires, against all probability, that life has a sense” as Claudio Magris notes (Magris 1999), utopia gives meaning to

6 Three Categories of Utopia life. “If the Perfect Society is not realistically realisable, nor is it realistic to think we can stop pursuing it.” 6 E Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, Stanford University Press, Stanford California, 2000 (original work Geist der Utopie was published in 1918). 7 T Campanella, La città del Sole, Adelphi, Milano, 1995. 8 “For Alberto Savinio, utopia is a deep mental attitude, which requires adhesion to a model that is both Greek (but pre-Socratic, since with the Socratic discovery of the conscience man loses his original freedom) and humanistic, in the sense of a human condition freed from theocracy. But freed, also, from that ‘residual divinism’ which is the destination of life, i.e. the will to substitute God himself as regards will of creation and power.” (Zampieri 1990). 9 In 1945, Alberto Savinio edited Thomas More’s Utopia in the same series. 10 This makes architectonic and urban space production be reduced to a spatial replica of daily behaviours, as happens among the supporters of “reflective sliding”, in which the said behaviours, the apparent manifestations of the social, become the primary content of architecture, often “at a level of clarity that transforms them into advertisements for themselves.” (cf. Gregotti 1993). 11 The resistant utopia is perhaps represented in literature by Italo Calvino’s book Le città Invisibili (1972), a report of travels through cities which find no room in the geographic atlas. “I think I have written something like a last love poem to cities, at the moment in which it becomes more and more difficult to live in them as cities. Perhaps we are approaching a moment of crisis in urban life and Le città invisibili are a dream born from the heart of unlivable cities.” (Italo Calvino, 29 March 1983).

The Discomposed City

The Formless City Sprawl means “lie in an unseemly manner”, “stretch oneself out untidily”. Many expressions try to portray concise images of the phenomenon: “recumbent city”, “urban liquefaction”,1 “explosion of the city”. Sprawl appears as a city adrift above all because it presents itself as urban growth without shape. In his essay Ciudad distraida, ciudad informe, Xavier Costa (Costa 1996) maintains that the spaces of the modern city were shaped on the logic of mobility, a logic that leads to the uprooting of ideas and places so as to enable universal mobility and global interchange, without restraint, of goods and information. The traditional city, the city organised in a hierarchical, geometric way around an agorà, or central space, is expected to be the constructed expression of stability and permanence, of safety and defence. This traditional city depends not only on its agorà as the centre of organisation, but also on its walls as a new component delimiting and defining the city, distinguishing it from everything that is not part of it. The zone external to the traditional city interests us as a reference base for certain conditions of territoriality that will necessarily be incorporated in the modern city. Places outside the walls were areas of mobility, paths along which merchants and warriors travelled. As engravers of the past have frequently shown us, the territory outside the walls was the place for military deployment, for temporary occupation, fluctuating and always unexpected, of the infantry and its war machines. An illustration by Claude Perrault of the French translation of Vitruvius,2 in particular, eloquently shows the symmetrical, almost spectacular, relationship between the solid city of stone represented by its bulwarks and unassailable walls, and the virtual city of war machines that seemed to build temporary, light simulacrums of the towers and constructions they looked out on.

7

8 The Discomposed City

Recalled by Xavier Costa, this image reminds us how the solidity of the building contrasts with the destructive power of what is mobile, of the war devices that pour out, agile and unpredictable, into extraurban fields. It enables us to understand that the stable, constructive, productive, hierarchising order of the city can only see itself threatened, undermined by a destructive order: this is the logic of the “non-city”, characterised by what is uprooted, destructive, ultimately what is mobile and fluctuating. It is the distracted experience of the wanderer, of the disorientation that produces the formless, the city without shape, i.e. that which is not distinct from the place where it is situated (Costa 1996). In the formless, as happens with sprawl, borders and limits vanish, the difference between figure and background, subject and place, internal and external disappears or is dearticulated. It is as if there were no longer an “inside” and an “outside” in the contemporary city. Even urban science fiction literature has been recording this perception of space for some time. If sociological science fiction of the 40–50s was characterised by the inside-outside spatial dichotomy, from the 80s onwards this distinction no longer appeared to work. In metropolitan post-civilisation the experience of “outside” represented by the country, the non-urban, by nature, seems simply to disappear (to crop up again in the different terms space/cyberspace) and leave room for urban structures which expand and swallow up all that is available of the world. The only physical experience that can be had is the experience of the city, i.e. the limits that compose it internally, the barriers. In current imagery, freedom, deviation from rules will thus no longer be a physical space, but a synthetic space, virtual reality, where places don’t exist. This is how cyberspace was explained to children in Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson (Gibson 1988). At our present moment we recognise the dissolution of the city in terms of order and limits, in the sense that the impact of technology for access to information necessarily entails the transformation of the apparent city – the inherited, constructed city – into a ruin, a place of artistic attraction ready to be consumed (by tourists or others). Perhaps, due to the difficulty of transforming the inherited city into a modern city of pure mobility and pure distraction, there is a tendency to recreate it as supervised stage-sets that, from the theme park to the large mall or airport city, are often a city caricature, reducing its complexity. The contemporary city thus finds itself immersed in a radical redefinition process, leading to a new stage of the process of slow dearticulation of the traditional city.

Crisis of the Context of Proximity 9

Crisis of the Context of Proximity Sprawl also appears to us as the crisis of the context of proximity. In his essay Context follows fiction (Chabard 2002), Pierre Chabard maps out an interesting reflection on the evolution of the concept of context as it moved away from the condition of spatial proximity beginning with Vitruvius. For two chapters of Book VI of De Architectura are devoted to the concept of context as a spatial frame. One chapter, De Aedificis disponendis secundum locorum proprietates, deals with the importance of two factors: a local factor, the region, indicating the regional sphere, and a supra-local factor, inclinationes mundi, indicating the latitude. The other chapter, De Aedificium privatorum proportionibus et mensuris secundum naturam locorum, deals with localisation, the importance of adapting the building to its specific locality. Locus as an operative concept means a particular, specific, qualified place. Locus as a set of physical properties, of external conditions to which a good settlement must suitably adapt. There is a line of continuity between Vitruvius and some scholars of the city who may be defined as “contextual”. Aldo Rossi alludes to the concept of context in his book L’architettura della città, which is an attempt at a scientific approach, systematic at any rate, to “place”, around which Rossi tries to articulate different trends in theoretic reflection going from history to human geography, from sociology to scientific and naturalistic approaches to the city. Aldo Rossi wrote one of the most influential texts of the period, grouping together a certain number of courses and workshops he had carried out as a Professor in Venice. It is the best work published on understanding the relationship between architecture and the city, that Aymonino, Grassi, Gregotti, etc. share in Italy. Knowledge of historic architecture and cities is at the centre of Rossi’s argument. The structural autonomy of the intrinsic knowledge of the discipline is its method. The analogy between ways of working in architecture and the city is the basic hypothesis. Persistence in the way of carrying out architecture in the city, whatever the place and whatever the historical period, is the postulate. Morphological analysis of the parts of the city and the identification of architectonic types with which to work constitute the only knowledge relevant for constructing the city and architecture. Clearly fascinated by the architectures of the foundation periods – early Renaissance architecture, Illuminist architecture, the architecture of the masters of the Modern Movement – the dry, bare language of Aldo Rossi’s suggestions takes us back to the basics, to the fundamental concepts of an architecture realised only as a part of the construction of a city (de Solà- Morales 1994).

10 The Discomposed City

The notion of locus is central. By this term we mean the relationship at the same time particular and universal existing between a given local situation and the buildings found there (Rossi 1966). To the concept of context corresponds the concept of city-place characterised by primary elements and dwellings, where the primary elements are urban “fires”, the monuments representing an invariant, as they do not change in type but in function, and remain as urban propellers through time. To these elements he binds the concept of place. In the 60s and 70s there were a number of similar attempts to theorise on “place”, at the service of a “contextual” architecture. Kevin Lynch inaugurated the cityscape trend in perceptive analysis with his book The Image of the City (Lynch 1960), in which place is the sphere of what is visible and offers itself to man in motion around the city. The perceptive, psychological analysis of phenomena must enable urbanistic and architectural methods to be reformed. Kevin Lynch borrowed conceptual elements from perceptive theories for his research, allowing him to work out a perceptive theory of the city, which he applied to Boston, the only city in the United States that had historical connotations and lent itself to verification of his theories. The central concept is man’s orientation in the city. In some ways it is an introductory concept to the development of research trends with psychological, sociological and geographical matrixes: their objectives concerned – as Paola Pittaluga notes – on the one hand with understanding the modalities by which individuals acquire, store, recall and decode environmental and spatial information; on the other, with pinpointing places of attention belonging to spaces lived in by a society – highlighting the value and significance, the relations linking them, the symbolic projections of which they are the object – and hopes, aspirations and anxieties of the populations inhabiting a territory (Pittaluga 2008).

In order to clarify the spatial images inhabitants have, it is important to emphasise that an individual’s representation of space is derived from psychological and cultural processes, life and daily experience, and reveals a distance from the image obtained by traditional urban and territorial analysis (Lardon et al. 2001, 2003). Representations change because perception of them varies, affected by the hopes and expectations of local societies: a change that may be considered partly external, objective, as the object of perception changes, and partly internal, in the sense that it is the result of a substantial shift of the point of observation of the perception (Maciocco and Tagliagambe 1998). As Edgar Morin notes, when collective meanings are attributed to a given space, this becomes a place on which groups of individuals construct social representations.3 It is acknowledged that the theory of social representations (Fuhrer 1990) has

Crisis of the Context of Proximity 11

heuristic potential for the capacity these have of promoting understanding of the settings of ideas and beliefs that act as mechanisms for socioregulation of social and interpersonal behaviour, or, on the contrary, of group mechanisms which lead to reworking and contextualisation of the said ideas, social norms and beliefs (Breakwell 1993; Vela 1992). Linked with orientation processes is cognitive mapping,4 a research trend whose cultural referents can also be found in the social psychology of the thirties. This has the clarification of space representations as its objective but, unlike the theory of social representations, these are not collective but individual. The environment is considered a producer of stimuli to which individuals are sensitive. Through these stimuli man and environment exchange information on space that the latter then organises in maps which are subsequently translated into guidelines by which to experience the external world. As Paola Pittaluga notes (Pittaluga 2008), the role the environment plays in this process is only apparently passive: its features can help or hinder the cognitive and representational process (Pittaluga 2008). An important contribution to clarifying and interpreting representations, or rather cognitive maps, is provided exactly by Lynch’s work on the definition of a basic taxonomy for the analysis of urban forms deriving from spatial images that individuals construct for themselves in respect of the urban context concerned: routes, margins, areas, nodes and reference points in territorial space (Lynch 1960). Numerous fields of application have been developed on Lynch’s analysis: exploration and learning about space, in which the procedures used are constructed according to the type of knowledge underlying the cognitive processes regarding the perception of the space we wish to acquire (Thorndyke 1983; Golledge et al. 1987; Golledge 1993). Situationism may, for example, be linked with cognitive mapping theories with regard to the modalities in which the development of a psychogeographic theory can produce new representations by the study of the specific effects of the geographic environment, whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. The main practice for perceptively exploring urban spaces is the “dérive” (Debord 1956), a type of free, but critical, walk through urban land, later defined as a way of experimental behaviour tied to the conditions of urban society and a technique for passing through various environments The movement’s approach to urban questions was closely tied to that of Lefebvre (Lefebvre 1971, 1991), who had tried to study the changing conditions of daily life and the urban landscape in a similar way, in France in particular, during the same period. Within this research sphere an important position is held by espace vécu,5 a trend in French geography, the origins of which can be traced back to the beginning of the 70s. The approach features the importance taken on by

12 The Discomposed City

the lived dimension of space, observed regardless of human perception at different levels (urban, periurban, territorial, rural, etc.). The territory or place lived in are “reorganised” spaces in the semiotic sense by a process of social organisation of territorial signs on different scales that Raffestin defines as “territorial ecogenesis” (Raffestin 1986). In lived space places the spatio-temporal convergence of collective and individual practices materialises. Space is adopted as a cultural organisation resulting from interactions between collective representations on the one hand and value systems of the territory on the other (Bélanger and Gendreau 1978). If for Lynch the concept of context has to do with man’s orientation in the city, for Christian Norberg-Schulz, contextualisation is identification with place, as a spatial experience that influences the identity of men. Norberg-Schulz conceptualises place using the expression genius loci, “spirit of the place”, a specific character of some places that have had a particular magnetism in history and over time, in a certain sense a metaphysical connotation (Norberg-Schulz 1979). The book is the first step towards the phenomenology of architecture, a theory which includes architecture in concrete, existential terms and suffers from the influence of Heidegger and the Gestalt theory.6 Genius loci is the incarnation both physical and metaphysical of the stable qualities of a place, as a legitimate context of the settlement project. The settlement, grasping the essence of the place where it is located, can resolve the problem of man’s identification with his environment. The identity of man presupposes the identity of place. It is not enough to say that our environment has a spatial structure able to facilitate orientation; it must consist of objects that allow identification (Chabard 2002). Recent developments that have at their base the epistemological shift from space experienced to space as a centre of values and meanings have been brilliantly explored by Paola Pittaluga (Pittaluga 2008), who describes their convergence towards the formulation of certain theories7 in which the concept of place becomes central. Among these, place-identity, introduced by Proshansky (Proshansky et al. 1983), marks an important turning-point in research on the value and the relational significance of places: the identity of places is considered an important component of the personality of the individual, a sub-structure both cognitive and affective of the identity of the self. The construction of the identity of a place is produced by combining different social and symbolico-cultural dimensions (Holan 1986): in this case environmental perception defines the set of processes by which individuals attribute meanings to their own socio-physical environment. In place-identity two fundamental elements of the psychology of the individual are involved: space understood as having emotive connotations, socially significant from the

Crisis of the Context of Proximity 13 rational, contextual and functional point of view, in that it is the source of opportunities to reach and achieve individual needs and purposes, and time understood as the dimension intervening in the process of hysteresis of past experiences, as regards the places and socioenvironmental spaces that each of us has the chance to frequent or experience cognitively or emotively in our lives. (Pittaluga 2008).

Space and time therefore represent two fundamental dimensions that organise and structure place-identity. To be “contextual”, to consider the place of settlement as its context, means to affirm a priori a certain type of relationship between the two. Contextere means, in fact, firstly, to interlace, intertwine, thread, weave, set up as necessary the interweaving relationship between architecture and what is external to it. This implicit meaning provokes the power and violence of Rem Koolhaas’ iconoclastic formula “Fuck context” that has often been received as the claim of an anticontextual activism, but ought rather to have been the wholesome expression of the limits of the notion of spatial context in architecture (Koolhaas and Mau 1995). But Koolhaas himself recalls the need to place his formula in the context of its enunciation, his manifesto on Bigness. Beyond a certain size, a certain “critical mass”, an architecture may not be imagined with the habitual conceptual categories (scale, composition, unity, identity, etc.). It has access to a sort of autonomy, to an architectural reality of a different type, which itself escapes architecture. The expression “Fuck context” should not, therefore, be interpreted as the will to destroy the place, but as the desire to break, using the extreme case of Bigness, with the absolute, almost religious, need of a relationship, of a weaving of architecture with its immediate spatial frame, a need on which the previous generation had however agreed (Chabard 2002). But also in the tradition of urbanism two different approaches can be recognised which either assert or are indifferent to relations with the context. One approach considers urbanistics as a new discipline that declares itself autonomous and wishes to be thought of as the science of city construction. It postulates the possibility of a complete discipline of urban affairs and has developed theories classified in two currents: one progressive, promoted by the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) and Le Corbusier, with the entity of the Ville Radieuse, which addresses progress and productivity and outlines forms and modalities of the spatial autonomy of buildings and functions; the other culturalist, theorised by Howard with the garden city, a compact, multifunctional model focalising on humanist objectives. Both positions are founded on an identical procedure: a critical analysis of the existing city and the “back to front” working out of a model of a constructible, reproducible city ex nihilo, therefore in a certain sense a-contextual (Choay

14 The Discomposed City

1994a). In the second approach, urbanism also indicates another feature, pragmatic and without scientific pretence. This is regularising urbanism, that regulates, indeed, pre-existing situations, existing contexts. In this case we are dealing with a contextual approach. The most important experiences have been, for example, Cerdà’s Barcelona, Wagner’s Vienna, Hausmann’s Paris, Rasmussen’s Copenhagen. The historic city is involved as one of the parts of the city, but not the centre, in Cerdà’s plan. The Vienna plan contains the first nucleus of services localised in the Ring, to be followed by the other rings of facilities of which the radiocentric scheme designed by Otto Wagner is composed. In Hausmann’s Paris the historic city becomes a space of communication created by Hausmann’s percements. The context also has a temporal dimension developed by the postmodernists as a common reaction against a certain idea of modernity, considered universalistic and anti-historicist. To affirm with the notion of context the need for interlacement with a particular locus is a way of distinguishing architecture from the idea of an international style identical in every place, at every latitude. Place is not, however, just a set of physical properties or features to be matched up, but also an accumulation of tangible traces of the past, indices of a sequence of local historical events into which the settlement is to fit (Chabard 2002). This historicist aspect was particularly manifest in the Roma Interrotta exposition, presented in the summer of 1978 in Rome, where twelve designers,8 the principal promoters of contextualism, summoned by the then Mayor, Giulio Carlo Argan, had to give continuity to Rome, its evolution interrupted by speculation, industrialisation, metropolisation, architectural modernism, etc. According to Argan, Rome had been interrupted: “… because they had stopped imagining it and begun (badly) designing it…”. But what was striking in Roma Interrotta was the multiplicity of interpretations of the context of Rome, a context already voluntarily disoriented with respect to contemporary reality. The heterogeneous juxtaposition of all these projects highlighted a new aspect of context, a sort of intermediate object between the real field of infinite possible situations and the intentions of each designer. For context seems to emerge through a series of operations of selection, sifting, choosing: it is more akin to an invention, at any rate a representation, in a certain sense to fiction (Chabard 2002). We are far from the definition of context as a narrow spatial situation, as a physical and objective environment of the project. If the context depends on an intellectual selection that the designer makes in his reality, then his context is not simply Rome, but becomes a complex cultural field that he has given himself. Thus for Aldo Rossi his context is not simply Rome, but a cultural picture he has given himself and

Crisis of the Context of Proximity 15

which has as reference points: the restoration work of the French Grand Prix de Rome, the designs of German archaeologists, the thermal environments of films by Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. It is the idea that Alberto Pérez-Gómez sums up when he sees “the context in the wide sense of cultural situation and epistemological foundation of the work, which in contemporary hermeneutics is called the universe of the work” (Pérez-Gómez 1966b). 9 If architecture no longer rests on this self-reference, this autonomy, this “classical reason”, then the question is posed of the exteriority of its reference base, of reflecting on its contexts, to perhaps work out a theory. But from what field does the concept of context come? Although this kind of migration is difficult to pinpoint precisely, one of the most probable hypotheses is that it has been borrowed from the linguistics of the 60s. At that moment the theory of intertextuality, proposed in particular by Julia Kristeva (Kristeva 1968), opened up reflection on the context of the literary work and, beyond that, the possibility of a more general theory of the text, such as Roland Barthes was to synthesise in the 70s. Intertextuality for Kristeva is textual interaction produced within a single text. Kristeva considered that the fabric of its influences, its loans and finally its context were no longer external but within the text itself. Context no longer indicates the external circumstances in which a fact is placed, but rather the whole, together with which it is going to make sense, this sense being constructed above all from the inside. The context may therefore be defined as the selection of what, in the real situation will be able to create significant relations with it, the deliberate establishment of that, of which and with which, it will be woven. This linguistic meaning of context paradoxically frees architecture from supremacy and from the sacralisation itself of the locus, which brought it under the fire of an authentic ethics of the local (Chabard 2002). The concept of context as an interior horizon therefore emerges. This can have different interpretations which nevertheless appear characterised by a coevolutive perspective of the relationship between architecture and context that may express itself in different ways, which can be described here by referring to the work of various architects. The relationship with the context consists for example of weaving ties between project and landscape, making the borders permeable. The project is not conceived to adhere to the context, uniting with its features, but to provoke perpetual movement, uncertainty of form, like in the New Opera House in Oslo by the French RMDM group (Catalogue d’Exposition 2002). Perceptions offered to the user and the passer-by stimulate a sensitive experience each time renewable, creating doubt over the unity and stability of a territory that appears mobile and uncontrollable.

16 The Discomposed City

Another coevolutive approach consists of exploring the context with a phenomenological approach to places of intervention, by immersing oneself in their specificity to take possession of their features and develop a contextual project that will lead most of the time to re-examining and rethinking the programme. It is an unusual approach for ancient buildings which are often instead left abandoned, conserved and made aseptic, stripped of their sense and their soul. Respect for the conventional, respectable past arises more and more often with an attitude that might be identified as “façadism” leaving “carcasses” of buildings, for the conscience to be at peace. On the contrary, Manuelle Gautrand’s (Catalogue d’Exposition 2002) PAC (Platforme Autonome Culturelle) project, developing true reflection on the cultural programme, places itself on a vacant building – a terrace of two hundred metres on the Seine waiting for a better future – and strives to work with time. It does not want to transform the place, for the interior of this building already has a large mixture of intersecting functions, but it has placed itself on it, looks inside, and when everything is ready, will be able to expand, progressively taking over the surface area of the existing building. For the dZO (Catalogue d’Exposition 2002) group the points for devising concepts are: negotiation between project and context; gradual opening of the form to the city or to the territory; context not as framing or being framed, but as an active element in the process of conception that is applied leaving room for indeterminate evolution; the reciprocal malleability of form and context. Another modality consists of “borrowing” from the context, drawing from the context to reveal and reformulate it, working with the materials of the specific environment of the intervention and, outside any methodical idea or any rule of the game, agglomerating the fragments of reality to get back a composite image and assert their insubordination to customary reality. This is the approach visible in the works of Avignon-Clouet (Catalogue d’Exposition 2002). For Didier Fiuza Faustino (Catalogue d’Exposition 2002) it is necessary to act on the context, to conceive the project as an extension of the body in an environment that puts it to a hard test, conceive the project for space as a social action. Like art, the project belongs to a process of crystallisation of the event, the occurrence, the happening at the same time as form, becoming the manifestation of immediate history. The points that characterise the position of the dECOI group (Catalogue d’Exposition 2002) are: to get modalities of reciprocal transformation put into action, an interactive game between man become actor and his environment; to consider the impossibility of controlling an environment in its permanent and unpredictable transformations, obliging us to think

Crisis of the Context of Proximity 17

again about processes of conception and production of space; recourse to numerical technologies, both as a model and as an instrument, to explore processes of open, indeterminate generation and get them underway in research on space; production of a fluid, malleable space, the vehicle of features that will “naturally” evolve, in a sudden manner, sometimes reactively in real time in the presence of people. Another approach aims at using the context to transform it, take possession of it and cancel its rules. This is the approach of the Péripheriques (Catalogue d’Exposition 2002) group, where being peripheral means to attack the effects of a system that leads both products and behaviours to normality. For Jacob & Macfarlane (Catalogue d’Exposition 2002) it is necessary to reinterpret the context, reinterpret it critically, to write off the instruments, rules, archetypes, to make room for interventions that affect the features of the environment to extract their form. The distortion of what is real and the explosion of the ground are the results of an action that takes into account the context only to challenge it, upset it: a sort of requisition that causes transformation. This entails fitting form into a logic tending to dismantle the context, making critical, almost political, use of the context considered in its relationship with power. Dubesset & Lyon’s research programme is centred on representation of context, which means activating the environment and revealing it, promoting visual exchange between internal and external. The project is adopted as a pretext for experimenting with the context on the part of the users, as a critical commentary on a situation. This is a political position shared with artists, which results in aesthetics consisting of combined images that re-represent reality. The “environmental project”10 research trend also confronts overcoming the traditional conception of the relationship between settlement and context. The project is not conceived to adhere to the immediate context, like a physical frame that is strictly contiguous, but brings to mind dilation of the concept of inhabiting, favours the adoption of a collective conscience of the “environmental dominants”, places and spatial concepts rich in nature and history that preside over the organised life of a territory, strengthening contiguity between the environmental project and the urban project. In the approaches we have examined, the operation of selection that establishes the context may, in fact, leave the immediate spatial frame of an architecture out of the field and legitimately prefer: determinant spatiality that globalisation or networks impose on the local, the terrestrial biosphere (in the case of bio-architecture) as the last context; places rich in nature and history; total interiorisation of the context of the building. It can

18 The Discomposed City

be seen how the context of an architecture can equally be identified with the internal environment created within its walls, such as happens in buildings made autonomous by the progress of technology, for example, in technical plant design, as is clearly illustrated by Reyner Banham in his book The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Banham 1949).

Crisis of the Ethics of Proximity On the basis of the considerations set out so far, we have to acknowledge that the concept of ethics linked with place is actually getting weaker and weaker. This is the crisis of the ethics of proximity, the “breaking of the links” – to use Giuliana Mandich’s11 expression – the break in a field in which two pairs of elements enter into tension. On the one side the space of contact, on the other the space of distance communication, a tension between opposites inherent in the perceptive dimensions of our spatial life. Sprawl is considered the phenomenon that emblematically expresses the break in proximity. Sprawl is, nevertheless an ambiguous expression that increasingly highlights numerous facets, much potential and many worries. A basic worry of planners is, for example, that sprawl represents an introductory phenomenon to the metamorphosis of the city from being organic and corporeal to being virtual. In this sense, detachment from corporality creates sprawl both in the forms of mental nomadism produced by the tension between anxiety over inclusion in an absolute space and the aspiration of surpassing all boundaries, and in the conditions of terrible mental distortion of a foreigner obliged to make a long metaphorical journey of forced elaboration of concepts from his country to the country of destination (Tagliagambe 2000). But in this journey Franco La Cecla reads the construction of the urban landscapes of globalisation as a search for a new “terrain” of identity (La Cecla 2000).12 The crisis of the ethics of proximity means that our behaviour is more and more influenced by relations that are independent of physical distance. This condition emerges just when the spatial forms of the urban are changing, and different ways of imagining the space of settlement are opening up. A mutation characterised by the dilation – above all mental – of the urban condition beyond a classical concept of the city, causing the emergence of what Massimo Cacciari (Cacciari 1990) defines as the contemporary contradiction between the need to maintain a relationship with places, and the request for mobility which is indifferent to it. It is the necessity for reconciliation of cosmopolitism and rootedness that are present in the city, but also the opposite traits – observation of a specific

Crisis of the Ethics of Proximity 19

place and general scientific knowledge – that also amalgamate in the wellknown figure of the “planetary gardener” proposed by Gilles Clément in his essay Le jardin en mouvement (Clément 1994), and which are at the origin of the two protagonists of the epistolary novel, Thomas et le Voyageur (Clément 1999). The first, Thomas, stays in his house in SaintSauveur: a scholar and practical man, a teacher, he is used to managing/querying what he finds within the limits of his own vegetable garden. The second, the Traveller, is a man of science: used to abstract reasoning, to thinking globally about the functioning of life on the planet. His letters from Africa or Australia make Thomas’ convictions waver on several occasions (de Pieri 2005). “We are getting ready”, Thomas writes, “to reconcile the irreconcilable: on the one hand the state of things – the environment, that you appear to know – and on the other the sentiment drawn from it – the landscape, where I am more at my ease” (Clément 1999). These “traits” that oppose local-sentiment and global-science and also local-landscape and global-environment, remind us that the destiny of “practical reason” in our society has more and more as a premise the assumption that our organised life is increasingly influenced by relations that are independent of physical distance. But how can we reconstruct urban ethics even in a condition of distance from place? This is the common premise from which Antony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman’s positions on the destiny of moral reason in our society grow, positions that have common premises but significantly different solutions as they are at the extremes of a range varying from Giddens’ “radical modernity” to the “morality of spatial and temporal distance” affirmed by Bauman (Giddens 1990 p. 222; Bauman 1993). Arnaldo Bagnasco (Bagnasco 1999) notes that the two sociologists have in common the idea that to understand the present society it is crucial to consider the intensification of the process Giddens calls disembedding: social relations are more and more released from close contexts and engaged in at a distance, our actions therefore being increasingly conditioned by factors for us uncontrollable and unknown, just as, in their turn, they have unpredictable consequences in the long term. The risks are now dramatic and in this situation Giddens recognises the limits of rationality. He nevertheless has faith in the intrinsic reflexive nature of modernity, which permits risks to be assessed and can think of colonising an open, uncertain future. Re-appropriation practices may also be set against disembedding tendencies, which within certain limits bring the conditions and outcomes of the actors’ behaviour back under their control. Bauman’s position is more radical and explicitly touches on the moral dimension, thus taking shape as an “ethical” solution, departing from the idea that traditional moral thought is also in difficulty due to the time and

20 The Discomposed City

space distancing of social processes and their outcomes, since it concerns proximity morals. Moral thought thus ends up being dramatically disarmed in the face of today’s moral problems. So the need prevails for “spatial and temporal distance moral thought” that will take on consequences that are difficult or even impossible to foresee; from this originate both a fear heuristic and a self-limiting ethic, for it only needs one man to be irrational for the others to be so, and for the universe to be so (Borges 1974). The history of the universe abounds with confirmation of this fear. The premises for an organisation of relations not physically constituted open up questions on the destiny of the urban condition – dealt with by Silvano Tagliagambe (Tagliagambe 2000) – in the sense that the mental nomadism of the human condition in boundless, immanent space in Russian philosophy and literature anticipates forms and modalities of the human condition in the network, like a journey beyond the confines of the real world and an aspiration to inclusion in an absolute space. This is a condition examined with effective critical crudeness by Ricardo Dominguez, who, taking the concept of “machine” to extremes and imagining a post-mass media science fiction scenario, dreams of nondigital macro-networks of civil disobedience against the “new order” ratified by globalisation which acts, in its turn, against the “disobedience of reality” (Dominguez 2000). A crucial knot of urban and territorial politics thus affects the new relationships between “territory, economics and society” which form at the border between proximity and detachment from places, reminding the project for the city to register its position with respect to this conceptual geography. For the territorial planning figures that the environment is adopting are increasingly present – its richness in nature and history – as a strategic nucleus for urbanity prospects of territories. If this conceptual background is adopted, the project for the city tends to radically modify the environmental behaviour of inhabitants and in this perspective affects the destiny of our moral reason. Referring to Bauman and Giddens’ (Giddens 1990; Bauman 1993) positions quoted on this theme, they define a range of possible behaviours in respect of the problems presented to our moral reason once the physical relationship with places no longer appears decisive in the definition of territorial behaviours. To reflect on these positions will perhaps enable light to be thrown on conceptual and operative ambiguities underlying the various entities that populate territorial planning, such as urban projects, parks, territorial marketing, etc. The conceptual picture outlined by the positions of Bauman and Giddens might be useful to attempt a clarification of some recurring figures in territorial planning and policies.

Crisis of the Ethics of Proximity 21

If we analyse these positions with regard to environmental policies, Bauman’s “morality of spatial and temporal distance” helps us to understand how some negative values of the past, like fear and selflimitation, have today been turned into values. There are values that we must hand down to future generations, at a great temporal distance; there are interventions that we cannot perform, because they would have a negative reflection at a great spatial distance, far from our eyes. In this position two sorts of practical behaviour very far from each other seem to be recognisable that we can evaluate, for example, with regard to problems of protection of areas of particular environmental interest. Those who support this position think of the protected area as a confined area constituting first of all a service for the collectivity. They consider that the collectivity should work with the aim of conserving these areas for future generations. That major economies should not be invented for these areas, but only marginal economies compared with urban economies, as we are used to understanding them. But in the same position are placed practices in which conservation of resources and understanding of environmental processes are inseparable components for opening up possibilities for new modalities of spatial life of the inhabitants. So the time necessary for awareness raising is the waiting period for new horizons of meaning and new practical developments. Giddens’ position is identified with “radical modernity”. At the centre there is the conviction that it is precisely modern man’s reflexivity that enables him to stop before he ends up in the chasm. This attitude based on the capacity of reflection seems to me nearer to the project, nearer to those situations in which the notion of environment principally recalls the need to structure a local economy. Those who support this position consider that local economies can be built that take into account the relationship between population and environment in a satisfactory way. They believe that within the different territories there may be different visions of the population/environment relationship and its components, that differentiated structural economies with concrete perspectives can be imagined in other terms. In the interval between these two positions there may be mixed situations. At any rate the different nature of public intervention in respect of the patrimony of nature and history is clear; it is – to use two simplifying expressions – “protective conservation” in the first case and “reflective planning” in the second. Both the positions that we have synthetically illustrated refer to the crisis of ethics founded on spatial proximity, in the sense that this is no longer an element able to guide urban and territorial cohabitation in a decisive manner, no longer determinant in an exclusive way on social

22 The Discomposed City

processes and their outcome. This concept, at the base of regionalism, seems to have lost its fecundity. We are therefore faced with an important problem of a conceptual, operative nature: if we do not want to give up urban and territorial conviviality, we have to imagine other models of urbanity, in which urban ethics can be reconstituted.

Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity Françoise Choay maps out a brilliant analysis of “liquefaction” of the city caused by the spatial impacts of the industrial revolution (Choay 1994a). This analysis also enables us to interpret urban phenomena from the viewpoint of liquidatory, conservative or resistant utopias. It is, for example, the Deus ex machina technique that pulls the strings of the liquidatory utopias of the city, starting from the great cataclysm of the environment of the 19th Century. The role played by technology in the mutation of the European city has been too unknown not to be privileged. Technology was simultaneously and directly involved both in the morphogenesis of urban space and in the genesis of urban behaviours and mentalities, especially with regard to the change in the statute of the urban plant, progressively become an exploded object made up of buildings transformed into autonomous technical objects, freed from any contextual articulation or dependence, while citizens extended the field of action and transformed their experience of space and time and the structure of their behaviours (Choay 1994a). From the beginning of the 20th Century, however, signals heralding an imminent deconstruction of the European city had not been lacking, such as, for example, the model of the Ciudad Lineal, which was destined to suppress urban concentration and densification. In 1882 a Spanish intellectual, Arturo Soria y Mata, published in the Madrid daily newspaper El Progreso, an early project of a linear city, the outcome of his reflection on the new transport and telecommunications technology and its social effects. Instead of imagining the process of communication generalised, like urbanisation, in terms of homogeneous, multidirectional explosion, he conceived it in a purely linear form: a street 500 metres wide that could be indefinitely extended, which grouped together the transport routes (railways, tramways, roads), the technical networks of water distribution, gas, electricity and telephone, as well as municipal services and parks.13 Soria thus imagined an unbroken “linear city” from Cadiz to St. Petersburg, posing for the first time the problem of human settlement on a world scale.

Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity 23

The same pattern of development was taken up at the end of the 20s in the Soviet Union by a group of engineers and architects for whom linear settlement meant the abolition of the city, and they named themselves “disurbanists” (Choay 1994a). But the principal liquidatory utopias correspond to the ideas developed in the years of radical inventions between 1917 and 1929, which led to a first attempt at theoretic ecumenism, as almost literal applications of a specific doctrine. The CIAM, in particular, tried to put together the experience of different European cities to establish a common methodology and doctrine: the “functional city” was to substitute the ancient, obsolete, historic city so that efficacy of the urban system and the happiness of individuals could coexist.14 The Ville Radieuse (Le Corbusier 1933) may serve as a paradigm to schematically define CIAM urbanistics, of which Le Corbusier was the inspirer in 1928 and afterwards one of the main protagonists. Ville Machine and the disappearance of urbanity were for Françoise Choay two associated concepts, since the utopia of the Ville Radieuse presented itself as the systematic deconstruction of all previous types city, of all forms of continuous, articulated agglomeration, of a possible role of ancient centres as nuclei giving dynamism to a new development, as had happened in Hausmann’s Paris and Wagner’s Vienna. For this reason it can be conceptually considered liquidatory, but also effectively liquidatory, due to the international influence without equal that it exerted on territorial and urban planning after the Second World War. The proposals of the first CIAM congresses, including the Charter of Athens of 1933, were more hypotheses than realities, but in the later post-war period ideas on the modern city were able to take off because the partial or total destruction of cities had converted them into fields open to experimentation (de SolàMorales 1994). At the same time the “total experiences” of third world countries, realised on a new base and in complete independence from what existed, such as, for example Le Corbusier’s Chandigarn in India, or Costa and Niemeyer’s Brasilia in Brazil, made manifest the schematism with which liquidatory utopias conceived the complex processes of formation of new cities. This schematism, a model of a complete city underpinning a project for the global society, belongs to the conservative utopias, its anachronistic nature being in a conception of modernity linked with the re-proposal of completed forms, crystallized, abstract, even diagrammatic, of the city, rather than the awareness of the processes and new systems of relations that feed urban complexity. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City (Howard 1898), is a figure of conservative utopia for its emblematic value does not lie in participation,

24 The Discomposed City

symbolic or concrete, in the process of disgregation of the European city, but in the antagonistic reaction it has against it, with its fixed, discreet model of the pre-industrial city and its intrinsic rural quality. But, in spite of appearances, the attempts to give a finished form to the city that developed between the 1950s and 60s are also conservative utopias, with the ambition to solidify the liquefaction of the city, refusing too difficult reality, or reality too unpleasant to be faced. Neo-historicist suggestions appear also in this case. The history of urban forms, so illuminating for understanding the past and dealing with ancient fabric, has served as a guarantee of “ludic historicism” (Choay 1994a) and has legitimised the projection of overdue models of the post-modernist architects, a utopia emblematically conservative because it gives the prospect of “the idea of a better life” relegating it inevitably to the memory of a mythical past. The resistance of the image of the discreet city is also tied to the persistence of another image and another illusion, that of the eternal city, celebrated in 1978 by the Roma Interrotta exhibition. But, for Antoine Grumbach (Grumbach 1994), Roma Interrotta goes beyond the simple exercises of “gymnastics of the imagination on the parallel bars of memory”, to recall Giulio Carlo Argan’s expression in his inaugural speech. The question posed in filigree in Roma Interrotta is that of the future of the past of urban forms, faced, on the one side, with the excesses of the safeguarding and promotion of the historic value of urban fabric and, on the other, the indifference of urban renewal with regard to history and the mechanisms of formation of the fabric constituted. As Grumbach (Grumbach 1994) emphasises, this is a case nevertheless of a situation that is unique, where the Mayor of a capital city is a great intellectual, for whom Roma Interrotta will become the concrete expression of cultural motivation for the city, already nurtured by numerous writings, all published in the 60s and 70s.15 All the proposals support the thesis according to which history is an instrument on the architect’s sketch-pad, and the context the material of urban operations. The form of the city of tomorrow is written in the traces of its history. This unwritten conviction, shared by all the participants, produced, however, extremely different expressions and positions. The heterogeneous juxtaposition of all these projects highlights – as has already been said in previous pages – a new aspect of the context, intrinsically connected with the mental universe of each designer, and for this reason more akin to an invention, a representation, in a certain sense, fiction. Conservative utopias do not rest only on neo-historicist temptations, but also on all those defined “pseudotechnical utopias” (Choay 1994a) by Maymont, Friedman and Schöffer, megastructures designed to crystallise the city that is discomposing, attempts to design the

Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity 25

collective city with strokes of large agglomerations that represent, in Reyner Banham’s words, the desperate intent of virtuous architects to take power again over a political and technical world from which they were feeling increasingly excluded. Never, after the 60s in Paris, would so many architects be seen to propose at the same time such an “impertinent” vision of non-city, halfway between the pure utopia and the ghost of potentially constructible realizations (Vayssière 1994). Like Ludovico Quaroni’s Italian megastructures (Astarita 1994) at Lagune di San Giuliano, which tackle the theme of the residential megastructure in an attempt to find the principal instrument of control of the urban scale in the form proposed. Leonardo Ricci in 1963 also proposed a residential megastructure in the Sorgane quarters up in the hills of Florence, which had the ambition of correcting the errors of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, practically reduced to a building-hotel lacking in organicity (Vayssière 1994), and of creating, starting from zero, a piece of city. Some of Vittorio Gregotti’s projects refer to another meaning of megastructure, near to city-territory, such as the 1971 project for a new site for the University of Florence, but above all the project for the University of Calabria, a gigantic structure of a linear bridge, on which the units of settlement are attached crosswise, and which depicts the territorial future of urban form. With respect to these positions, the resistant utopia presents itself as an example of reciprocal integration of past and present. It characterises those positions that, in the face of city deconstruction, have managed to involve the experience of the past in the fecundation of our times, but with the heresy of those who live already anticipating the future. Françoise Choay refers to this, attributing these features to “regularising urbanism”, thus indicating a pragmatic character without scientific pretence of the project for the city compared with the need to face the spatial and social impacts of the industrial revolution. Hausmann, Stübben, Wagner, Cerdà, Hénard, Prost and Jaussely were the protagonists of this approach, with which another approach is contrasted, rich in theoretical elaboration, that supports a new discipline declaring itself autonomous and considering itself the science of the conception of the city, critical analysis of the existing city and the working out “on the contrary” of a model of a constructible, reproducible city ex nihilo, and includes the progressive positions of the CIAM and Le Corbusier and the culturalist positions of Howard (Choay 1965, 1980). Targeting a past future of the city characterised by sprawl, Françoise Choay calls the “last figures of urbanity” (Choay 1994a) those cities that were the most effective field of regularising urbanistic experiments to face the process of deconstruction of the European city: Paris, Vienna and Barcelona.

26 The Discomposed City

Hausmann’s Paris, which left its imprint on the majority of European cities, is a resistant utopia for its boundary value “as the outcome of one tradition and departure point of another” (Choay 1994a). The involvement of the historic centre in the construction of the new city is total. The new city is born of the “regularisation” that the Prefect imposed on it by the percements, taking the old quarters from their isolation and making the entire city a system of communications. But trying above all to find in the new state of the metropolis spatial reconciliation between the social relations of proximity of the pre-industrial city and the anonymous, fleeting, cosmopolitan relations of the industrial metropolis that discovers the crowd, explored by the Baudelairian flâneur. In Otto Wagner’s Vienna the historic centre has a different dynamising role. In contrast with Paris, Wagner’s project gives shape to a radiocentric, though not hierarchical, model. The annular arteries of the model take on the role of service axes, with the Ring being the first annular artery, but not the only one, since the new city with its demands cannot have a single centre in the historic centre. The radial arteries support a system of agglomeration units (stellen) along the radials. This road system, infinitely extendable, does not define the finished form of the city, but the generating structures for its evolution. In a certain sense, it enables the city to grow without discomposing (Choay 1994a). In Barcelona Ildefons Cerdà was the protagonist of an urbanistic experience that has many conceptual similarities with the previous ones.16 He did not design the finished form of the city but its generating structures, that are founded on the interconnection of two orthogonal grids of a different scale, a larger grid crossed by diagonals and destined for heavy territorial traffic, and a smaller grid destined for light local traffic which cuts out blocks constituting the basic urban element, a sort of unit of life and neighbourhood. In this way Cerdà also tried to organise cohabitation between the personal social relations of the pre-industrial city and the new social relations breaking out in the metropolis. The historic centre becomes an integrating part of the new city through the spatial model of the double grid that puts it into a relationship “with a territory virtually enlarged over the whole of Europe” (Choay 1994a). The resistant utopia figure is present in the role the historic centre adopts in these experiences, as the will to demonstrate that “the experience of the past continues to give evidence of values that keep intact an internal susceptibility to reconsideration” (Cherchi 2001, p. 80), as the place of transformation in Hausmann, as one, but not the only, centre-point of services in Wagner, as one of the parts of the new city in Cerdà. In Barcelona indeed the comparison between the ways in which the historic centre is dealt with by Cerdà’s plan and that of Rovira y Trias, winner of

Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity 27

the competition for the regulatory plan for the Catalan city, is emblematic. Cerdà involves the historic centre in the city project without attributing an improbable central role to it but integrating it in the double spatial grid system, while Rovira y Trias proposes a plan featuring a radiocentric scheme that puts the historic centre in the middle of the new city, underestimating the problems of spatial organisation that the industrial revolution posed for the city. But Wagner himself in Vienna drew up a radiocentric scheme whose functioning puts the different parts of the city on the same level. In this sense he contrasted a modern vision of the scheme with the tritely hierarchical interpretation of the radiocentric model by Rovira y Trias. If the resistant utopia presents itself as “an example of reciprocal integration of past and present”, Gustavo Giovannoni’s (Giovannoni 1913) realist anticipation of the future of settlements in the advanced technological society rightly interpreted this utopian figure for its capacity of understanding the role of historic patrimony as a local organisational scale in a dialectic relationship with the territorial one revealed by the large communications and telecommunications networks. Faced with the deconstruction that had taken place, there was a flowering in the 80s of negative liquidatory utopias narrated by science fiction literary trends dealing with sprawl as a lethal phenomenon for the city. “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” With this sentence William Gibson begins Neuromancer, inaugurating the cyberpunk era and the so-called “sprawl trilogy” (Gibson 1984, 1986, 1988), the portrayal of a marginal humanity swarming in the urban environment, nocturnal and degraded, the undisputed protagonist of the three novels, where characters disappear and reappear with different names, not always easy to reconstruct. Science fiction of the city no longer has a moral function like when it warned us of the dangers of the industrial city, but has adopted an informative function, and can only give a chronicle of what happens in the megalopolis. To negative utopias correspond positive conservative utopias. The small city is defended with moralism by Leon Krier: to wipe out sprawl we must go back to the size of the small pre-industrial city. It is probable that the Prince of Wales, Prince Charles’ project workshop, his Poundbury, in Dorset, and a refuge in the fine world of the past, offer better urban quality, but it will probably use, as soon as it can, the commodities of the generic city, contradicting the ethical bases of the model. New Urbanism, an urbanistic trend promoted by Peter Calthorpe, tries to condense the ideals of the Garden City. For Calthorpe, the American suburbs should behave like small urban nuclei with their “pedestrian pocket” and with a centre of public transport reachable on foot in ten

28 The Discomposed City

minutes. Theorist and founder of New Urbanism, as well as first Chairman of Congress of New Urbanism, Calthorpe rethinks the American city with an entirely innovative approach aimed at redefining the limits of urban development.17 Initially New Urbanism was defined as a “neotraditionalist” type of planning, in that it was inspired by urban models of the pre-war period. Its application was not addressed exclusively to new planning areas, but rather to degraded urban areas to be recuperated and reused, with a view to reviving the existing buildings and containing indiscriminate growth. Little by little New Urbanism encountered the favour of local governments, architects, urbanists, investors and citizens, since it was the discipline required to manage to channel urban growth into a physical form more in tune with the quality necessary for human existence. By combining his visionary images with territorial, economic and social reality, Calthorpe achieved widespread consensus. Even the Governess of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, began to rely on the New Urbanists in consultations over reconstruction. The newborn Louisiana Recovery Authority chose Calthorpe to develop a long-term regional plan for the areas devastated by floods following the hurricane. The idea that New Urbanists like Calthorpe could collaborate on drawing up plans for a new Gulf Coast raised much criticism. Eric Owen Moss, the Director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture reported to the Washington Post in October that the New Urbanists were finding space on the Gulf Coast because their programme brought to mind “an anachronistic image of the Mississippi winking at the good old days of the Old South, slow, well-balanced and airy, where everybody knew his own role”. Mike Davis has defined the New Urbanists an “architectural cult”. So how has New Urbanism managed to acquire a stronghold on the Gulf Coast so quickly? The Congress for New Urbanism, founded in 1993, promotes objectives that every architect can support, at least in theory: get suburban sprawl under control, link the new settlements with collective mass transport, make quarters more habitable both for pedestrians and cars.18 But the architects and urbanists loyal to modernist principles have denounced for years not just the neo-historicist approach, but also the fact that beneath the principles of New Urbanism was an idea of new building that deformed the inheritance of the modern movement and was too friendly towards constructors. This exposed the New Urbanists to recurrent criticism of a conscious complicity with a model of development far less illuminated than it claimed to be (Hawthorne 2005). Nostalgic architectonic forms apart, it is not clear how this type of settlement helps to contain sprawl or break up the love story between the Americans and the private car. To construct quarters fit for pedestrians and

Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity 29

public transport requires significant, painful changes in our cultural priorities. But the New Urbanism projects do not request any sacrifices from their potential homebuyers. Instead what both propose is the idea – an idea that the American consumer finds irresistible – that we can turn the clock back to a culture having greater ties and neighbourhood, without giving up the garage for three cars and other not very environment-friendly luxury goods we are used to. Anyway, the debate on the growing influence of the New Urbanists in reconstruction work after Katrina, and the way it has begun to bounce from the Gulf Coast to Washington, D.C. and as far as southern California, has ample developments for contemporary urbanistics (Hawthorne 2005). But sprawl is also considered a different modality of city construction as a space of relations and interaction. Joel Kotkin uses the expression “new suburbanism” (Kotkin 2006) to define the positive prospects of the process of peripherisation of the city maintaining that, even though Lewis Mumford defined the outskirts the “anti-city”, the outskirts are actually a reinvention of the city. “It is probable that, compared with those of the city, suburban inhabitants will be more inclined to vote, go to church and accept involvement in school and community. The idea that they are alienated individuals is simply a myth. We should also remember that the outskirts are in a very early phase of evolution. I think they represent not the end of urbanism but its triumph in a completely new form and dimension.” (Kotkin 2006). Studying the negative correlation between urban density and the increase in births, Kotkin maintains that as a rule, when a population has achieved a certain degree of education and acculturation in terms of urban life, if the people live in a high density area, they will not have children. Seoul has become one of the most densely populated cities on the planet and has experienced one of the greatest collapses ever seen in the world in the number of births. Once worried about over-population, by 2050 the country will catch up with Japan as to the level of ageing. The fact is, that if people live in a culture where they have to wait till the age of 40 to buy a 50 sq.m apartment in a huge block, they will obviously not have children. One of the reasons why Americans and Australians are more prolific – Koktin emphasises – is that they have much more space. Only the lesseducated, first generation immigrants will have children even where space is lacking. In 2005, the book L’esplosione della città came out, summarising the outcome of a comparative analysis on urban diffusion in some European urban areas and cities. The authors interpret the phenomenon as spontaneous geography in which a continuous need for cities is evident against any antiurban hypothesis, almost a resistant utopia. The hypothesis

30 The Discomposed City

is that diffusion has dimmed an underlying phenomenon, the tendency of the territory to “metropolise”, i.e. the tendency for integration of different urban aggregates and also of territories with widespread urbanisation, a different, more enlarged modality of constructing relations and interdependence (Indovina et al. 2005). Among these there is also a landscape planner like Frederick Steiner, whose position on “saturnal planning” applied to the Sonora region in the Mid-West United States, outlines the possibility of “planning good sprawl” (Steiner F 1994, 1995). These are definitions belonging to the resistant utopia, in which the instance of integration of past and present lies in the concept of city as a space of relation, as the will to demonstrate that the experience of relation of the space of contact of the past continues to keep intact an internal susceptibility to reconsideration in the urban language and space of our time. This conception of sprawl may also be referred to positions that belong, for example, to Regional Planning, a planning trend created by the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), founded on 18 April 1923 in New Jersey. Projectual exploration and garden-city practice, tying up with Howard, are the prime inspiring guidelines. The Garden City scheme fit in well with the principles of “The Fourth Migration” which, according to Downing’s expression, considered nature a friendly partner in the construction of the city. This is a utopia because it features great experimentalism, including the awareness that this is a model to be adapted to the American context. In some ways the project follows a model that is considered one of the first forms of planning process and one of the first examples of American community planning. Thus, ways of letting ethnic minorities into the community were envisaged, optimal dimensions for the functioning of collective services and the interpretation of the model in the light of American legislation on land use. The group worked on the project using a different method from that traditionally applied in architecture. A multidisciplinary group was organised to make use of the contributions of consultants external to the association. Completion of the garden city of Radburn needed, according to Mumford, to be in a regional sense, since one garden city alone would be a mere artistic object. The theme of the low-density city was faced here for the first time with a comprehensive regional plan that included many garden cities (polycentric model of small and medium cities), an objective that could not be realised due to the lack of interest of the political class and the impresarios. This was the event that, according to Peter Hall, led to the professional break between Stein and Wright and had repercussions on the winding-up of the RPAA.

Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity 31

The background to RPAA activity is represented by various phenomena: the weakening of conservationist policy due to the First World War, the 1920 Census, which showed how city inhabitants exceeded for the first time the number of inhabitants of rural areas, the collapse of Jefferson’s dream of a nation based on widespread small agricultural communities (family farms), urban concentration, and metropolitan explosion, which required the triggering of planned forms of growth. The New York State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning Report (1926), the first example of planning on a state level, refers to the idea of a widespread city region which was to be created following the The Fourth Migration, an image evoked by Mumford to represent the exodus from the city metropolises towards the surrounding region. The Fourth Migration is Mumford’s interpretation of the socio-geographical theories of society worked out by Geddes in Cities in evolution of 1915.19 The first migration coincided with the process of urbanisation that followed the great migrations westwards. The second migration corresponded to industrialisation becoming established and greater ease of movement due to the expansion of the railways, directing the population flow towards towns and river valleys. After the civil war, growing technological progress produced the third migration towards large cities, causing congestion in metropolitan centres. The Fourth Migration, due to the spread of automobiles, communications and the transmission of energy at a distance, was to lead to the retrieval of links with the non-urban environment lost in the previous migrations. The RPAA members’ resistant utopia consisted of proposing an alternative to the centralised metropolitan society, profit-oriented, with a territorial one that was more decentralised, more concentrated on social values and grafted onto regions that were well-balanced in terms of their environmental profile. It is in this sense that the alternative proposal to Thomas Adams’ Regional Plan of New York and its Environs and the ironic and disparaging use of the expression “metropolitan planning” should be considered, which the RPAA had Henry Wright pronounce to fail the New York plan proposed by Adams himself in 1926, a plan that for Mumford in 1932 resembled a pudding. In The Story of Utopias of 1922 (Mumford 1922) where the concept of regional balance and interrelation appears, Mumford recognises the weakness of the utopia due to its maturation outside the complexity and diversity of the environment in which men live. The challenge is to take our utopia from inside the world of ideas and bring it into contact with the real world. This is the resistant utopia: to build a method to put together the pieces of our fragmented world, a base on which to construct livable

32 The Discomposed City

communities, create relations between arts/sciences and the problems and conditions of specific regions and communities. The territorial future of the city as a resistant utopia – in this case as a need to prove the fecundity of the languages of our time in the languages of tradition – is present both in Giancarlo De Carlo’s reflections on the form of the territory and on the concept of city-region (De Carlo 1962), and in the experience of Adriano Olivetti’s Comunità movement in Italy (Olivetti 1960), which faced the themes of inter-municipal relations and those between city and rural area, taking on the role of design and projectual invention within an interactive process favouring selforganisation. The Comunità movement was born in 1948 as a new organisation that was at the same time a protest (against party regime) and testimonial (that it is possible to create a new system capable of giving freedom and welfare to all Italians). The main experience was that of the Canavese League of Councils which proposed the unity of local policies and an inter-council plan, this being a fundamental instrument in the debate on the construction of the Turin-Ivrea motorway due to possible repercussions on the territory, linked in particular with the choice of route. Olivetti’s resistant utopia is a concrete utopia, compared with that of the “pre-urbanists”20 who were searching for somewhere else, though not a real, precise place. But since none of the existing towns seemed able to satisfy the desire for happiness, justice, freedom and solidarity animating the utopian writer, Olivetti started with a decidedly concrete fact: a business company known throughout the world. Olivetti understood the role of the new electronic technology that heralded the spread of mass informatics, and especially the cardinal role of territorial planning in defining the community. In his role as a designer within a “concrete community”, the urbanist should not propose pre-established destinations, for his task consists more of discovering them and above all helping the community to give itself a purpose. The new city would therefore be brought alive and enhanced by the discovery of its vocations. Olivetti drew attention to the need to make urbanistics responsible by giving this the important role it deserved, seeing that it was instead “reduced to inspiring small municipal police measures to regulate traffic. We wanted something quite different!” This was a reflection that showed Olivetti’s thinking opening up to the macro dimensions of urbanistic policies. From this the need arose for an instrument that would lead to a “great synthesis” of the territory: regional plans and coordination of them with economic programmes; regional plans for “the defence of man” that enabled the balance that had been lost between agriculture and industry to be restored. Olivetti left us ample reflection on the concept of “region”, for example on the great need for distinguishing whether the term “region”

Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity 33

corresponds to a traditional historic or geographic entity, or whether it is an artificial creation empirically useful for studying a particular area, a reflection that also materialised with the participation in the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) plans for the populations hit by the Second World War.21 The “territorial city” of Fernando Clemente, the Italian urbanist distinguished for his highly environment-oriented conception, may also be considered a resistant utopia. The “environmental project” is the disciplinary trend characterising it which, in order not to be considered a slightly ambiguous formula, requires interpretation in different terms from the usual. The expression “environmental project” is associated with a form of action of a community that constitutes its own life environment through processes in which the planner participates by contributing his specific knowledge and his ethical intentionality to stimulate collective awareness of the environmental dominants that preside over the formation of the settlement, and to promote the sharing of coherent outcomes of the organisation of settlement space. The term “environmental” – the abuse of which has unfortunately diluted its density – takes on an overall meaning in the sense that processes and outcomes are interpreted adopting as a reference base not only the physical environment, but also the salient stories with which the population identifies itself, activities and places of a territory as a shared background from which construction action emerges of an environment that is favourable for organized life. In its turn, the term “project” envisages a non-formalistic vision built up of requisites no longer sectorial but involving the entire environment and requiring dense articulation of relations between environmental system, project drafting and urbanistic action, for space organisation. Projectual orientation is thus characterised by the search for coherence of interventions within nonresolute plan forms, but which include the extended time of the values of an environment endowed with its own identity that it is possible to bring to the light as shared outcomes of community processes. Moving from a resolute conception towards a more complex conception of projectual orientation that envisages the interpretative and cognitive functions belonging to a specific environment, urbanistic action, building itself on argumentative forms tied to its environmental constitution, is legitimised in that it is an integrating part of the life of a settled community.22 But sprawl also evokes a liquidatory utopia. It may be considered the outcome of a process of self-organisation but, being market-determined, it generates processes of social selection, segmentation and discrimination. In this sense it reminds us of the liquidatory utopia, in that it admits and certifies the “already become”.

34 The Discomposed City

The liquidatory utopia may be described, for example, by Robert Bruegmann’s (Bruegmann 2006) reflections on sprawl, who departs from historic legitimisation of the phenomenon. … in the last 500 years at least the main development of the rich cities throughout the world has been growth outwards, characterised generally by a decrease in density of population and the thrust of the wealthy ranks in one direction and of the less wealthy in the other. This type of development characterised ancient Rome, it has characterised London since the 17th Century and characterises today’s American cities. For actually, almost everything nowadays considered central in a city has been, in some moment in history, peripheral. For this reason I am sceptical about the history of suburbs discipline. If applied properly, this field would coincide completely with that of urban history… The idea that in the 21st Century it is useful to suddenly prevent cities expanding further is for me decidedly debatable. Projects that try to block growth outwards by imposing limits on development, from immediate post-war London to today’s Portland, in Oregon, have produced many undesirable effects, including in particular restrictions on the supply of land and the high transfer costs of the excessive impact on the lowest socio-economic band of the population. (Bruegmann 2006).

Bruegmann argues against the reasons of the environmentalist groups who in the 90s strongly fuelled the movement fighting uncontrolled urban development, accused of the problem of global warming. Bruegmann maintained the thesis that global warming seemed in every way to be a problem worthy of note, but the link between this phenomenon and urban development was weak. The fundamental problem is not in housing dynamics but in the inefficient use of the old technology and excessive recourse to fossil fuels. If we depart from this premise, we cannot understand why a widely disseminated urban form cannot use energy with greater efficiency and pollute less than a city with high demographic density. If we lived in a society where each settlement had a couple of acres of land at their disposal, the entire energy requirements could be satisfied on a local level by exploiting Aeolian, solar and geothermic energy. Thanks to low and high technology solutions, the concrete possibility would be realised that a large number of people would no longer need to rely on the distance communications system that became necessary for sustaining the industrial cities of the 19th Century (Bruegmann 2006). Finally, according to Bruegmann, the opinion of sprawl is spoilt by a weakness in the debate on uncontrolled urban development, which, being founded on the compact model of the 18th Century city, lacks both any curiosity with regard to other possible urban models and any interest in the way in which technological innovation can shape the future. The network city is also a liquidatory vision in that it “dismisses” the widespread concepts of urban strategy, which are today surpassed by the

Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity 35

entry on the scene of a new paradigm of network that urban geographers have adopted in an attempt to adapt words to things that happen in the urban field. But above all because the network metaphor is the reproduction of the “already become”, for it reproduces its course with surprising precision. The expression network city in effect emphasizes the importance relations take on in the new “kingdom of the urban” that are linked with mobility and “material” and “immaterial” communication flows of data. “Urban network” and “city network” are expressions that have been in use for some time in urban geography to indicate groups of cities linked together by regional, national or transnational relations (Dematteis 1990). Networks of interurban relations are certainly not a novelty, but – as the French geographer Jean Gottmann underlines – in our times they have spread universally with such intensity, density and variety as to dominate the life of most regions (Gottmann 1991). It is this fabric of industrial, commercial, cultural and finally political relations that enables us to see how, in spite of regional and national resistance, the tendency towards “globalisation” has materialised and how a network of global cities is being born, an “intercity geography”, as Saskia Sassen defines it (Sassen 2006b). Radical overcoming of the habitual representations of the urban world has, moreover, been underway for some time, where cities are basically seen as discrete entities, definite images with a definable perimeter even when their dimension takes on a territorial character. In the contemporary urban panorama these situations are still present, predominantly in less developed areas, but now they are increasingly being assigned to a secondary role compared with other types of city that have started to occupy the stage of the contemporary urban theatre. We are dealing with networks of cities that are recognisable in the most recent forms of “selective polarisation” typical of the metropolitan areas, which causes the role top cities are playing to emerge, in the competition between cities with regard to attracting valuable functions and with regard to transregional and transnational dilation of the area of influence (Gibelli 1990). For this polarisation is in fact based on functions connected with high technology, research and development, decisional functions and financial control, and ideological and cultural orientation, which preside over contemporary modalities of urban development. Thus the concept of urban strategy changes radically, shifting from the traditional task of regulation of development – also because the area of expansion has ended – to a position that tends to minimise urban risk, the loss a city can undergo with respect to the external world. Cities are, in this sense, preparing their urban strategies to get ready for the new scales of

36 The Discomposed City

urbanity with interventions to improve the “urban machine”, such as modernisation of transport and telecommunications networks, but also with interventions tending to illuminate the shared natural and historic background of an urban area. In this metropolitan picture, in which there seems not to be any escape for other cities, cohabitation in great dignity is seen on the part of urban situations, networks of small and medium cities, whose vitality is indifferent to the closeness of centres of a higher rank and whose localising conditions due to their activities are indifferent or insensitive to traditional factors of localisation, such as proximity of demand, economy of scale, etc. For these reasons Giuseppe Dematteis defines these networks of cities as “localization-indifferent”. Such situations are not, however, indifferent, indeed they are particularly sensitive to other factors, like less urban congestion, environmental quality, accessibility, lower cost of work and collaborative attitude of administrations. They include those cities that are capable of rediscovering in their own past, in the inseparable relationship between population and places, the strength to put into effect knowledge with a degree of rarity such as to enable these situations to participate in this new world of cities (Dematteis 1985a, 1988, 1990).23 To the interaction between the metropolitan level and this type of network of cities would correspond, as a strong image of urban suggestion, the megalopolis, the pluri-city that Gottmann pinpointed already in the 60s as the new, emerging urban structure of the more developed countries. In its turn, the megalopolis would be the densest part of a single, planetary, network system on a metropolitan level, for which Doxiadis had coined the term ecumenopolis (Doxiadis and Papaioannou 1974). In this metropolitan picture, almost a symbol of a liquidatory utopia, the small and medium city networks are in some ways resistant utopias in that we recognise in them cities that are capable of rediscovering in their own past, the inseparable relationship between population and places.

Notes This is the expression adopted by Bruno Taut in the book Die Auflösung der Städte, Hagen, Volkwaang Verlag, 1920. Bruno Taut’s production, still exemplary today, both if studied, and if restored (e.g. in the outskirts of Berlin), translates the search for local counterpoint in the face of the process, fully taken on by the Auflösung der Städte, of liquefaction of the city, as is the title of Taut’s book. 2 Vitruve, Les dix livres d'architecture, corrigés et traduits en 1684 par Claude Perrault, Pierre Mardaga Editeur, Paris, 1988. 3 “Culture, distinctive of human society, is organised/organises by the cognitive vehicle made up of language, from the collective cognitive capital of acquired knowledge, learnt know-how, experiences lived, historic memory, mythical beliefs 1

Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity 37 of a society. Thus ‘collective representations’, ‘collective conscience’ and ‘collective imagination’ are manifested.” (Morin 1991). 4 Cf. Ittelson 1973; Downs and Stea 1973; Downs 1981; Duncan 1987; Soja 1989; Jameson 1991; Duncan and Ley 1993. 5 The following may be a useful brief collection on espace vécu and on the concept of lived and daily life. Lefebvre 1972; Frémont 1976; Bourdieu 1980; Buttimer and Seamond 1980; de Certeau 1984; André 1989; Di Mèo 1996, 1998. 6 In the sense that perceptive experience is made up of dynamic processes organised according to autonomous structural principles: the function of the parts is determined by the organisation of the whole. A circle, for example, may be black or red, large or small, and so on, but still maintains unchanged its own global characteristic of circularity. Unlike other movements of thought characterised by naïve globalism, a generic and often irrationalist globalism, gestaltism introduces the new globalist examples into the context of rigorously experimental research. 7 Theories formulated by some trends of environmental psychology, deriving more from social psychology than from the psychology of perception-cognition. Usually defined as the discipline that studies interactions and reactions between people and their environment, it conceives space and place as elements susceptible of activating three types of mental process in an individual: cognitive representations associated with these, the sentimental reactions triggered, the behaviours induced or hindered. On the evolution of environmental psychology over the last 20 years (cf. Gifford 1987; Proshansky 1987; Stokals and Altman 1987; Bonnes and Secchiaroli 1992; Kitchin et al. 1997; Baroni 1998; Bechtel and Churchman 2002). 8 Roma Interrotta is the event that in an emblematic way celebrates this illusion. The historian and art critic, Carlo Argan, Mayor of Rome, inaugurated the Roma Interrotta exposition in May 1978 at the Traiano markets. Twelve architects, P. Sartogo, C. Dardi, A. Grumbach, J. Stirling, P. Portoghesi, R. Giurgola, R. Venturi, C. Rowe, M. Graves, L. Krier, A. Rossi and R. Krier were asked to reflect on the basis of the Nolli plan drawn up in 1748. 9 This extended conception of the context refers directly to the problems of autonomy and heteronomy of the conception of the architectural project posed after orders in architecture were surpassed, what P. Eisenmann calls the end of the classical (Eisenmann 1984). 10 The establishment of this trend goes back to studies led by Fernando Clemente on the relations between university and territory at Bologna, Parma and Pisa, published respectively in the following books edited by Clemente 1969; Clemente 1973; Clemente 1974. For the most recent developments on the “environmental project”, the following contributions can be consulted: Clemente et al. 1980; Clemente and Maciocco 1990; Maciocco1991a, 1991b. 11 Giuliana Mandich actually refers to other pairs of opposites. On the one hand the opposition materiality (understood as an “external”, objective character, as what is perceived) and metaphor (“internal” character, modality of perception of reality), on the other the opposition culture (socially constructed nature of space) and nature (its existence regardless of the different ways it is represented in

38 The Discomposed City different societies): a tension between opposites innate in the perceptive dimensions of our spatial life (Mandich 2000). 12 An imaginary journey by means of a rug, which La Cecla adopts as a metaphor of the Islamic world. 13 The “Linear City” is set out on a hierarchically organised, extensive orthogonal road network, creating spacious 200 × 100 blocks. Building of a sparse type, not tied to alignment restrictions, insists on regular plots of various sizes. The “Linear City”, served by the main public facilities, but economically subordinate to Madrid, is thus to be understood as a large, decentred residential quarter. The axis, destined for fast traffic, is characterised by separate carriageways. Around it, constituting the great artery of development of the “Linear City”, the residential zone gravitates, bound to keeping back. The planted area takes on particular importance for aesthetic and hygienic effects. 14 As known, the Modern Architecture International Congresses (CIAM) represented at regular intervals a culminating point of militancy and doctrine formulation for the members of a Committee, which gathered together architects united by their will to break with the past and by faith in technology (Choay 1994a). 15 Aldo Rossi had published L’architettura della città (1966), Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter Collage City (1978), Antoine Grumbach L’architecture et l’évident nécessité de la memoire (1975), Paolo Portoghesi Le inibizioni dell’architettura moderna (1975), James Stirling, a collection of his works of 1975, the Krier brothers numerous projects and theoretic propositions. But the intellectual climate in which Roma Interrotta developed cannot be dissociated from the publication of Joseph Rykwert’s books, Adam’s House in Paradise, published in 1972, and Idea of the town, in 1976, nor from those of Norberg Schulz, who wrote a long article on the “genius loci of Rome” in the preface to the catalogue. 16 Cerdà also carries out theoretic ordering of experience with his Teoria general de l’urbanisación (1867), which also coins the term urbanisación which has since then defined the discipline dealing with the project for the city. 17 Among the books published by Calthorpe: Sustainable Communities with Sim Van der Ryn; Pedestrian Pocket Book with Doug Kelbaugh; The Next American Metropolis; Ecology, Community, and the American Dream; The Regional City, co-author William Fulton. 18 The “bible” of the movement is Suburban Nation, a book written five years ago by Andrés Duany together with Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck. It proposes to balance out the bad effects of sprawl with settlements that put the houses nearer to offices and public transport. It also hopes for an architecture that will respect and also bring back to life its historic precedents. 19 Mumford’s “Fourth Migration” precedes the starting off of “New Exploration” by MacKaye. Benton MacKaye gives an original boost to regional planning with two papers. One is theoretical with the text The new explorations of 1928, where regional planning philosophy is linked with the wilderness of

Deconstruction of the Space of Proximity 39 civilisation, contact between the indigenous world and the metropolitan world. The other is practical, with the planning of an excursion route: the Appalachian Trail, proposed in 1921 and completed in 1937. The images of the “Fourth Migration”, “New Exploration” or “Dinosaur City”, coined by Clarence Stein, intended to establish a comprehensible vision abounding in images to assert the need that the whole nation be involved in the process of singling out new forms of development. 20 Robert Owen one hundred and thirty years earlier. 21 Olivetti also attempts to provide a classification of “communities” based on the most vital administrative experiences, referring to the number of inhabitants: first degree community: rural municipalities and quarters with a population of between 500 and 5,000 inhabitants; second degree communities: cities with 75,000 inhabitants or a network of small municipalities and hamlets or a quarter in a metropolis with a total maximum number of 150,000; third degree communities: those that comprise from 10 to 50 of second degree ones; fourth degree communities: nations or groups of nations. 22 This co-presence has to do with the matter of identity, which is associated with proximity relations with places. But it cannot be only this for if the place is considered a fundamental component of the individual conscience (NorbergSchulz 1979) to bind identity exclusively to places results in impoverishing and restricting personal experience (cf. Indovina et al. 2005). 23 For the various aspects of the reticular paradigm, cf. in particolar G. Dematteis, who has dealt with them in a systematic way in various essays (Dematteis 1985a, 1988, 1990).

The Generic City

The Revenge of Functionalism The generic city is the form without name of the standardisation of urban space, where there is a dominance of consumer activities compared with other activities. It seems to us a city adrift because it shows itself as a negation of the city in the plural, decreed by the pervasivity of shopping, as the unavoidable outlet of the doctrine of form (of the city) that follows the (consumer) function in the same way throughout the world, the “unexpected revenge of functionalism” (Chung et al. 2001). It is the city that no longer has any specific reference point in its territorial birthplace and drags into this indefinite state those who live there, too (Koolhaas 2000). As the generative engine of urbanisation, shopping has become an element that defines the modern city and in many cases the reasons for its existence. In a certain sense it is “the apotheosis of modernisation” according to Sze Tsung Leong’s definition (Chung et al. 2001). “It seems that the retail trade is ready for anything when it is a question of attracting the client” was said in an article that appeared in ’97 entitled “Star Wars floods the market” (quoted in Chung et al. 2001). “Just notice what happens in the Safeways supermarket chain which recently had an artificial intelligence system installed by IBM called AIDA (Artificial Intelligence Data Architecture) originally conceived to intercept any Russian missiles in space, it is used today to analyse data on purchases by customers from the data shown on their Client Cards.” When the desire of consumers is “aroused” and encouraged to proliferate, the great imagination the control system is allowed is to trace and follow flexible personalities. As Art Weinstein, the business guru, writes in his book Handbook of Market, basically mass marketing is dead; it has been replaced by marketing that is extremely precise in pinpointing its targets. By focalising segments of the market that are increasingly smaller and profit-bearing, a closer relationship is born between companies and consumers, and 41

42 The Generic City

technologisation of products is now able to invent a market for companies, i.e. it is now the consumers who decide on the features of the products the companies will produce. When feedback mechanisms are carried out within the distribution channels themselves, consumers’ needs become immediately accessible to company monitoring. Now anyone can contribute to perfecting production from the inside. But if up till not long ago these tendencies seemed pleasantly ambiguous, prices reasonable and freedom increasing, since the 11th of September the feverish need for safety has thrown a different light on everything due to the imperative of enlarging and perfecting a system that has no scruples (Holmes 2002). In science fiction literature, criticism of the city anaesthetised by mass consumerism often takes on the features of a resistant utopia. This is the case of the city-civilisation described by Mark Adlard in the Tcity trilogy: Multiface (1977b), Interface (1977a) and Volteface (1978). The setting is a hypothetical England of the future where the population lives in gated communities controlled by the enormous organisation Stahlex. The trilogy begins by describing the population as a single mass of consumers that should have no reason for being unhappy. Gradually, as the trilogy progresses, the leaders realise that discord in the city is caused by something missing in the life of the inhabitants and they are thus forced to resort to a new concept for this society: supply the people with work. A visionary writer like James Ballard goes much farther, showing – as he does in other books (Ballard 2000) – that when the organisation of space and urban life is “unnatural”, phenomena of social disease are produced that also lead to madness. The dark side of the shopping economy is what Ballard also narrates in his last novel Kingdom Come (Ballard 2006a). It is the story of Richard Pearson, an unemployed publicity agent, who visits a mega shopping mall on the edge of London two weeks after his father has been killed precisely in the shopping centre by an armed maniac. Metro-Centre, as it is called, is a sort of monster with 20 supermarkets, 30 pharmacies, two hotels, a stadium and its own football, hockey and rugby teams, with masses of supporters who go around waving the national flag with the St. George cross on it. Pearson decides to get to the bottom of his father’s death and discovers that the city where the deed took place is actually the place of a contemporary apocalypse, where people are gripped by boredom and the fear of emptiness, where the life itself of the individuals is regulated by the craving to continuously possess new objects, at any cost and at any price. Consumerism is just a sort of opium used to numb people, a new fascism that keeps the vacuous minds occupied of those who, without the daily, compulsive purchase would devote their energy to wrecking society.

The Revenge of Functionalism 43

The generic city is an articulate chain on a planetary scale of mimetic urban forms that reproduce ad infinitum the same model of circulation and consumerism. A post-city conceived and lived in which has no past or identity, its principal attraction is its anomia, according to Koolhaas’ definition (Koolhaas 1996). Over-equipped, watched over and competitive, reducing interpersonal contact as much as possible, the generic city is more and more identified with the city. Of the minority and privileged, it is the place where political and economic domination of the rest of the world is decided. Koolhaas himself recognizes that the generic city implies a refusal of identity. Even if it is perhaps a myth that cities have clear identities, we think of them that way, or at least so it seems, and that is how we dream of them. This is why the generic city is a liquidatory utopia, in that it tends to take on the existing as a single horizon, the “already become”. The generic city gives the idea of a city with neither quality nor specific identity, suffering from amnesia, destined to spread inexorably throughout the world, to be, like airports, always the same, identical to itself, given that the staggering growth under way seems to finally demonstrate that the historic city and the past in general (and perhaps European culture altogether) are in a certain sense “too small” to contain so many human destinies and so many phenomena, and such a great number of economic transactions (Chaslin 2003). The generic city is the metaphor for all things that possess some commercial, functional or ludic usefulness, which nowadays come under the goods categories. This also entails the disappearance of historical traces, except for those used to act as alibis or logos. Koolhaas links these reflections with the concept of junkspace (Koolhaas 2000). Koolhaas is, moreover, convinced that throughout the planet the extraordinary molecular diffusion of trade and consumerism has generated a new spatial paradigm, whether we are dealing with airports, shopping centres, operations for urban renovation, urban re-use, theme parks or simply ordinary public space. We must convince ourselves that the physical sediment of modernisation in this century is not to be found in forms of modern architecture, but rather in a sort of junkspace; junkspace stands for what remains of modernisation, or better, the container itself of modernisation. It brings to mind the idea of a place, once tidy, completely reorganised by a hurricane; but this is only an impression. We judge this junkspace as if it were an aberration, a delayed, temporary stage, but we are mistaken: junkspace is real; it developed in the 20th Century and will reach its apotheosis in the 21st. It is a condition that creates a constant mixture of boredom and excitement in those who live in it, of incredible beauty and absolute mediocrity (Koolhaas 2000; Boeri 2000).

44 The Generic City

Koolhaas’ explorations, his surveys on the extremes and paradoxes of the contemporary urban dimension have often been accused of cynicism, almost as though they were self-satisfied descriptions of uncontrollable, regressive processes. In effect, as Koolhaas says, our interest in understanding the forces that transform space often continues to be read as a sort of surrender; we really believe that describing these phenomena is already in itself a form of criticism of the existing, especially if we choose to look at things as they actually happen, without hiding them with “good intentions” and the nostalgic moralism that constitutes the daily bread of contemporary architecture (Koolhaas 2000). Furthermore, in the tendency to concentrate on everything that reflects the existing city, there is the risk of what psychologists call “reflective sliding”, a phenomenon in which the social element is traversed by the sum of the subjective contradictions deriving from it, so that behaviour itself, the apparent manifestations of the social element, becomes the primary content of the project for space, often “at a level of evidence that transforms it into an advertisement for itself” (Gregotti 1993). It reflects in a certain sense attention to everything that is included (and at the same time an indifference to what is excluded), an “amnesty for the existing” (Chaslin 2003) as an aware refusal to modify it. In spite of the fact that Koolhaas began a radical revision of the interpretative categories of urban phenomena (putting copyright on about seventy expressions of phenomena directly or indirectly linked with the city, thus significantly modifying the vocabulary), this conceptual, operative world is a closed system, in which the rules are given by everything that is included, which is the system of goods. This attitude which urges confirmation of the “already become” has the flavour of a refusal, in a certain sense negligence, as distraction, a logic that leads to the uprooting of ideas and places in order to enable global interchange, without restraint, of goods and information.

Thematisation of the City As we have emphasised in the previous pages, the modern condition is repelled by the hindrance and energy of the established hierarchies since it aspires to promoting absolute fluidity, to connecting up what was till now distant and separated (Costa 1996). The modern world will take possession of the experience of places based on free circulation and unproductiveness – i.e. idleness, play – through a concrete model of spatial articulation like the theme park.1 The shopping city is in this sense organised like a theme

Thematisation of the City 45

park, modelled for a set of irregular, picturesque itineraries, dictated by spectacular, changing experience, which is also the model of the place of pleasure (Jacobson 1998). In the shopping city the visitor lets himself be led along a path that will offer him surprises, an unexpected wander, exotic pavilions, various artifices in simulated nature, aimed at seeking an ecstatic effect, namely an effect of relief, disarming for the observer. Pleasure consists of yielding, letting oneself be influenced, confused and even intoxicated by spatial experience. The shopping city is a park city, with pavilions dotted throughout for consumers; it allows and promotes losing oneself therein (Costa 1996). Distracted experience in the park is the experience of the wanderer, of disorientation. But it is also the experience of the formless, the visitor’s abandoning himself to the place, this letting himself be led that presumes a weakening in the difference between the figure of the visitor-observer and the place perceived, between figure and background, a glance turning everything into a show, that tends to blend in with the surroundings present. This is a process that can be tied up with Roger Caillois’ studies on imitation and camouflage, understood as the subject’s abandoning a laborious, constant task of definition/differentiation in respect of his surroundings. For Caillois, a specific condition of the formless emerges during this process, i.e. that which is not separate from the place where it occurs (Caillois 1984). The park enables the “taming of the distant”, in the words of Joseph Rykwert, namely assimilation of the other, of what is outside the boundaries of our experience (Rykwert 1980 quoted in Costa 1996). For this reason the generic city has an assimilating, pervasive character. Referring to the central city of San Francisco, Joel Kotkin defines thematisation of the city with the expression “ephemeral city” (Kotkin 2006). But in general the prosperous urban nuclei of the West are mostly home to rich people, couples without children and to the population made up largely of the immigrants in their service. The first group will stay in the city until it feels able to extend its adolescence. This “ephemeral city” is an environment that offers poor mobility, even though it is possible that some members of the service class manage in the end to improve their destiny and move to the outskirts, too. According to Kotkin, San Francisco is an extreme example of this phenomenon. The city has a very high percentage of residents who have inherited money, people who work for non-profit organisations and are, in some way, kept. Most of the scientific economic activities have moved out of the city and now what remains is basically a boutique lifestyle. It is the kind of place that the Californian historian Kevin Starr, a native of San Francisco, has defined “a theme park for restaurants” (Kotkin 2006). Modern urban space also appears to be shaped on the model of spatial experience that interested the French writer Georges Bataille in the 30s.

46 The Generic City

For Bataille, it is the space of the labyrinth that makes the contemporary cities uniform (Bataille 1970). The spatial structure of the labyrinth is that of a body without hierarchy, without a head, as Bataille was to say. The labyrinth is a body in which everything is intestine, a locus without end, without reason. The labyrinth resists being described or defined like an object represented by a topographical plan or construction map, since only one route exists to get through. This overexposed city, about which Paul Virilio writes that it translates into a space deprived of control and originates in recognition of insecurity (Virilio 1991). It is what is felt in some areas of the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia, a tourist paradise honoured by the Jet Set, that enables a reflection to be developed on some types of labyrinth: a survey on a spatial archetype that may be considered a paradigm of private construction of space, an aspect of the “non-city” of the Costa Smeralda.2 To dwell on an archetype and the myths that have expressed it – and which we have sometimes found deformed – has revealed itself to be a stimulating experience: on the other hand, if the Gods become illnesses, all our ailments may be imagined as the embodiment of mythical realities, of archetypal events (Hillman 2001). If the itinerary winding along the Costa is followed, departing from various localities which take their names from famous beaches, like Cala di Volpe and La Celvia, an “urban” landscape is outlined with morphological features that reveal the up-to-date nature of the labyrinth image, in its mythologenic and functional variants. One of the first categories is that of the “labyrinth as screen”, the city seen only from the sea, a sort of stage-set for Odysseus. “When I designed Porto Cervo I posed myself the problem of expressing a presence to navigators coming from the blue sea, who would have liked to reach land among different forms and different colours” (Vietti quoted in Consorzio Costa Smeralda 1987). In the words of Luigi Vietti, head of the team that designed the Costa Smeralda, there is the conception of the project as a screen, ingrained in the risk of designing in places without “an evident history”. The maze of houses offers the limit, as it is deceptive, of a better view for the visitor arriving from the sea, as if the urban space had been designed from the sea: the maze-like structure that so often intervenes between the interior and the shore seems to have been constructed for a second Odysseus, therefore, and not for those who live there or try to cross it. Planning seems to have been addressed to the myth.3 On the other hand, “elite tourism needs a mythological origin” (Bandinu 1980). An urban space conceived in this way – a private project for space – could only express a relationship with the sea of a private type, with the houses occupying a position on the coast taking the sea away from those who are not part of the adventure. But the labyrinth proposes a false adventure: it is

Thematisation of the City 47

the theme of the game that considerably characterises holiday production and leads to the creation of the theme park (in effect, the game cannot take place except in a limited way). This reveals the willingness to perceive the territorial context as fiction which enables users to live a make-believe life. There is an analogy between the labyrinth and that sort of screen placed in the middle of the central nave of the temple, aimed at protecting from evil influences (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1986). And also the representation of the labyrinth on the door of the Cumaean sybil’s cave, described in Book VI of the Aeneid, can be traced back to a screen function that drives away the incautious visitor (Guénon 1975). But the image of labyrinth as a screen, reminds us of an attitude rather than precise choices, a general tendency of tourist planning: “the Costa Smeralda”, Bachisio Bandinu has written, “has created a world of objects that keep all evil away from the holiday and guarantee the tourist ‘a perfect Paradise’” (Bandinu 1980). The holiday is conceived as a production by the organisers and the context as fiction by the visitors. Another category is that of the “labyrinth as game”, it is Dedalus’ intoxication. “The architect Jacques Couëlle ‘creates’ Cala di Volpe. Couëlle defines himself as an ‘artist’ and not an ‘architect’ or rather a ‘house sculptor’. And in this case also he has modelled the forms of the hotel as if it were a statue, a large statue with wings that open as if to embrace the sea.” (Consorzio Costa Smeralda 1987). The aesthetic odyssey is a fundamental aspect of the visit to the various localities of the Costa Smeralda. But to this characteristic attention towards visual and superficial (Mossa 1973) corresponds indifference towards the deep meanings of the nature and history of territories. The mystification of the relationship with the environment and the construction of fiction determine an amorphous situation of “invertebrate” territory, whose function is relegated to the false-wild. A peculiar aspect of this particular planning for space is clearly outlined: the mystification of the relationship with the environment. Ways of designing space do not pass (except superficially) through the relationship with the environment, with its deep meanings, but we witness the importation of models and urban forms that lead to superficial transfiguration of the language of construction and determine an image of estrangement that has nevertheless imposed itself over time. Promises have been betrayed concerning many aspects: in the light of the problems that have arisen over the course of the years, abandonment to a sort of creative delirium has led to the risk of being conceptually imprisoned by the project itself, with the residents themselves imprisoned in the intertwining of the labyrinth. Dedalus, too, the maze builder, also experienced a decline from symbol of ingeniousness and shrewdness to the exalted image – without measure – of an architect becoming the victim of

48 The Generic City

his own construction, the labyrinth-prison. It is also the image of the inventor that betrays promises and the witch’s apprentice unaware of the limits of his power, as the story of Icarus (whom Dedalus supplies with wings) and his ruinous fall reveals, an event that developed from creative intoxication to betrayal of promises (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1986). Another category is that of the “labyrinth as enclosure”, which is the sign of a split between city and territory. As Jean Brun writes in his essay Il vertice e l’abisso, the panorama, to which the rising path permits access, possesses a resonance that infinitely surpasses the sphere of cartography. This panorama is, more or less obscurely for us, of an ontological order; we have the sensation of finally having access to the being of man’s dwelling (Brun 1994). From Monte Moro, the highest land in the Costa Smeralda, some important environmental signs can be recognised which characterise the territory: it is by experimenting these apertures that we make contact with the environmental dimension. Recognising the most significant environmental signs makes acquisition of a fundamental fact possible: that the territory and its environmental processes in particular become part of urban organisation. It is the territory that contributes to the construction of the city. Whereas it has been possible to note a large number of settlement nuclei without territorial identity and expression of a private organisation of space, a simil-city that takes away intrinsic public space from the city. The absence of the relationship with the deep structure of the environment has determined a substantial split between the territory, with its environmental processes, and what we still call city, in spite of it being perceived by the metaphor of the labyrinth, in this case understood as the metaphor of the artifice and enclosure. Another category is the “labyrinth as enclave”. Ovid in the Metamorphoses reminds us that “meanwhile Dedalus, hating Crete and his long exile, and longing to see his native land, was shut in by the sea. ‘Though he may block escape by land and water’ he said ‘yet the sky is open, and by that way will I go. Though Minos rules over all, he does not rule the air.’”4 Currently the debate on the territory of the Costa Smeralda basically concerns modalities of organisation of the offers for sustainable tourism, but the recurrent aspect is that of considering a territory as an enclave with extraterritorial features. The expectations of the new Consortium, with alternative programmes to the previous ones, confirm the search for tourist development of high quality and the aspiration of lengthening the tourist season: “the tourist should last the whole year”. Once again, the first theme is the environment, with a precise identity: “we are the myth of the green.” Departing from unedificability, or the

Thematisation of the City 49

awareness of no longer being able to intensify, the choices of the future seem tied to planning minimal volumes of environmental plant: resorts far from the sea with a park around them; a villa must have a public park because “the tourist seeks privacy”. Balance between volumes and environment is resolved following one modality: enclose. Another category is “the labyrinth as defence”. Searching for the sea near La Celvia beach, often begs the question: how do we get access? A paved road that seems promising – apart from representing the last possibility – reveals itself to be a meander leading to a closed space, a dead end. Sporadically public spaces are recognized, as narrow as a ravine. We read “La Celvia” painted on a large stone: we look for the parking place again but the road leads to another closed, walled-up space. Along the route – which anyway is a one-way road taking us back to the exit (to leave is very simple) – it is easy to miss the access to the beach, a narrow path between two stone walls a little more than a metre wide. As René Guénon notes the labyrinth permits or prevents, depending on the case, access to a certain place where not everybody indiscriminately should enter; only those who are “qualified” may follow it to the end, while the others will find it impossible to get through or will get lost on the way. In this is implicit an idea of “selection” clearly related to admission to initiation (Guénon 1975). The problem of accessibility is closely connected with that of privatisation of access to the sea. We read: “Access forbidden except for residents”, but it is not an authorised sign. On the beach private land is at less than 15 metres from the shore. Public connections seem private, with house numbers hung by the side of a public passage. Sometimes the road has been deliberately neglected, to hide access. The meander becomes narrower and narrower, while the sea continues to be a postcard. Roundabouts take away the sense of travelling towards the sea, which is that of touching the horizon. What we see is the opposite of the horizon: it is the spiral likened to the labyrinth. “The labyrinth of the search for the centre in its absence” is the category of the labyrinth as absence of centre, understood as absence of place, i.e. loss of place. We build the city through territorial content that represents its centre. In this way the project for the city incorporates the meanings of the territory. Whereas the labyrinth hides the centre. Even with the spiral motif, as can be seen in these tourist settlements: the labyrinth as a spiral and as a form of unfinished mandala. “Dedalus, a man famous for his skill in the builder’s art, planned and performed the work. He confused the usual passages and deceived the eye by a conflicting maze of diverse winding paths. Just as the watery Maeander plays in the Phrygian fields,

50 The Generic City

flows back and forth in doubtful course, and turning back on itself, beholds its own waves coming on their ways.”5 The labyrinth must simultaneously allow access to the centre by a sort of initiatory journey and forbid it for those not qualified. The labyrinth has therefore drawn close to the mandala which sometimes presents a mazelike aspect. It is, however, a representation of initiatory, discriminatory tests, preliminary to the journey towards a hidden centre.” In the psychological sense, the labyrinth is the expression of the “search for the centre” and it can be considered a form of unfinished mandala (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 1986 ad vocem). Arianna suggested to the hero to attach the thread up high at the entrance to the labyrinth and not let it slip out of his hands: on the way back he would need to take the same route used to enter and that would be difficult. (Kerény 1951, 1959). This is the labyrinth as prison: from the wings of Dedalus to the thread of Arianna. The labyrinth that hides the centre. “Delfi is no longer at the centre of the world” said Epimenide, one of the seven sages, linking the loss of centre with the loss of place. The possibility of finding the place is the possibility of finding the meanings of the place in the territory. The city builds itself incorporating the meanings of the territory. The territory saves the city. “Destinies will find their way”, Fata viam invenient, is the engraving on which the alchemic symbol of the labyrinth is represented.6 “But as an archetype, as a primeval phenomenon, the labyrinth cannot pre-shape anything but the ‘logos’, but reason. What else, if not ‘logos’, is a product of man, in which man loses himself, goes to his ruin?” (Colli 1975). This is why the labyrinth produces transformation and awareness in man. The correspondence between labyrinth and generic city is bound up with the consideration of the labyrinth as the form and representation of chaos, of psychic dulling, of what James Hillman defines as the “anaesthesia of our sensitivity” (Hillman 2002) which prevents us from grasping the differential quality of the city. The contemporary city, moreover, finds itself immersed in a radical process of redefinition that does nothing more than lead to a new stage in the process of slow dearticulation of the traditional city, in the sense that the modern city always tends to be less the place of accumulation and multiplication of wealth to convert to the place of squandering and wasting energy. Contemporary cities recreate the erratic, amused experience of the city, which refers to – as the figure that gave paradigmatic expression to this new condition – the flâneur described by Charles Baudelaire, the inhabitant of the new boulevards who strolls along without stopping, half distracted and half stunned by the sight of the shop-windows, department stores, landscapes and the splendour of the Second Empire.

Thematisation of the City 51

The generic city is in this picture also a figure of liberation from the urban spatial experience, that was introduced in some ways by the figure of the baudelairian flâneur. In his article “Theorié de la dérive” (Debord 1956) of 1956, Guy Debord wrote about the spatial experience of the city that departed from the figure of the flâneur, but proposed a new condition. With the term dérive, Debord defined an experience of absolute abandonment of productive activity or consumerism to let oneself be taken by the city and its flow. Thus, Debord proposed that one or more people who committed themselves to the dérive abandon for a specific period of time every reason for action, their relations, their work and entertainment activity, letting themselves be taken by the attraction exerted by the city and its places, and the meetings it involved. In the dérive proposed by the Situationists the modern condition of the city was celebrated, in which public places ceased to be the agorà, where power found its privileged scenario faced with a tidy congregation of citizens, to pass to being the random fabric of multiple, widespread itineraries directly in the logic of mobility. A possible graphic expression of this interpretation of the space of the city is present in Debord’s collage entitled The Naked City in which the map of Paris is broken up into nineteen parts, connected between them by arrows which indicate the change of direction the subject can spontaneously take, who is wandering round these places without paying attention to the useful connections that usually govern his behaviour and which, according to the Situationists, reflect the image of the city propagated by the structure of power. The generic city has in a certain sense, as its underlying epistemology, attention for everything that is included and at the same time indifference for everything that is excluded. But Saskia Sassen (Sassen 2006a) points out to us, however, that history teaches us that the excluded, the weak, everything that is excluded from the processes of development of the contemporary city is an important factor in the development of new historic phases. The generic city is also the sentry of functionalism, which Musil, in his fading satire (Musil 1954), configures as the quintessence of modernity, it is the capital city differentiated by functions, which, in the 20s came under discussion with the crucial word “Americanism”; it was, however, also the development that characterised urban centres up to the 70s. The key words that describe it are: the enormous growth in the expanse of the city produced by the exodus from rural parts; the demographic increase and deregionalisation; dilation of space not just horizontally, but also vertically; the spatial separation of production, services, entertainment, culture; temporality and velocity opposed to the cautious rhythms operating in agrarian spaces; reorganisation of the city adjusted for the imperatives of traffic; predominance of the machine like a

52 The Generic City

model which governs communication itself between human beings; the city, finally, dependent and articulated by the same laws that regulate the functioning of the production system (Böhme 2001). In a word, the triumphant march of Fordism with its principles of apportionment of work, of automation and rationalisation. Principles on which not only production was shaped, but which, moreover, permeated all sectors of society. The modern city seems like a gigantic piece of machinery to Musil. It is not the ancient squares and markets that make up its centre, but the link-roads for traffic. In all this is reflected, as Musil was already able to observe in the 20s, the progress of management sciences. A strategy, whose effect is to remove any fundamental difference between men, apparatuses, materials, things, processes, actions, motives, aims. All this is thus conceptualised as a community of compacted forces, as a system of energy that correlates inorganic and organic, human and non-human (Böhme 2001). Individuals disappear in the production process of society. Private traits have the same form as elements of the general dynamic flow. The individual, if meant as a person, is either not functional or a replaceable fiche. Life and happiness consist of conforming to the system without electric shocks. The social body is split into the segments of the different roles and into the sectors of local functions with the purpose of achieving division into functional sections. The physiognomy of the city ends up being dominated by this topographical differentiation of its functions that welcomes, together with the new, all the old differences, letting them settle, localising them and drying them up, levelling them out from the point of view of traffic and communications: here public, there private; here work, there spare time; here family, there entertainment; here production, there reproduction; here the factory, there services. Exactly the opposite, in other words, of the obstinate cultural self-preservation of provinces and regions (Böhme 2001). Everything that originated after 1970 in urbanistic conceptions – the postmodern city, urban re-aestheticisation, the collage city, the fractal city, the rediscovery of regionality and historicity, the increase in the importance of urban culture and the urban social element, the vivacity of the identity of district, cities seen as texts susceptible of cultural interpretation, attempts to give life to new forms of collusion at many levels between functions and culture, accentuation of the difference in opposition to homogeneity, the re-appraisal at one moment of the centre, at another of the outskirts, at another the city, another the suburbs, the subject of new theories formulated in architecture and urbanistics; the rediscovery of nature in the city, the discovery of urban ecology, as well as the opposite aspiration of circumscribing the country with respect to the city, the desire to substitute the dilation of spaces with thickening as urban quality – all these reforms, in the end, were exhausted, giving life to the

The City as a Simulacrum 53

“super-American city” or, if preferred, the generic city, an effort to create cities without quality for the “man without quality” (Musil 1954) and, thus, to construct a sort of functional shell of techno-economic modernity obtaining a human species socially and technically similar (Böhme 2001). In the system man is “man without quality”, which means with each of the qualities that, on each occasion, are expected to be manifested by him in a segment of the system with the fact, however, that these “qualities” no longer prove to be integrated in a “personal identity” (Böhme 2001). It is, as we have already stated, “the unexpected revenge of functionalism” (Chung et al. 2001), a liquidatory utopia of the city which, as an entity without identity, is no longer representable.

The City as a Simulacrum The generic city, always the same as itself, cannot be represented, or better, is not representable using the forms and modalities with which we have represented the city over time. The matter is important because we nevertheless have in the city the principal store of our memory and the nerve centre of our civilisation. “To give up this privileged mirror would make us dumb and blind. But, in spite of this, is it representable? Painting and drawing were enough for the ancient city; the word gave an account of the industrial city.”7 For the city of the 20th Century the word was insufficient. The first to acknowledge this change in representation of the city was – as is known – Walter Benjamin, who asserted in his writings of the 30s that the metropolis could only be represented by the cinema and photography. Benjamin knew intuitively that editing was not only a specific technique of these new mechanical visual arts, but a new aesthetic category that arose from the essence of the industrial metropolis (the juxtaposition of images, the assembly line as the condition of factory work, etc.). It is the city itself that equips itself with the instruments necessary for its representation (de Azua 2003). The wide-angle magnifies the technical realisations of triumphant capitalism: bridges, railways, iron and glass buildings. When we fly in a hot-air balloon with Felix Nadar, the city seems simultaneously real and unreal.8 The spectacle offered from above is no longer false, like in panoramas. Distance neutralises details and transforms space into a mass of roofs similar to the cogs of a machine (D’Elia 1994). Representation of the city is a montage of stills. Painting, the word, photography, the cinema, the means that have represented the city over time have had to do with the differential quality of the urban world, today lost in the generic city. Contemporary post-cities

54 The Generic City

have gone far beyond what can be represented by the cinema and photography. “Should we perhaps understand that the city has disappeared as a conceptual unit? The answer will be that the city, in its classical significance, already does not exist, but in its place and upon it a simulacrum of classical city is being built that is notably convincing. And this simulacrum is truthful. And this gives rise to our bewilderment.” (de Azua 2003). Baudrillard, with La société de consommation, in 1970 (Baudrillard 1970), linked the simulacrum phenomenon with the passage from an industrial economy to an economy based on consumption and services, with the transition from the production of goods destined to cover needs to the production of desires as the moving force of the economy (Ritzer 2000). Just as men’s needs have a clear, rational definition that proves easily representable, desires on the other hand do not: they change constantly, lack a fixed object and at the moment in which they are satisfied are reborn embodied in a new fetish. Cities also follow this trend that leads from construction to cover needs to the construction of settings of desire, of the way present cities are adopting an oniric aspect coinciding with the disintegration of the social classes. This was what Felix de Azua maintained in his essay La Necessidad y deseo (de Azua 2003). This loss of the capacity to represent the city corresponds, according to the Spanish scholar (de Azua 2003), to the loss of the city as a conceptual unit. The contemporary city cannot be represented because it has become a “simulacrum” (de Azua 2003) of the city, light, fake, and as such, consumable, a copy of the copy of cities that have never existed, were never inhabited by any man but depended on mass consumption. In this city – according to De Azua – the citizen enters like the main character of a show that includes a series of more and more abstract imitations which lack an empirical original, such as the “John Silver” chain of sea-food shops, which imitate on their premises the set of Treasure Island (film), which, in turn, imitates Treasure Island (novel), which represented a treasure island that never existed geographically, nor was ever inhabited (de Azua 2003). It is not just a question of isolated, very specific cases: shopping malls are like this, and theme parks, thematic urbanisations and many other similar figures. A lot of American and European urban centres currently sell, remodelled following the method of inventing a simulacrum that departs from a copy with no original. Let us look at the case of Times Square in New York. What was for a century the symbolic world centre of show business, Times Square, had decayed to the point of turning into the most dangerous quarter of the city in the decade of the 70s. But the decay of the urban centre began to be fought at the beginning of the following decade and an army of estate agents,

The City as a Simulacrum 55

multinational show business companies, financial consortia, lawyers and top municipal executives began the project of gentrification in around 1980. The operation lasted twenty years between negotiations and implementation. Its history, without doubt exciting (Sagalyn 2002), is that of an urban space created by image technicians, who set out to realise a “reproduction” of the historic model of Times Square to be realised, with their luminous advertisements in bright colours and other spectacular scenes. The areas devoted to luminous advertisements, like the technology behind them, were regulated with the purpose of producing an effect of anarchy and spontaneity, similar to the “old” Times Square. It seems to have grown, like the previous one, in a chaotic manner with disjointed private initiatives, with the anarchic poetry of classical capitalism, whereas it is actually the result of a technical, political and financial operation planned with almost scientific rigour. It is thus a simulacrum or an “urban theme park”, as some critics certainly described it. In no case a reconstruction, and even less a revival (de Azua 2003). The social imagination is being more and more incorporated in simulacrum-like panoramas, like theme parks, historic quarters and hypermarkets which are cut off from the rest of the city. Traditionally its greatest theme parks were fundamentally architectonic simulations of films or television. This possible horizon of modernity is a liquidatory vision of the city that pretence disguises as a conservative vision. The contemporary city that has become a “simulacrum” (de Azua 2003) of a city, light, fake and consumable is the city without problems that we desire. It recalls in some ways the contents of the video-cassette on sale in the United States for those who would like to have a child at home without any of the nuisance. On screen the child smiles at you, grows day by day, cries a little, too, but does not wet the bed and lets you sleep at night… Simulation, the artificial level of reality, can be useful only if it does not eliminate the evidence of that “something” that is beyond our representations, the “datum”, made of limits and other by us and our intentions, which alone can guarantee us the future. And, as it happens, we have discovered that we are much more similar to, sharing more in the nature of, that “datum” than of the representations of it. We are mortals as is the world, we are not inside the screen but, though only a little, outside it (La Cecla 1991). Detachment of the images from reality has the shape of a loss. Entrusting its image to the virtual, and with the image its cultural ways, its notional worlds, its perceptive worlds, what is real becomes residual, while the simulacrum is an escape, an easy vision, almost marginal, of reality for men who seek original, genial machines because they no longer believe in

56 The Generic City

their originality and therefore want to free themselves of their own reflection and knowledge. It is – according to Baudrillard – the theorem of the incomprehensibility of the world, where it seems that the task of human thought is that of making it more incomprehensible and enigmatic and, since the true world is incomprehensible, there is the temptation to produce a world that goes ahead on its own (Baudrillard 1999). At this point it is technology that marches alone, it is technology’s automatic writing that marches without a subject. This is what happens in the virtual: there is no longer a subject, it is calculation that works alone, a number, a logico-mathematical synthesis, the self-production of a system rotating tautologically around itself (Baudrillard 1999). It is in a certain sense the Dorian Gray syndrome the other way round: men grant the Web the image they consider the best,9 splitting the time dimension, entrusting the real world with past time and the Web with real time, the time we are in, in all parts of the globe and all corners of time (Baudrillard 1999). We entrust “becoming” to the real world and change to the Web. This is the nth pair that takes its place in the sum total of pairs in tension which – according to Giuliana Mandich (Mandich 2000) – structure the new perceptive worlds. This changing without becoming is the virtual world. It is the possibility to adopt all forms that is specific to a certain task on the computer and that constitutes a sort of morphism. And the morphism in this continuous formal change is exactly the opposite of the concept of metamorphosis (Baudrillard 1999). Referring again to the inverted Dorian Gray metaphor, metamorphosis is entrusted to the real world, morphism to the virtual, changing without becoming, without growing old. The world goes ahead on its own, the Web images observing us become autonomous, they acquire autonomous power and take us hostage to the point that we ourselves become an image, without identity, if this ever existed, since the world of images is autonomous, it unfolds on its own, is self-referential. Paul Virilio’s La machine de vision (Virilio 1989) shifts perception from the topic to the tele-topic, superimposing a virtual, filmed/projected territory on the mapped, described one, a real “war zone” between a territory first hypothesised then applied, and another “corporeal” one that does not cease to show new aspects of its complexity, legitimising its existence. It is this phenomenon, the symptomatology of the disappearance of original landscapes, that, according to Tiziana Villani, shifts points of view and “geographies” (Villani 2000) and registers the separation between bodies and territories. This change in landscapes is reflected in our perceptive worlds and our behaviours (Vos and Meeks 1999). If post-modern landscapes are

Desired Landscapes 57

explored, as in previous epochs, in our times, too, there is not a single direction to landscape development. A feature of our times is, nevertheless, the rapid change in production and information technology, and in the demands of society too, which completely change the economic base of the types of landscape. All things seem possible: people go shopping in the landscape. The “unity of the world” has definitely ended: man is at a distance from the landscape and this distance has the dilated dimensions of a wasteland (Maciocco 2000).

Desired Landscapes This development of our shopping society with its variety of requirements results in a complete mosaic of different types of landscape in our postmodern universes (Vos and Meeks 1999). These types show different intensities and styles of controlling man, the products of which are all desired by society. In this sense, to industrial production landscapes corresponds as the desired product the landscape as industry, where each form of “nature” or scenario is an involuntary product of agriculture; to the multifunctional landscapes subjected to pressure beyond all limits in areas with a growing urban population, is associated the landscape as supermarket, where the market has very recently asked our landscapes for a wide spectrum of functions à la carte: food production, industrial use, recreation, residence, water extraction, nature conservation, etc.; just as the landscape as historic museum is made to correspond to traditional archaic landscapes; to landscapes that are disappearing, being marginalised, is associated the landscape as ruin, where the spontaneous development of nature takes over and within some twenty years nature dominates landscapes that had been used for centuries, while natural landscapes, wrecks, correspond to the product landscape as desert (Vos and Meeks 1999).. This desire for different landscapes is only an apparent struggle against the growing uniformity of landscapes, it is really a “fraud” (Clément 2002). The question of identity of the landscape, of the features of a place might reveal itself to be more complex: as Gilles Clément notes, a place might no longer be defined by its largest common denominator, the most visible, but for the smallest, the most fragile. The question is to know how far the cultural loss represented by this oscillation of the identity system is acceptable as such, without any traumas (Clément and Blazy 1995). The representations, images, our society creates for itself of landscapes as “desired products” cannot, however, be separated from reality because if we lose their identity in images, we also lose it in reality, thus we cannot

58 The Generic City

entrust our life to images because we will lose it in reality. In this “detachment” between reality and representation lies the contemporary incapacity to “represent” the city, to “see it”. It is the discomfort described in Lisbon Story,10 in the film director, Friedrich’s, monologue which expresses the anguish of those who no longer manage to “see” the city, the despair of men to whom the city no longer shows itself. The city withdraws, it does not let its soul be filmed because man’s glance in the city has turned into the glance of cultural consumption, the glance that kills the city, in that it annihilates men, their life of reciprocal relations, civitas, since it is directed solely at the spaces indicated and tidied up by the media. The contemporary incapacity to “see” the city, to represent it, seems – Italo Calvino is aware of this in Lezioni Americane (Calvino 1988) – like an epidemic of the plague that has hit humanity in the faculty that is its greatest feature, i.e. the use of the word, a plague of language manifest as a loss of cognitive strength and immediacy, as an automatism that tends to level out expression in the most generic, anonymous, abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, attenuate expressive points, quell each spark that spurts from the clash of words with new circumstances, a plague described with mastery, for example, in Peter Greenway’s filmography which, with all its studied excesses, its cruelty flaunted from a literary point of view, is more vulgar, more popular, more coarsely extreme in its description of the world. And the world described really does seem to have lost all its fascination, including that of lightness of spirit, dominated as it is, exclusively, by the aggressive vulgarity of the function. This relationship between language and the world is even seen as an analogy with regard to the city. One of the most famous paragraphs of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations compares language to an old city: a labyrinth of lanes and little squares, old and new houses, and houses enlarged in different periods; and all this surrounded by a number of new quarters with straight roads lined with houses all the same (Wittgenstein 1958). The diversity of the play of words is thus similar to that of the quarters or other urban structures and the description of this play relates them with a form of planimetry, also able to include outlines of paths. According to this text, language is not similar to a labyrinth of lanes and little squares but to a “labyrinth of paths” (Wittgenstein 1958). Every comparison being reversible, it is not surprising that some have, in contrast with Wittgenstein, taken language as a model of intelligibility if not of cities, at least of the spatial practices they give rise to. There are risks, however, in the sense that an aberrant use of language can produce involution of sensitive knowledge of the city, of the capacity to see it. This perspective is effectively interpreted by the aberrant use of

Desired Landscapes 59

the “geographical system” for artistic or para-artistic purposes that formally characterise the “urban works” of the situationists, like GuyErnest Debord and Constant, and some conceptual artists like Douglas Huebler and Stanley Brouwn. Of course, every map is, as Nelson Goodman has noted, “schematic, selective, conventional, condensed and uniform”, and these features are more “virtues” than “defects” since without them the map would tend – the hypothesis was developed by Jorge Luis Borges (Borges 1965) – to merge with the territory to which it refers (Goodman 1972). However, the planimetry of Debord’s Naked City and that of Constant’s New Babylon, without mentioning Stanley Brouwn’s This Way Brouwn, drive schematism, selectivity, condensation or uniformity to such a point that reference to a territory is somehow radically absent, favouring the adoption of an urban image as such. Their works – in many cases it is a question more of outlines or plans of works than actual works – in effect have in common making an image such as the geographical form of the map or urban plan play like a linguistic sign that is perfectly identifiable as such, but clearly deprived of its capacity to refer to its normal spatial referent. No territory can be described by these diagrams or fragments of real maps, as if the cartographer were struck by blindness concerning the relationship his work should have with a precise space. What is projected in images aberrant to the extent of losing their reference point is nothing more, probably, than the loss of the reference point as such, a loss affecting language, the same loss that affects the inhabitant when he tries to imagine the city. But the inconsistency is not perhaps in the images or the language alone: it is in the world, for an indissoluble bond associates language impoverishment – and the images with which we try to understand the world and picture it for ourselves, expressing its nature – and world impoverishment. So from this point of view the world ceases to appear as an object, an event, a process in itself and independent. Actually, it is more like a background, a scenario and field of action for all our experience which, nevertheless, cannot exist separately from our structure, our behaviour, our consciousness.11 This growing process of integration between reality and the representation of reality, which are not totally independent, detached spheres but end up influencing each other to the point of constituting a united whole, makes contemporary man adapt and react not only to the “world” as it actually is, but to the images he creates of it and the representations provided of it, images and representations that therefore acquire their own “physicality” (Maciocco and Tagliagambe 1998). Here lies the connection between genericity and fiction, referring back to unsettling pairs of opposites like real city/simulacrum city and

60 The Generic City

citizen/non-citizen (De Azua 2003, p. 20). This perspective is reflected, for example, in the geography of city centralities. Problems of accessibility to consumption are pointing in many small and medium urban centres to the creation of new “central places”, an alternative to those of the large urban areas (Bellicini 1988), within a vision of malls intending to be more diversified than the replicating operations of the large sponsors, given that the mall has different influences, depending on place. Dealing with the Italian case, Michele Sernini puts forward the hypothesis that one of the current tendencies that should be studied is the creation of “city two”, a second version of the city next to the existing one. Maybe we are at this point, though Italy, so full of cities, would show that it has made a disastrous choice requiring a very long period of adjustment and unimaginable costs. This would, however, be proof of aspiration to centrality, sought in every way elsewhere and even insisted upon when forbidden, making the historic centre a limited zone (Sernini 1989). Exclusively entrepreneurial logic, utterly neglected by urbanistic administrators or perhaps deliberately facilitated by them, even denies the usefulness of urbanistic policy in that this would hinder the efficiency of the commercial distribution system (Lugli 1983). This possible horizon of modernity is a liquidatory utopia of the city disguised through pretence as a conservative utopia. We might ask ourselves if it is worth pursuing such a long, costly renovation process, from the city outwards and back, from inside to outside to recreate a centre (Sernini 1989). Or if it might not be the case to accept and appreciate centrality and the city that are already there and work around them. For there is some significant relationship between the simulacrum city and the city “centre” theme and its attractiveness. There is nothing strange, nor theoretically or politically unseemly, therefore, about centrality in general, and the urban centre in particular being an attraction. It is because they are attractive. Only the recent arrogance of residents in the centre may have it upheld that the centre “belongs” to those who live there rather than to the whole city, which gets life from it but gives it life; no public administrator would have tolerated just a few years ago such conceptual oddness. Where spatial centrality finds a way of spreading, expanding, there will be, in large cities built not too discontinuously and in compact metropolitan areas, centrality and city blending together, the great urban centre, where the thousand tensions of attraction towards “the centre” become variegated practices of a thousand social interlacements, ultra-enhancement of novelties, activities and creativity and a built-up complex of great consistency. (Sernini 1989).

Perhaps humanity does not really want to give up what Braudel indicated when studying French history: “the most obvious feature of a city is the way in which it concentrates its activities in the smallest area possible”; in the city-centre “everything meets up and everything is

Desired Landscapes 61

decided”. Usually, if the large centre attracts, it is because for many it is like taking part in a lottery.12 “Knowing well how much the centre counts, many people nowadays, especially in a country where the city-centre is also a “historic centre”, re-propose around the most internal centre and, putting forward reasons of safeguarding antiquity and monuments of historic beauty, the walls, possibly suitably restored and enclosed, the boundaries, and the gates of the city.” (Sernini 1989). It sounds false when this actually wishes to be a retrieval of local “identity” largely lost, since with population shifts it is no longer clear who the “true” citizen of a city is. In both cases the study, always interesting, of the city walls and walled cities, when conducted honestly, rather than “demonstrate” the need to reinstate the socio-spatial device of gates and walls today, may cautiously at most raise the question of whether the urban boundary is disappearing (Sernini 1987; De Seta and Le Goff 1989). To the admiration and recent enthusiasm for walls and boundaries to be reinstated is added a reactionary medieval frenzy. Also false because entirely remade – but the false, as we know, is legitimate in a society of the baroque and the debatable – the medieval city seems to be liked.13 Among intellectuals since the end of the millennium demand for the medieval has been gushing. So irrepressible that software packages are ready with which, starting from the really flat urban images of Giotto’s paintings, medieval cities are simulated, as random as they are improbable and ugly, which never existed and are disorienting and unnecessary. The medieval society was enclosed within the boundaries of that urban form. Within “the antique circle” of Dante’s Florence “one was in sober, modest peace”. “See our city”, says Beatrice in Paradise. A city and a society: the state itself, conceived as a Christian community (McClung 1983; Sernini 1989). The world of the simulacrum city is interpreted by the town of Seaside in Florida, which appears as Seahaven in The Truman Show, Peter Weir’s film set in this affected little town covered with a great glass dome and separated from the rest of the world by the filter of television. At Seahaven the longest and most fortunate soap opera in television history is running, the one that has Truman Burbank as its protagonist, the unaware star since he was in his mother’s womb, of a show that never stops and has as its gigantic studio the whole city: the “candid camera” of a true life (if it can be called that), spied on day and night by five thousand operators, with the complicity of a population of actors and extras who help, so to speak, the protagonist to live his existence under the hypnotised, involved eyes of the television public (Bignardi 1998). The Truman Show is a clockwork mechanism, a highly sophisticated satire of the American Way of Life: departing from the sociological-urbanistic dream of Seaside which, with a double somersault, Weir takes from reality, using it as the apparently false

62 The Generic City

background of his little television world, to finish with the fact that the life of Truman Burbank – the one that everybody, in bars, in their homes, in drive-ins, avidly watches, without losing a single hour of it – is the most boring existence, we might say the “most generic”, and has become an exciting show for the simple fact that it is available for everybody on T.V. (Bignardi 1998). But the scene of the storm at sea, as part of the set, is particularly emblematic, where Truman risks being shipwrecked and the sailor cannot help him because he does not know how to do, he only knows how to act. The difference between doing and acting corresponds to the difference between the true city and the simulacrum city, where doing is in close connection with inhabiting, a concept Heidegger faces in his analysis of Holderlin’s poem “Poetically inhabits man”, referring back to the Greek root of poetry, poieo, the Greek expression for the word do (Heidegger 1971). The contemporary city simulates or is like a hallucination in at least two crucial ways. First: in the era of electronic culture and economics the city repeatedly re-duplicates through the whole of its information structure and the media networks. Perhaps, as William Gibson (Gibson 1986)14 suggests, the computer’s three-dimensional interfaces will soon allow post-modern flâneurs to wander through the luminous geometry of this mnemonic city. This way urban cyberspace, as a simulation of city order and information, will be experienced as more and more segregated and deprived of true public space in contrast with the traditional city. Second: social imagination is being more and more incorporated in simulacrum-like panoramas like theme parks, historic quarters and hyper-markets, that are cut off from the rest of the city. Mike Davis underlines how widespread the conviction is that Los Angeles is the world capital of “hyper-reality”. Its greatest theme parks have traditionally been fundamentally architectural simulations of films or television. Disneyland, of course, opens its gates to the “magic world” of cartoons and caricatures of historic figures, but today it is the city itself, or rather the idealisation of it, that has become the subject of simulation. With the recent decline in the air-force space industry in southern California, the tourist/hotel/recreation sector has become the greatest source of employment on a regional level. But the tourists have become increasingly reluctant to venture into the obvious dangers of the Los Angeles “urban jungle” (Davis 1994). The MCA (Music Corporation of America) and Disney consider the solution to be to recreate the urban vitality of the city inside the safe boundaries of fort-hotels and theme parks surrounded by walls. As a result, the artificial Los Angeles is gradually coming to light. Since these simulated scenarios compete with each other with regard to “authenticity”, strange dialectical relations ensue. The simulations tend not to copy their

Desired Landscapes 63

“original” but the other simulations. Davis recalls in this sense the number of hyper-realities involved in industrial battles to monopolise “Hollywood” that have tried to sort out the not so simple pairing of made-in-Hollywood charm and Hollywood’s decayed quarters. The Hollywood in the imagination of the world cinema public was consequently kept lightly anchored to the homonymous location by rituals with a regular cadence, such as film previews, the Academy Awards, etc. But after the last generation, while true Hollywood became a hyper-violent slum, the rituals ended and the magic vanished. While relations between the past “signifier” and its “signified” declined, an opportunity was born to resuscitate Hollywood in a safer district. After some very harsh battles with small local owners, the larger landowners managed to obtain the city’s approval for an aesthetic operation costing a billion dollars on Hollywood Boulevard. In their scheme the Boulevard would be transformed into a fenced-in, linear theme park, linked to mega-malls at each end. But while the renovators were still dealing with the potential investors, the MCA upset the apple-cart by announcing that Universal City, its almost taxexempt enclave, was going to build a parallel urban reality called CityWalk. Designed by Jon Jerde, CityWalk is an “idealised reality”. As Davis emphasises, the best attractions of Olvera Street, Hollywood and West Side were synthesised in “tranquil emotions” for consumption by tourists and residents who “don’t need the exciting activity of dodging bullets… in that Third world city” Los Angeles had become. To alleviate the feeling of artificiality in this mixture, a “patina of antiquity” and a “handful of gravel” have been added. Using a decorative conjuring trick, the designers plan to disguise the new streets with a cloak of instant past; on inauguration day some buildings will be painted so as to give the impression that they were already occupied before. Sweet wrappers will be stuck to the terrace pavement as if they had been dropped by previous visitors (Davis 1994).

As the owners of MCA have taken the trouble to point out, CityWalk is not a “hypermarket” but a “revolution” in urban design … “a new type of quarter”. An urban simulator. “Actually some critics are asking themselves if it isn’t the moral equivalent of a neutron bomb: the city emptied of all experiences of human life. With all its fake sweet papers, fossils and other tricks, CityWalk takes us for a ride while it cancels out every trace of our true joy, pain or weariness (Davis 1994). In the proposals so far illustrated there is a sample collection of entertainment industry attitudes: satisfy the tastes of its public arousing the least resistance possible, with the constant intention of increasing turnover. In a certain sense this “entertainment urbanistics” works with the same

64 The Generic City

tricks as Hollywood, the greatest enthusiasm in the simplest, most economic way, that kind of enthusiasm typical of anticipation, of the promise, “but at the end of the film, when you leave the cinema, the surprise almost always remains that you have paid for it. For you go away depleted, with the feeling you have received nothing, you have only given: two hours of your own time for a great sarabande that leaves everything as it was before (Wenders 1992). Entertainment urbanistics lies in the fact that it also takes liberties with future inhabitants, but then it will be up to them to realise they have to pay for it, that they are getting nothing, only giving, giving away the secret stories of places to the dissolution of the city. In this frame memory conservation entities like the “archaeological park” as understood in a variety of proposals, be it on the transformative side or on the conservative, also incarnate this type of urbanistics: it is cult entertainment, conserving the past just for fun, or through a sense of guilt; first it is knocked down and left as waste, but then immediately recognising that a mistake is being made, an arch or archeological park is left as an alibi, actually a sign of ineptitude of the inhabitants, who, devouring their history and imagination are divesting themselves of the city project. This is urbanistic fiction that has the tendency to close our eyes on the world by its own definition, make us forget it, because entertainment urbanistics is pure oblivion. The conception of history as fiction is not – as we have seen – a novelty for architecture, which has often adopted it explicitly, sometimes with almost caricatural amplifications, like, for example, the experiences of “simulated architecture”, which even go as far as the “simulation of the simulation”, creating second grade parasitic objects, imitations of aesthetisation of the historic centre, but phenomena that are actually secondary (Nicolin 1994). We find ourselves faced with pure fiction, while, as August Endell demonstrates in his book entitled Die Schönheit der Grossstädte, only lived experience can become the homeland and the homeland only shows itself to those who seek it (Endell 1908). For we will always have pure fiction, oblivion of the world, while the project does not have the role of distracting our attention from the world but of stimulating it, taking on a different concept of space, of order, as creative potential to be used, rather than always being forced to destroy in order to recreate order. If we do not move towards what is real in lived-in space, we will be wasting the poetic expressive potential of places. The city would lose its conceptual unity, it would become a simulacrum of a city (de Azua 2003), a theme park, or perhaps a group of theme parks, islands without an archipelago, closed in and self-sufficient, that are often the background to urban segregation, to what may be defined as the segregated city.

Desired Landscapes 65

Notes 1

Sorkin 1992; Warren 1994; Augé 2000; Glaeser et al. 2001; Jost 2003; Low and Smith 2006;. 2 The theme of the labyrinth connected with Costa Smeralda architecture was developed by Franco Masia and Salvatore Altana in their series of lectures on “City and Territory”, directed by Giovanni Maciocco, Architecture degree course, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, academic year 2003–2004. 3 Insistence on the myth arose during the meeting with the representatives of the Consorzio della Costa Smeralda. Persico (lawyer), the Chairman of the Consorzio: “We are a mythical object and the myth must be maintained.” 4 Ovid Metamorphoses vv. 183–187 Vol I, with an English translation by Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library, London, 1971. 5 Ibid., vv. 159–163. 6 “Destinies will find their way”: motto engraved on a chest-of-drawers in which the alchemic symbol of the labyrinth is represented. In Fulcanelli Le dimore filosofali, Vol. II, Edizioni Mediterranee, Rome, 1973–1996, pp. 61–62. 7 In premodern urbanity the ancient cities, like the new ones, were engraved, painted or sculpted. Only at the beginning of the modern era does literature give the first symptoms of interest in geographical description. In what may be considered the first modern novel, Don Quixote (1605), Cervantes worries about informing readers about the villages and cities that appear in the text of the novel, such as the known “elogy on Barcelona”. The last passage is produced in the 19th Century. The attraction between urban space and narrative space is such that each is incomprehensible without the other: London is Dickens, Paris is Balzac, Madrid is Galdós, Dublin is Joyce (cf. de Azua 2003). 8 F Nadar, Photographie de la Place de L’Etoile, 1898. 9 With his single novel, published in 1890 in the American magazine Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, the English poet Oscar Wilde left us a long metaphorical fable with a deep significance. The story of Dorian Gray and the portrait given to him by his artist friend, Basil Hallward, who portrayed him at the height of his youth and beauty, onto which, under the arcane spell of a vow, all traces of the vices and crimes of the protagonist are transferred, is much more than one of the stages, though highly significant, of the long history of the “double in literature”, which reached its highest peak in German Romanticism. Together with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, which came out in 1886, it is one of the two exceptional points which, at a brief distance one from the other, gave new content and depth to this history (Maciocco and Tagliagambe 1998). 10 Lisbon Story, directed by Wim Wenders, Road Movies Filmproduktion/Berlin, 1994. 11 Developments in the modern theory of evolution reach the same conclusions, where it is stated that the organism and the environment are not actually

66 The Generic City determined separately. The environment is not a structure imposed upon human beings from outside, but is actually a creation of theirs; it is not an autonomous process but a reflection from biology of the species. In the same way as no organism exists without an environment, thus no environment exists without an organism (Lewontin 1983, pp 63–82). 12 Sachs 1988. The concept was already in Sauvy 1975. 13 An example: De Seta 1989. 14 William Gibson, the torchbearer of “Cyberpunk”, describes this supertechnological world as decadent: the atmosphere breathed in this novel is that of films like Blade Runner, a universe populated by adventurers and women wrestlers, prostitutes and mercenaries, all ready for any “deal” as long as they stand out. In this composite humanity, slave of the Simstin television system as much as of drugs, a new race of hero emerges, lawless and roguish, the cowboy of the console (Gibson 1986).

The Segregated City

The Urban Project of Inequality The segregated city is a relatively recent phenomenon that corresponds to the formation of powerfully structured spaces that host the new urban elites. Substantial research activity has flourished on this theme.1 Saskia Sassen, in particular, has worked out effective theoretical and conceptual reflections on the theme in very well-known essays (Sassen 1991, 1994b, 1996, 1998, 1999), which have the merit of attributing a strategic role to the city in globalisation processes, in that they are processes situated in specific spaces. As is known, we are dealing with a new type of conceptual architecture of the urban universe, which Sassen describes in her studies on the cycle of formation of global cities stating that the future phases will have global cities and global city-regions as the core element of the global economy’s organisational structure. These entities show substantial differences with regard to scale and competitiveness in the urban world. As regards scale, the global city-region is a concept fit for questions on the nature and specificity of urbanisation models. Its characterising elements consist of basic infrastructures and artefacts. As far as competitiveness is concerned, in the global city-regions there are infrastructure issues on which competitiveness is based; a greater emphasis on competition is present. The global city is characterised by strategic components of global economy that have to do with power issues, industry being represented by finance and specialised services, and there is a specialised division of functions between global cities, of which on-line connection is an intrinsic element. But recurrent features of global cities are the disproportion between the concentration of workers with a very high and a very low income, and the inequality issues between very well-supplied city spaces and spaces that are severely disadvantaged. In this picture an important novelty introduced by Sassen is the relevance attributed to the role that the production of IT services plays in

67

68 The Segregated City

city transformation. In this sense the cycle of formation of global cities (Sassen 1991, 1994b) is described by the Dutch sociologist following a particularly interesting pattern. The first phase is characterised by the geographical dispersion of the activities and the growth in importance of the central functions. Activities due to the effects of globalisation of the economy are more and more independent from place. Since activities are independent from place, geographical dispersion is generated, but at the same time a request for integration of these urban activities that are scattered. Since there is this geographical dispersion and a request for integration of activities, there is need for central control, for someone somewhere who checks the distribution of activities. Central functions grow in importance, like, for example, the headquarters of manufacturing activities spread throughout the territory. The second phase involves central administrations subcontracting some or parts of these central functions to highly specialised service companies, e.g. for data control. As in a multinational concern with activities spread all over the world, it has a central function exerted, for example, by the marketing control, quality control and data control needed to manage this activity (Sassen 1991, 1996). In the third phase these highly specialised service companies are subject, in complex global markets, to agglomeration economies. For example, a company that supplies IT services joins up with other companies to supply better IT services on a global market. These are new dynamics of urban agglomeration in the sense that being in a city means being in an extremely dense, rich mesh of data. To produce highly specialised services better, companies agglomerate spatially, forming pieces of city. In this picture, the headquarters that give out the more complex, nonstandardised functions to subcontractors, are not subject to agglomeration economies, they can choose any location: they are in a certain sense hypermobile. The key sector underlining the characteristic advantages of global cities is therefore that of production of highly specialised services. Since many of the central functions needed to control all the scattered activities are delegated to highly specialised companies, the headquarters become hypermobile and the highly specialised companies become fixed. In this conception there is a reversal, a great difference compared with the dominant argument in which productive activities are defined as hypermobile or can be relocated in various ways, and headquarters fixed. The key sector is no longer the one exerting the central function, but the productive one that supports central function activity (Sassen 1991, 1996).

The Urban Project of Inequality 69

The production of a highly specialised service happens in a place, while corporations are hyper-mobile, the aggregates of specialised services, which are urban aggregates, are specialised. Nodes of urban services are formed because these highly specialised nodes arising from the agglomeration create a network, are connected with each other, and form new urban systems. Strategic nodes are thus explained as aggregations of specialised service companies that have to supply a global service for which the following are created: global networks of subsidiary offices, network transactions crossing borders, transnational urban systems. One of the outcomes of this process is the growth of the service class, an increase in the number of high-level professionals and high-profit specialised service companies, which causes the level of spatial and socioeconomic disparity in these cities to widen. The city made up of dense nuclei of services is an unequal city. In these aggregates of highly-specialised services there is a growth in the number of high-level professionals and high-profit specialised service companies in the same way as in the agglomerations there is a growth in executive levels and high levels of activity, but there are situations of extremely high income and extremely low income. Urban science fiction literature has for some time faced the theme of the segregated city. The skyscraper in High-Rise (1975) by James G. Ballard (Ballard 1975) is a psychotope that summarises in its unusual character the “universal” of the city. More than a building it has become an autarchical mini-metropolis nullifying the city, with its swimming-pools, restaurants, social divisions, borders between the three class-environments that compose it: the proletariat, the middle class, the economic oligarchy. According to Marco d’Eramo, however much skyscrapers are the symbols of American metropolises, skyscrapers lead to crises and ultimately nullify the city, if by city is meant the place where people mix, where individuals, cultures and activities merge. The skyscraper as a dwelling nullifies the city because it is itself an enclosed, autonomous city (d’Eramo 2004). In Ballard’s novel those who are below aspire only to move upwards, while those above dictate the rhythms of the city-block, which, as the story goes on, “goes mad” almost without a trigger, to the point of degenerating into chaos. The mall on the tenth floor was a clear border between the nine lower floors, with their proletariat. The central two-thirds of the condominium formed its middle class above them, and on the top five floors of the skyscraper there was the upper class. And thus the technological paradise of the miniature-metropolis becomes an authentic hell, a return to the Middle Ages (near future) very similar to that of La morte di Megalopoli, where tiny enclaves form, from which, however, a new social order will arise. “As was often repeated, the current skyscraper crisis might mark the

70 The Segregated City

beginning of success rather than failure. Without realizing it, it had given those people a means of escape to a new life, and a model of social organisation that would become a paradigm for all future skyscrapers.” (Vacca 1974). But it is perhaps Super-Cannes, a more recent book by Ballard, that better represents the irruption of the service class, the professionals, onto the urban horizon. A horizon somewhat different from that of the HighRise that Ballard himself explains (Ballard 1975), revealing many differences rather than similarities between the two books. In both novels we see groups of successful professionals – lawyers, doctors, accountants, businessmen, and so on – but in the novel High-Rise the people who live in the block and decide to go back to a barbaric, Stone Age, state completely refuse their lifestyle, rediscover themselves, their primitive selves. In Super-Cannes the executive managers living in the business park completely accept their lifestyle and their role in the community and do not want to go back to a barbaric state or anything else. Eden-Olympia, the business park in Super-Cannes, has lost its ethical values because this is not necessary, there is no need of them to keep the Eden-Olympia community united. Eden-Olympia is kept together by the requirements of office life. There not being any crime, there is no need for the voluntary organisations we have in the ordered societies we know: people who join together in local congregations are involved in local elections, people who are elected or elect councillors to be their representatives. All this is not necessary, because the Eden-Olympia business park is like a machine. It does not need the personal involvement of its population. Everything is already organised. It is like going to stay in a fantastic hotel: you do not need to elect the person at the reception desk or in the management office, because everything is perfectly efficient. The culture of pleasure and fun can be seen to make room for a new type of fun: hard work. The elites of this world – the top managers, the most important companies – never play, they are too busy. But in Super-Cannes violence is lying in wait to bring men back to their primitive, ancestral selves. “When we became human, 500,000 years ago, we were violent creatures and this is still in our blood. There is no doubt that violent sports, dangerous sports, really do have a rejuvenating effect.” (Ballard 1975). As we have seen, with her global city construct Sassen does not just explain what the phases of urban change are, how cities are formed nowadays, but also maintains that cities are being formed as nodes rich in functions, and systems of these dense nodes that are the product of the dynamics of agglomeration of highly-specialised services. These urban situations have an extreme blend of destinations, dwellings and services and a formal mixture of great iconic evidence.2 But, as we have underlined

The Urban Project of Inequality 71

in the previous pages, in these “dense nodes” there are very high levels of profit compared with other situations where profits are extremely low. It is the geography of an unequal city. The theme of the unequal city is a theme almost intrinsic in the urbanistics discipline, dealt with, for example, by Koolhaas with the Exodus project in 1972 (Koolhaas and Zengelis 1973). “There was once a city divided into two parts …”: Exodus is a tale that narrates the story of the separation between the good part of the city and the bad; it is the enhancement of this break until architectonic and urban construction and the life itself of the inhabitants are reduced to ensuring and perpetuating this difference. One works to realise, to extend and defend a zone of “great metropolitan desirability”, the other to forbid its inhabitants access by putting up an insurmountable wall. A scenario that departs from the idea of London as an underdeveloped city and that building the “metropolitan ideal” would create an authentic exodus of inhabitants wanting to immigrate. Exodus, which responds to the competition launched by the magazine Casabella in 1979 on the theme of the “city as a significant environment”, is part of the line of “radical” projects drawn up by the young Italian generation of the late 60s, committed to a united criticism of the modern city, of functionalism, capitalism and the oppression that every system exerts (Rouillard 1994). The “radical” Italian criticism generated completely new images manipulating excessively and “in the reverse sense” the architectonic and formal traits of modern rationalism, betting everything on the senselessness of the concept of a continuous linear city and undifferentiated urbanistics. In Exodus, Koolhaas, with a parallel extremist vision, transforms the linear city of Leonidov3 into a realist concentration camp utopia: the continuous band is enclosed between two insurmountable rectilinear walls, and the “squares”, also pools, that split it into functions, develop a demented scenario, following perfect zoning: the condition of the extremity where, day by day, the band progresses by planned tranches being dug; individual plots to balance out collectivism and the intense community way of life; the ceremonial square paved with marble; the reception area looking out onto the decrepit state of old London and the splendid manifestations of the band; John Nash’s London, conserved and accessible at a lower level by escalators; the toilets; the park of air, fire, water and earth; the square of culture (the British Museum); the university; the science research complex (Rouillard 1994). Koolhaas takes up the fascinating themes, the critical method, the architectonic forms and ways of narrating discovered in 1969 by the radical Italian generation in the Superstudio Continuous Movement or the Parallel Quarters of Archizoom in Berlin. As one of the last projects of

72 The Segregated City

radical architecture, Exodus summarises its traits: narrative fiction as its programme, the project as polemic demonstration, criticism of the contemporary city by enhancing its “qualities” and taking the utopian themes themselves to extremes (the ideal, isolation, preference for the island), the reversal of values on the part of an Orwellian universe, precise graphic representation, photomontage technique which creates a dreadful hyper-reality. Exodus shares with the radical projects the theme of continuous, magnificent movement, and a band crossing and proceeding, slowly and regularly, unrelentingly, over the existing world reduced to the silence of a ruin, while the city looks ahead to its prospects of spatial and social segregation (Rouillard 1994).

Elitist Segregation as Global Identity In these drafts urban segregation appears as an unavoidable destiny of the city. Hartmut Böhme (Böhme 2001) even goes as far as maintaining that the global identity of cities is indeed elitist segregation. Davis, who has chosen Los Angeles, the “city of angels” or the “metropolis of illusions”, as a world laboratory of city transformation, moves in his book Dead Cities: And Other Tales (Davis 2002) among science fiction, philosophy and social ecology to denounce urban segregation as privatisation of public spaces and gated quarters, but also bloody conflicts between gangs of youths, the logbook of a “second civil war” conducted by the establishment against the poor. The American scholar retraces the history of urban development in the United States outlining the new shapes of metropolises marred till death by environmental and social disasters. An apocalyptic vision that takes the attention away from another important mutation: the large urban agglomerates have become a single, enormous productive atelier where urban segregation is becoming a socially necessary convention to maintain the status quo. The declared objective of this and previous books is easily summarised: to demonstrate the use of urban redevelopment as a social and economic space to produce profit, but also as a place where space organisation is aimed at reproducing existing social inequality. Thus was it in Los Angeles, so too in Las Vegas. The metropolis was becoming the place of a thousand centres giving a serious blow to some generations of urbanists who considered planning work on the lines of city development to be indispensable. Each centre, it was asserted, possesses its own logic and capacity to mould the surrounding environment. Basically, urban sprawl and gentrification were

Elitist Segregation as Global Identity 73

indeed the result of a deep crisis in this conception of the metropolis. But at the same time, however, polycentric development of cities responded to very clear political and economic criteria. The fleeing of the middle class and the bourgeoisie from the old quarters to escape from the traffic and the presence of the new “dangerous classes” is certainly no novelty. In the same way as the shift of productive settlements to new areas has been constant. Elements that have fed urban sprawl indeed and the exodus of the middle class and the bourgeoisie from the city centre, phenomena supported and nurtured, moreover, by city commissions appointed to draw up urbanistic projects (Davis 2002). Nevertheless, in the 80s a profound change took place that concerned the eclipse of the old magnates of the property market, determined by two factors: on the one hand, the new residential and productive settlements required technology for surveillance and communications, making the presence of high-tech businesses increase; on the other, the quantity of capital from national and international finance swelled to become a river that flooded “urban redevelopment”, shifting large investments to the property market (Vecchi 2004). In Los Angeles these two factors fuelled the gold rush to recuperate Downtown. The same process, though with obvious differences, also repeated itself in Las Vegas, where the transformation of the “city of the desert” into a sparkling series of theme parks initially caused the proteiform development of the city, but in the last ten years the reverse tendency was suffered. With remodernisation of the old city centre an authentic “urban revolution” took place, which had the old owners of the city as sacrificial victims and saw the arrival of thousands of latinos and fortune-seeking capitalists, not just looking for lucrative investments. The Los Angeles scholar notes that the highly-praised polycentrism of metropolises can be interpreted as a transition phase still underway towards a widespread metropolis stratified along class, ethnic, and functional fracture lines. Themes already dealt with by Davis in previous studies (Davis 1990, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2004), but which he develops further here, spelling out the features of the segregated city in the fortified quarters of the professionals, in the elimination of public space by privatisation, in the conflicts between Afroamericans and latinos, in the ghetto as a basin of disadvantaged individuals and just-in-time factories of criminal economy (Vecchi 2004). Dead Cities: And Other Tales is, however, a very dark and apocalyptic book, almost as if the fate of the metropolises is sealed. Or rather that cities as we have known them in modern history are destined to succumb, due to the environmental disasters and social apocalypses that they continuously produce. Admirable in this direction is the conclusive essay

74 The Segregated City

in which Davis, also in this case, asserts, amid references to science fiction and scientific literature, that metropolises are not eternal because they are social formations that can be substituted, just like other social formations, by other ways of “inhabiting together” (Vecchi 2004). Davis’ tone is very far from the dynamic image other scholars of the metropolis have described in recent years. He certainly has little to do with Sassen’s global cities, where sociology elects some metropolises for the role of coordination of the entire global economy. And he is also far from Manuel Castells’ reflections, in which cities are authentic nodes of a thick network potentially embracing the whole world in the information era (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998). At the same time Davis’ studies of metropolises are diametrically opposed to those of scholars like the architecture historian, Michael Benedikt, who has pinpointed the future of the metropolis-form in the possibilities offered by virtual reality (Benedikt 1993). Beyond the suggestions in Benedikt’s theses, it is however obvious that here the perspective has been turned around: the city is no longer the space where living in society is structured, but a gateway of access to an infosphere where the plurality of forms of life present outside the screen live harmoniously together. And if between the “global city” and the “quartz city” there is no point of contact at all, then the “silicon city” becomes the “totalitarian” device represented in the cinematographic trilogy The Matrix, where men and women are heterodirected by a technostructure which guarantees a “vision” of social relationships defined in a separate location (Vecchi 2004). In this frame “urban redevelopment” is nothing more than the laboratory where models of reticular organisation of urban space “functional” to widespread production of goods are finely adjusted. So is it in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and the global city itself par excellence, namely New York: the metropolis is thus an enormous, single, productive atelier, a conflictive space in which surveillance policies and those of organisation of urban fabric, mobility and access to knowledge are the numerous manifestations of the entire workforce being put to work. To oppose the segregation trend, the metropolis should be considered, according to Davis, a place of radical policies, with the possibility of subverting the dominant social relationships in metropolises. According to Davis, every American city has its official symbols and its motto: some have mascots, colours, songs, birds, trees; sometimes even mountains. But only Los Angeles has adopted a nightmare as its official symbol (Davis 1990). In the book City of Quartz (1990) Davis enumerates various tendencies towards militarisation of the panorama. Events like the spring rebellion of 1992, including the progressive recession, the leak of capital, the savage cuts in the budget, the rising murder rate (in spite of the

Elitist Segregation as Global Identity 75

cease-fire between black gangs) and the boom in purchases of firearms in the suburbs, only confirm that social polarisation and spatial apartheid are accelerating. While the “endless summer” is about to finish, it seems quite probable that the Los Angeles of 2019 be able to comfortably be in a distopian relationship with every ideal of a democratic city (Davis 1990). In Neuromancer and other stories, Gibson gives astonishing examples showing how realist and “extrapolative” science fiction is able to prefigure social theory, like an opposition policy that anticipates the cyber-Fascism lying in wait behind the future horizon. The American scholar offers a “Gibsonian” map, already partially drawn, for the future of Los Angeles. Paradoxically, the map itself, though inspired by a vision of Marxism for cyberpunk, resembles, according to Davis, the “combination of the halfmoon and the dartboard” that Ernest W. Burgess of the Chicago School of Sociology had much earlier made “the most famous diagram in social science” among the canonical studies of the North American city; with this “dartboard” Burgess represented the five concentric zones of the city in which it was supposed that the struggle for survival of the fittest (as imagined by social Darwinists) generated the urban social classes and the type of housing. It portrays a “human ecology” organised by biological forces of invasion, competition, succession and symbiosis. The re-mapping of the urban structure done by Davis brings Burgess into the future. It retains certain “ecological” determinants like salary, value of land, class and race, but adds a new decisive factor: fear. With the refusal to make new public investments to rebalance social conditions, citizens are obliged to make private investments in public safety. The rhetoric of urban reform persists, but the substance is extinct. In the first place, the border between urbanistics and the policing authorities has eroded further in the sense that the Los Angeles police have become the principal actor in Downtown planning; no big project is launched without their participation. To reconstruct Los Angeles – Davis emphasises – means simply to reinforce the bunker. In contemporary metropolitan Los Angeles a new kind of special community is emerging in sympathetic synchrony with militarisation of the territory. For convenience we might call them “social control quarters”, SCQ. They merge penal and civil code sanctions with planning for the territory to create what Michel Foucault would without doubt have recognised as a further example of the evolution of the “disciplinary order” (Foucault 1976)4 of the 20th Century city (Davis 1994). With these Orwellian-style control technologies the border of communities and the communities at the border will in the end mean the same thing. When Davis began to study the “gated communities” in southern California in the mid-80s, this was a tendency that only concerned really

76 The Segregated City

rich quarters or new settlements at the far metropolitan frontiers (e.g. the areas that Burgess described as “strictly residential neighborhoods” or “commuter-zones”). After the spring 1992 rebellion, however, tens of normal residential quarters in Los Angeles claimed the right to selfsegregation from the rest of the city. From 1980 onwards there was the mini-market boom; after 1990 there would be the mini-city boom. In Davis’ opinion, at the same time electronic ghettoes were proliferating for the poorest, like Southcentral, a black hole of data and media, without local TV broadcasting via cable or links with the major data networks. Just as it turned into a residential/work ghetto at the beginning of the 20th Century in the industrial city, it is now turning into an electronic ghetto within the emerging city of information. If we go on allowing the centres of our cities to deteriorate into criminalised “third worlds”, all the clever safety technology, present and future, will not save the anxious bourgeoisie (Davis 1994).5 Böhme’s position confronts this apocalyptic but realistic picture (Böhme 2001), and may be considered a resistant utopia for his insights that on the basis of the analysis of “superamericanisation” of the city, requisites can be pinpointed that urbanists must lay down for structuring the cultural space of large cities opposing urban segregation prospects. Böhme describes the Berlin of 1932 as a place where the experience of Americanism and Fordism was assimilated, of new, rapid rhythms of massification of cities with millions of inhabitants, where functionalism had begun its triumphant march in all fields of modernity, including architecture and design. In the Berlin metropolis the way of perceiving big cities had been re-examined for the first time. Precisely in that year Robert Musil focussed on the social obsession of a sort of “superamerican city” where everybody ran or stopped with a chronometer in their hand.6 The “superamerican city” fantasy reflects society’s approval of the megalopolis. Modern life is the life of the megalopolis. Regions and cultural traditions are absorbed by the functional spaces of economy and technology. Taking over from the “local” and the “historic”, globalisation, in an expansion without a past, is constructed by technology, traffic, telecommunications and economy. What is historically heterogenous and a cultural heterotope is destroyed by the insatiable hunger for space and the intimate segregation of the city. Atomisation of human activities and thus the tendency towards dissolution of the social, the past and the “regional” leads, in Musil’s opinion, to dominance of the abstract over the concrete.7 This geography is expressed in some cities, or rather, in their circumscribed areas representing the compact, thick control network of a “worldscape of flows”. This space of circulation of invisible and autopoietic capital is managed with the help of gigantic information systems. So the new

Elitist Segregation as Global Identity 77

Manhattan Downtown is, like the global cities, also and above all the effect of the information technology revolution, as are in fact the cyber cities, materially expressed in only a few, though extremely concentrated, architectural complexes. It is the symbolic materialisation of what Sassen has defined as the new global triangulation (Sassen 1994a; Fuchs and Moltmann 1994), The axis mundi – to quote one of Constantin Brancusi’s central sculptures – of a reality that, though of American origin, is nevertheless transnational. From 1970 onwards the global cities have taken their place, in the manner of authentic management centres, beside the classical institutions of national States and world economy. All this has had effects no less sensitive than paradoxical on urban geography and, in particular, on the mechanisms of spatial and social segregation. New York, just a couple decades earlier, was a metropolis of industrial production and transfer of goods, to which corresponded precise social stratifications, immigration flow channels, and the shaping of quarters regulated specifically by class and/or ethnic group. Space articulation was configured by the dynamic tension between centre and suburbs and by the characteristic ethical “nests” of a classical city of immigrants, with their socio-economic grids (Park 1967; Lindner 1994). Spaces faced eastward towards Europe, from where the mass of immigrants arrived. Consequently white people made up the majority of the city population. In the space of thirty years the white people became a minority. Nowadays Afroamericans, Latin-Americans and Asians make up 55/60% of the population. Together with the increase in multiethnic proliferation and the new demographic profile of the city, New York’s decline was accomplished as a “machine of industrial production” and, in the urbanistic sense, as an “integration machine”. In contrast, New York City began to take off as the capital of financial and industrial services, a launch associated with economic and financial management anchored to the gigantic IT potential. This management, what’s more, was created by recruiting its staff both at a national and international level. But economic globalisation and social segregation are phenomena that are closely linked (Böhme 2001). The work and life of the new Newyorker elites, in no way tied to any specific place, nevertheless determined the extraordinary demand for many little services carried out by the new groups of immigrants. The economicfinancial management elite, culturally and geographically out of their element, and at the same time extremely active, numerous, with plenty of cultural and consumer requirements, needed an on–site concentration without equal of extremely specialised, private and semi-public cultural services, made to fit their lifestyle. A collection of services which made Manhattan also a centre of tourist attraction. Disegregation policy grew

78 The Segregated City

weak as a consequence of these demographic shifts and the economic structure. In its place segregation processes grew, not only in New York, once the melting pot par excellence, but also in all the global cities and the mega-cities. Taking Los Angeles as an example, Edward V. Soja (Soja 1986, 1988, 1996; Scott and Soja 1996) has described the urbanistic strategies of the post-Fordian era, strategies that lead to the disintegration of the dual centre-suburbs city and create new geographies. Deindustrialisation of the classic industrial sectors leads both to gigantic neoindustrial technopolises, such as are to be found in Korea or the Orange Country near Los Angeles, and to the global cities that make up the control network, at city level, of the expansion movement of capital in the global dimension of cyberspace. The consequence is, as Soja maintains, that almost every corner of the world can become part of a global city. Thus, if global cities are materially and locally present, they are nevertheless entrusted, as are the brains of the management, with the control of local realities. They can therefore be operative just as well in a South African goldmine, as in a textile factory in Thailand, on an Arab oil-field, an Argentinian automobile factory, even a coca plantation in Colombia, a Siberian natural gas-field or a woodworking site in the Tropics. This is due to the new organisation of Earth space, in such a way that the global is localised in some spots and the local is globalised everywhere. The two geographies, one complementary to the other, activate segregation in a new way. They create, in other words, for the new elites enveloped in the powerful cloak made up of the service suppliers totally enslaved to them, powerfully structured social spaces with security technologies, separated like fortresses (Böhme 2001). The production of segregation is in itself a service, provided as much by companies specialised in security, as by the city police itself. These policies are the effect of a new form of social segregation, of polarisation and dismemberment of the city, that have ended up giving life, both internally and at the city edges, to pluriethnic, social subclasses, that are immobilised, deprived of the hope of any opportunity, people who are no longer to be assimilated, but only put into a ghetto. Which is like saying that in the megalopolises the relationship is built up between a first, wellcircumscribed world and a third and fourth unlimited world. Next to highly comfortable, efficient urban areas reflecting the colossal domination of capital, utterly clean, zones spring up that are urbanistically-speaking wastelands, with crumbling infrastructures, inhabited by ethnic groups with a high rate of conflict; areas completely deprived of any instruments of control or assistance on the part of the city or State, lacking in economic support (Worpole and Greenhalgh 1996; Fainstein 1997). It seems almost like returning to the dominance, typical of the premodern, of the ascribed

Flat Man 79

status, where the modern city based the attractiveness of its dynamic quality on the fact that in it none of the almost natural status requisites prevailed (birth, race, ethnic group, type of housing), whereas achieved status did, the condition able to be achieved by work and performance (Merten 1957). Besides, it was precisely on this that the American dream was founded. Nowadays those who do not have certain necessary forms of identification (the right housing in the right neighbourhood, account number, telephone, internet site, credit card, health insurance, etc.) are socially a “nobody” in the city’s no-man’s-land. He/she will remain fatally in outer space with respect to the global cities and the global economy, in the same way as in the Middle Ages he/she would have been pinned to rank by birth. This also stands, on a planetary scale, for the billions of very poor confined to the geography of poverty: their birth fatally defines their life up until their death. Consequently, the elites of Manhattan, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo and San Paolo have more in common with each other, on an economic, social and “habits” level, than with their compatriots, housed a couple of miles away in slums, favelas, ban-lieus or one of the German Elendsviertel (Böhme 2001). Globalisation also implies the activation of entirely new dynamics of segregation, dynamics that, both in the city and on the planet as a whole, produce a change in the structuring of spaces (Böhme 2001).

Flat Man Global cities also give shape to the model of space organisation for the future, with the double form of localisation of the global and globalisation of the local, which has produced an enormous reversal of space and made the centre coincide with the suburbs. In this picture, certain requisites should be remembered that urbanists can lay down for structuring the sociocultural space of large cities: cities have to be able to serve immigration (Böhme 2001), which, in the present state, has generally taken on the form of multicultural migration; they need transparent social and economic aggregation strategies, though without destroying the “nests” of the subsidiary economy of the different ethnic groups and the socio-cultural grids of groups of immigrants which organise themselves in regional microcontexts. The work Flat Man by Gilbert & George,8 which shows some young immigrants who resemble giants in the street compared with the small apartment-men looking nervously from the large residential buildings they are locked up in, proclaims the vitality of the immigrant generations and in a certain sense is emblematic of the fact that cities should serve immigration,

80 The Segregated City

for above all immigration can give life to the cities. This means two things: on the one hand, the need for cultural pluralism and socio-economic multidimensionality, associated with the routes of integration and assimilation in the macrospace of the city; on the other, the need of extraordinary density of forms of life and reproduction in the medium and microspace of quarters that cannot be thought of as destined to arise in pre-determined zones, and therefore separate from the city. The “economy of poverty” in the ethnic quarters of migration and the proletariat and subproletariat quarters has, however cynical the statement may sound, an essential function for the survival of cities. This economy has to be “left to itself”. Hence the usefulness of the city generally being able to dispose of spaces of access and transit for the purposes of cultural collusion, exchanges, contacts, reciprocal permeation and reproduction, and thus also of what is called the “politics of visibility” (Böhme 2001). The thing is destined to hit just as much what Michel Foucault and Marc Augé call the non-places (Augé 1992; Foucault 2001), the places of the heterotope and the transitory, where men and things cross paths and crowd together in confusion, as the poor quarters also, even more shut off than before, and the immaculate spaces, more strongly reinforced by security technology, of the economic centres, of the government complexes and of the enclaves of exclusive dwellings of the elite (Böhme 2001). In this way, to use an expression dear to Musil, “superamericanisation” of the city is delineated, oriented towards post-Fordist fragmentation of the city, adjusted for the imperatives of safety and ethnic segregation. This would be the final decline of modernity and at the same time the consequent end of urbanistic architecture inspired by the great traditions of the utopian city and the utopia as a city. It is therefore important to combat this danger, nurture a resistant utopia to avoid destroying the space of a pluricultural urban dimension and the conditions of its actual genesis. One form of resistant utopia is that worked out by the French anthropologist Michel Agier (Agier 1999a, 1999b), who proposes a hypothesis of city regeneration beginning with what he defines as the uncertain city, a place of instability but also of social practices containing embryos of civitas. Agier illustrates his position departing from a critical analysis of the “dissociated world” of the city of today, that has taken its distance from the purpose for which cities were born: to reduce the cost of interactions, bring men nearer together, facilitate trade, exchange and collective production of goods, organise the social division of work according to a system of solidarity no longer “mechanical” or direct, but “organic” or indirect (Durkheim 1991; Webber 1996). The ideal city is thus a complex socio-spatial form, the functioning of which presupposes a series of social mediations between individuals, and not individualism.

Flat Man 81

Nowadays there is commiseration over the “end of the city”, the era of the “non-city” is announced and models of urban conviviality are sought by transforming historic cities into urban museums. What has happened? The spaces of contact which once contextualised sociability through subsequent proximities, have lost their ancient function (Choay 1994b). Life in the city is more and more fragmented: in the management policies, in routes, in representations. For some inhabitants it is dictated by the rhythm of the tense flows of motorways, railways or airlines and Hertzian networks via which people, goods and images circulate: well, what functions and sense can the city still have, in economic and political territories without a fixed anchorage? For others, it is confined to spaces characterised by a pile of shortages: lack of housing, work, security, etc. The effects of fear, of social segregation, violence and hyper-protection are perceptible in the spread of small ghettoes – some luxury ghettoes, others poor – and in the progressive disappearance of public spaces. The world of the city is dissociating itself while it is, at this turn of the century, the principal habitat of the inhabitants of our planet. For in developed countries 78% of the population live in the city, 77% in Latin America, 43% in Africa. Agier develops the hypothesis according to which life in the city, as it is being formed in the world today, relates to three main models: the generic city, the bare city and the ban-lieu (or the uncertain city). The first, as much a minority in facts as it is dominant as a model, reproduces the same privileged forms of circulation, communication and consumption all over the surface of the globe. The second is, in contrast, the space of extreme spoliation due to the increasing number of persons abandoned. Between the two, finally, the uncertain city is a zone of ambiguity, of precarious social paths continually oscillating between failure and success. This all suggests that the city of tomorrow will be shaped by ties, struggles, passing and counter-balancing between these three paradigms, and we wonder whether they will diminish or increase, if they will grow nearer or, on the contrary, move farther and farther away from each other (Agier 1999a). The French scholar maintains that the large cities of the South were mostly formed by recent urbanisation and “born in dissociation”. In black Africa, for example, the dominant urbanistic model was the planned expression of the “colonial situation”, on the Brazzaville model, studied by Georges Balandier in the 50s (Balandier 1985): suddenly the opposition was created between the “official” city, colonial and white, and the group of African “centres” and “camps” placed under colonial administration. Nowadays the majority of African citizens are to be found in nonestablished cities, they occupy the townships, the quarters of the evicted or

82 The Segregated City

the spontaneous, illegal districts. In contrast with and to the advantage of a minority, urbanistic policies are inspired by the more up-to-date models of the rich countries and they multiply urban highways, large malls and luxury residential ghettoes. A minority entrenched in its own spaces, this little world is linked with global consumer and communications systems. Agier tells us that Douala, the city-port and transit point for the West, economic capital of the Cameroons, illustrates this dissociation. The city has today a million and a half inhabitants and four-fifths of the industrial and commercial activities of the country are concentrated there. Western companies have promoted the settlement of a dense European colony of investors, small or large businessmen, traders, oil magnates, executives, administrators and technicians, generously paid by multinationals. The white people of Douala (around 15,000 in the 80s) display daily their consumer goods and their power. But for the large majority of the inhabitants of Douala, life is marked by the inaccessibility of the modern, developed, rich city. For each of these a form of segregation exists, totally interiorised, which is expressed by the impossibility of walking through the city without previously having worked out a personal mental map of the proper and improper places to frequent (Agier 1999a). The second entity adopted by Agier is the bare city, which represents the space of extreme spoliation due to the increasing number of people abandoned, a world in some ways the opposite (and the hell) of the generic city. At the farthest edges of the world we find populations subjected to exodus or uprooted, often scorned by the immediate neighbourhood. Other peoples, still farther away, are gathered in refugee camps or national evacuee camps, as a result of wars, natural calamities and large development projects.9 It is there that a minimal, collective stage of “bare life” (Agamben 1997) takes shape. It is the condition that leads to postulating the possible existence of what should, using a generalisation, be defined as a bare city. There, the question of humanity at the elementary level becomes imminent, in the sense that “bare life”, as an extreme figure, is an undefined life that has been separated from its context and that, having, so to speak, survived death, has become incompatible with the human world (Agamben 1997). It is total poverty, beyond any issue of citizenship. Refugee camps will soon become the largest cities of these countries, excluding the capitals, sometimes reaching a hundred thousand inhabitants. In short, a new type of agglomerate of citizens appears, without being a city at all. This world is just as global as the generic city, but is attracted downwards, beyond any political existence (Agier 1999a). How are social ties to be recreated in this context, and forms of symbolisation of life and places of life? Far from being the places experienced almost daily by a small part of humanity in the anonymous,

Flat Man 83

privileged and comfortable universe of airports and malls, “non-places” are basically the result of a loss: loss of a land, a house, a village, that is, the attributes of identity, of relations and memory connected with a place (Augé 1992). This concerns emigrants of course but, even more, people subjected to forced moves, confronted with various types of privation: loss of work, housing, a family tie, human resources, nationality. In the pile, nowadays become commonplace, of all these missing things the extreme limit of life is delineated, there, where human beings are neither dead nor human (Agier 1999a). The camp has thus become, according to Giorgio Agamben, the extreme paradigm of our modern world. It is a “biopolitical” paradigm: be it a concentration camp, transit or refugee, the camp establishes spoliation around mere biological life (Agamben 1997; Agier 1999a). Finally, struggling between the bare city and the generic city, the majority of citizens populate precarious, intermediate, uncertain places. The most exact term to describe their existence would be ban-lieu, place of banishment. Not a space, but a zone of indifference between internal and external, exclusion and inclusion (Agamben 1997; Agier 1999a), they are the places of the ban, of being recognised as valueless, perhaps by loss of rights or even being sent away, but not anomic, not illegal. The ban-place may be temporary (in individual trajectories or collective history). It is an ambivalent universe, for it is there that “true life” is found again, as François Maspero writes on the subject of the Parisian ban-lieues (Maspero 1990; Agier 1999a), namely a form of spontaneous imagination, devoid of an institutional project created a priori, more of a city life than urban, therefore; but there, too, fear and death are greater, a place where life has less value than elsewhere. A whole world of men badly placed, evacuated, unemployed or, in the best of cases, workers, too, precariously moving up the social scale, who invent forms of stabilised survival in this context, on the edge of the large planetary territorial links. These citizens reinvent their city in their relationships, along the paths they take, in their occupation of space. Forced to get by, to improvise and indissociably imagine forms of ties, moral values and little jobs. All of the many survival strategies always experienced in the intermediate space. An inventory of the resources, expedients and cunning tricks used by citizens who live in contexts never defined with certainty, in a situation of mobility, ascending or descending, of escape from or stabilisation of their poverty, on a path of migration or exodus enables us to be aware of and appreciate better the ban-lieu zones, those where survival, physical and social, is still possible. This city is generous with solutions and creations, more in general, it is a whole range of social, political or symbolic strategies that allow daily life to be organised and, in a certain way, the

84 The Segregated City

city to be reinvented for oneself. These “resistant solutions”, tiny and invisible, are all the more pressed for, the more the actors are situated in an intermediate, indefinite context, susceptible, therefore, to being further transformed. First step, or last bastion, of a social tie of proximity, of a “minimal social life”, the ban-lieu makes certain paths through the city familiar, surpassing also material and social barriers. At this level it also becomes possible to enter a little into the circuits of the generic or global city. But if these solutions are more vital than ambitious today, it is because, from this side, the spectre of the bare city and social disconnection is becoming more and more present and impressive (Agier 1999a). The conclusion Agier reaches is therefore that the urban world is split into three large paradigms: the bare city, representing the extreme baring of biopolitics with no other aid but humanitarian, the generic city, privileged and reproducing the same models of communications and consumerism throughout the planet, and, between these two cities, the banlieu, the uncertain city, a zone of ambiguity between failure and accomplishment, where people set up survival strategies. The city of tomorrow is outlined in the ties, struggles, passages and balance between these three paradigms, but it is the uncertain city, the intermediate space, in which these citizens reinvent their city in their relationships, their paths, their occupation of space. Survival strategies are always experienced in intermediate space perhaps because there is a correspondence between intermediate space and public sphere, where everyone tries to smooth things out with reciprocally civilised behaviour, where all citizens have the certainty of being able to live in reciprocal trust (Dahrendorf 2005). In these places of intermediate space the first steps of a social: tie of proximity, “a minimal social life” are still possible. This is why the banlieu makes some paths through the city familiar. At this level it becomes possible to enter a little into the circuits of the generic city and the global city, opening up ways of contact in the segregated and fortified spaces. It is the energy of hope that nurtures social and cultural creations and lays some frontiers open to debate, like that of the ghettoes, whether they be true or false. This hope feeds the resistant utopias of some scholars of the city like Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Sennett, Saskia Sassen or the anthropologist, Arian Appadurai, who keenly investigate late modernity categories. They narrate the human condition in the global cities and the revolution under way in the notions of space, time and social class. In the past, the condition of man in the metropolis was investigated by Georg Simmel, who devoted a famous essay to the figure of the “stranger” (Simmel 1961; Bagnasco 1999), as a metaphor for modern man, used by

Flat Man 85

Simmel to interpret the metropolitan condition. The stranger – not the wanderer that comes and then goes – is a member of the group, but in a particular position. Present, but not deeply-rooted, he expresses both nearness and farness, indifference and commitment. He is less bound and freer in his opinion, and with him we have more abstract relations, since we only share certain, more general qualities with him. The figure of the stranger, or the outsider, takes on the significance of archetype of the modern condition of man in the metropolis. Simmel’s themes have some ramifications, one of which has directly to do with reality and the metaphor of space in relation phenomena: the tension between nearness and farness, or rather between access and separation. The city may be understood as a relatively spacious, dense, permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals. In a spacious, dense and heterogeneous social environment potential for accessibility to others increases. If different urban structures permit greater or lesser degrees of accessibility and fluidity, it is also not excluded that subsequent processes of urbanisation might reduce these possibilities. This circumstance may then be amplified by the tension, always active in relationships, between access and separation. In an emblematic way, Richard Sennett, accentuating the reach of the separation strategy, speaks of the “modern fear of exposure”. The dangerous, chaotic, conflictive, contemporary metropolis arouses reactions of defence and detachment, but the fear of exposure also has ancient roots in western culture. This fear is reflected in the way the city has taken shape and reveals itself in full show nowadays in the metropolises. As Sennett emphasizes, what characterises our way of constructing the city is the ghettoisation of differences, implicitly considered threatening for the collectivity rather than stimulating. What we construct in our urban realm are therefore anonymous, neutralising places, spaces that remove the threat of social contact (Sennett 1991; Bagnasco 1999). The Greek polis and the medieval commune expressed a different possibility of free access to the other, though with ambiguity and severe limitations. Hannah Arendt reflected on this, to arrive at the idea of political and public life (Arendt 1958). In the Greek polis politics was born, understood as the public sphere of activities freely chosen and practised, emancipated from the private sphere of the family and economics, places of necessity. In politics one is among “equals”, among men who are equally not subjected to other men; whereas in the family and family economics, relations are between “unequals”, an inequality that is maintained in despotic government systems. In the second place, in public life decisions are made using persuasion and the word, not by force: to force was indeed for the Greeks a pre-political way of dealing with men.

86 The Segregated City

Both points are clearly at the base of the principle of democracy, worked out theoretically with reference to Aristotle’s polis. In this sense they are also intrinsic in the concept itself of city. In developing the theme we touch upon a crucial point that directly affects another value of modernisation: universalism, opposed to particularism, rediscovered by Arendt in relation to the theme of the “exile”, which is quite close to that of Simmel’s stranger, and a metaphor of the modern citizen. The exile lives in a cultural world that does not belong to his heritage. To have access to a new life his “I” and his identification with his cultural roots have to become less important; the freedom of the present has to be won by coming out of interiority. What the exile – the metropolis citizen – has in common with the others may only be recognised at an abstract level, far from the particular customs of a culture, in what is binding thanks only to common humanity. Transcending details this way, in the name of a value and a general, abstract condition, corresponds to the principle of universalism as usually thought of by sociologists. But such abstract universalism as a principle – Sennett argues – entails a problem, because it can prevent one from really communicating with others, for it excludes understanding and sympathy: the emphasis on impersonality hides the “modern fear of exposure” (Sennett 1991). The remedy is to be found, according to Sennett, also in a different way of designing the city, which excludes the confinement of differences, but actually promotes a blending of them, even radical, an “urban change” that requires innovation in form and language, formal and functional variety, to reflect the complexity of contemporary life: in a certain sense a resistant utopia. Sassen expresses what in some ways may be considered a resistant utopia in her book Globalization and its Discontents. As is known, the global city is the place Sassen presents as the sphere where the crucial functions of global capitalism are concentrated: It is just like this, finance, crucial decisional centres, the legal offices of transnational companies and gigantic professional studios are concentrated in some forty cities. Here, beside these planetary functions and those who work here, are the lorry-drivers, the cleaning-ladies, those doing the ‘caring’ jobs, in short, the enormous mass of work needed to make the machine function. This huge mass of people, often immigrants or members of minority groups, are often pinpointed as backward and not a decisive part of the global economy and its networks. I maintain that urban products, the economic and social networks, are as crucial a part of globalisation and that everything that revolves around these sectors can be a stimulus to the growth of large bands of city population. (Sassen 2004).

Flat Man 87

Globalisation is a process that generates contradictory spaces characterised by disputes, internal differentiation, continuous overstepping of limits. The global city is emblematic of this condition: it concentrates within itself a disproportionate share of global business power and is one of the key places where it is developed; but it also concentrates a disproportionate share of disadvantaged population and is at the same time one of the key places of its downgrading (Sassen 1998). Immigration is an intrinsic constituent part of today’s globalisation and the reality of human masses on the move makes us aware of the process underway. But this humanity in flight, as well as the weakest, penalised ranks of the new ruthless economy, find in large cities the place where they can state their presence, in spite of the fact that it is indeed in these very metropolises that the financial power is concentrated which gives globalisation its impetus and reason for being. The global city is a strategic place for actors without power, since it enables them to state their presence (Sassen 1998), highlighting the sometimes dramatic contradictions in conditions of life that place futuristic realities of shameless affluence alongside situations of backwardness and total exclusion. Globalisation is still very strong and in some areas still has the capacity to grow. But the Dutch scholar maintains that the powers that have governed the world are experiencing a crisis on many fronts. Her thesis is that this crisis and the contemporary presence of networks of informal participation will open up spaces for the construction of economic alternatives and political action. Sassen calls these widespread networks sticky webs, because of the way they are linked with each other. Cities and territories are the privileged place of the sticky webs and will have an increasingly important role because they are a space more suitable by far for politics than the state is. One of the leading themes of the book Globalization and its Discontents consists indeed of the crucial importance that place has for many of the circuits giving substance to economic globalisation. A strategic place for these developments is the city. Economic globalisation has mostly been represented in terms of the national/global dichotomy, where the global gains power and advantages to the detriment of the national, and has been conceptualised in terms of the internationalisation of capital, referring mostly only to its higher circuits, especially the financial ones. Introducing cities into the analysis enables economic globalisation to be reconceptualised in that it is a complex of concrete economic processes situated in specific spaces (Sassen 1998).10 According to Sassen (Sassen 2006b), “the creation of ‘intercity’ geographies” is offering fundamental infrastructures for new global political economy, new cultural spaces and new types of politics. Some of

88 The Segregated City

these intercity geographies are rich and highly visible: the flows of professionals, tourists, artists and immigrants are some of the specific groups of the city. Others are slight and hardly visible: the financial trading networks, highly-specialised networks that connect particular cities depending on the type of instrument involved, or the global commercial chains for various products. This homogenised environment is destined to accept the most complex globalised functions and is more similar to an “infrastructure”, though not in the traditional sense of the term. The global economy requires standardised global infrastructures and global cities are the most complex expressions of these infrastructures. The “infrastructure” enables cities to capture the advantages of globalisation. In order to do this, ultramodern infrastructures and office districts are necessary, as well as all the requisites for a life of luxury. In this sense a large part of this environment is in a way an infrastructure inhabited by functions and specialised actors. Situations like this have produced renewed enthusiasm for aesthetisation of the city and for maintaining its public space character. The enormous dimensions of the current urban systems have brought with them a reassessment of the smaller spaces and terrain vague, where people’s habits can contribute to the creation of public space, going beyond the monumentalised classic public spaces (de Solà-Morales 2004). These public spaces may involve a variety of temporary social practices that materialise in the city in particular spaces at particular times of the day and night, in the sense that the city “naturally” leads people to seek public space (Williamson et al. 2002). But the pervasiveness of digitalised space makes the city less permeable for the normal resident. However, the city is at the same time also the site where digital control systems can become visible, and this can cause political challenges, such as has happened on various occasions in history when cities have functioned as spaces that politicised society. According to Sassen, the current epoch is also one of these periods, in that in the proportion in which powerful global actors put forward growing requests for urban space, thus removing from it less powerful users, urban space is politicised while in the process of constructing itself. It is a question of a policy being introduced into the physicality of the city. The emerging global movement for the rights of the city is one of the emblematic examples of this fight: the right to public space, to public transport, to a good neighbourhood (Sassen 2006b). The urban condition today is distinguished exactly by this juxtaposition of very large dimensions and interstitial spaces (Salerno 2003), of global flows and local features. This is why one of the main objectives of research on globalisation is to find the fixedness and materiality obscured

Flat Man 89

by the dominant conviction that everything is becoming a flow (Beckmann 1998). Moreover, it has been demonstrated that the globalisation of activities and flows depends to a large extent on a vast network of places that are important for global flows (Sassen 2006b). These cities enclose many under-used spaces, often characterised more by the memory than by a current meaning, spaces that are part of the city’s interiority and which remain, nevertheless, outside its functionalising logic, spaces the quality of which may be captured by the creation and positioning of a public space made up of various types of “public dimension” that need to be created through the practices and subjectivity of individuals (Williamson et al. 2002). Another of Sassen’s observations concerns the political character of these cities (Sassen 2006b). The other aspect of the large complex city, especially if global, is that it is a sort of new frontier zone in which an enormous mixture of people converge. Those who have no power, those who are disadvantaged, the outsiders or discriminated minorities may achieve a “presence” in cities of this kind, a presence in the face of power, a presence of one opposite the other. The city sphere is a much more concrete space for politics than the nation is; it becomes a place where non-formal political actors can take part in the political scene in a way that proves much more difficult at a national level. A large part of politics becomes visible on the streets; a lot of urban politics is concrete, and is acted out by people rather than relying on the mighty media technology. Today’s large city, especially the global city, is a strategic site for the global capital of large companies, but it is also one of the sites where new claims by informal political actors take concrete shape (Drainville and Sassen 2004). A large part of urban politics is real, not fake, carried out by people, rather than relying on costly media technology. Street politics facilitate the creation of new types of political subjects that do not necessarily have to pass through the formal political system. The growth of movements for the “right to the city” is a good example of this potential, in the sense that the city recuperates its role of urbs through the civitas. What Sennett proposes in his book Respect in a World of Inequality (Sennett 2003) may be considered a resistant utopia. In his previous study, devoted to the effects that the post-Fordian world of work, based on no long-term rhythms, produces on the individual existence and “character” – building, Sennett ends with some ideas heralding the central themes around which his recent work, Respect in a World of Inequality is developed, which he himself defines as a “complement” to The Corrosion of Character (Casalini 2004). In this work he goes beyond the more “physical” position present in The Uses of Disorder (Sennett 1970) of

90 The Segregated City

1970, in which he proposes the planning of physical disorder to facilitate meetings with the “other” to free the city from the ghettoisation processes underway. Whereas in Respect he refers to a new perspective of urban life beginning with the civitas, by rethinking the link between autonomy and dependence: promoting solidarity without crushing human dignity means to make the Other self-confident and therefore autonomous, to realize the right to the city in the name of respect for the excluded, considering the asymmetrical nature that exists between state institutions and the excluded. For in our society the condition of dependence is a source of “shame”. Shame of the need of the other erodes the bases of confidence and responsibility, and with them those social ties that make any society function: to feel responsible the individual must be able to think that there is someone who needs him, to cultivate confidence he has to give himself the chance of needing the other, relying on the other, even in the sense of confiding in the other (Sennett 1998). The incapability of modern western culture to accept the dimension of dependence, and at the same time the desire to free the modern individual from the shame of dependence has, in effect, according to the author, played a crucial role in the welfare state reform proposals that have arisen in the last few years. Sennett’s investigation seeks the reasons, therefore, why this inequality is made unbearable to the point of seeing in it an element that can lead to the loss of self-respect, and he does this by analysing the three codes of respect proposed by modernity: “fulfil yourself in some way, take care of yourself and help others”. According to Sennett, it is indeed the cultural interpretation of these three codes that is at the origin of social dynamics that are negative, envious, competitive, producing weak, introverse and reactive identities in the most disadvantaged classes. The first code of respect corresponds to the fact that, as an alternative to the hereditary system of ancien régime, modernity recognised and rewarded the value of individual talent, inventing and developing aptitude tests, tests that evaluate not results obtained but inclination towards something. To try to honour the social results of each one’s efforts, rather than the talent, might be a source of respect less charged with socially negative implications. In its desire to free society of servilism, liberalism was led to recognise a second source of respect in an ideal of caring for oneself interpreted as the achievement of selfsufficiency and independence: he who is able to look after himself by his own work is considered worthy of respect. Shame, on the other hand, has been associated with the incapacity to rise up from that state of dependency that liberal thought has always associated with infancy. In this case it is not so much the fact of needing the other that creates shame, as not controlling and managing one’s own request for help. The error has

Flat Man 91

been to confuse independence and self-sufficiency with autonomy. Winnicott’s psychology of objective relations teaches, on the other hand, that autonomy is acquired by recognising others, their autonomy, i.e. the fact that we may not understand the other but we still trust him. Autonomy therefore establishes relations between people, rather than ratify a difference that isolates them, and it is a process that continues even after reaching adulthood (Casalini 2004). The third source of social respect is giving help to others. Though solidarity among unequals can be a source of great ambiguity. The comparison between the experience of Sister Francesca Saveria Cabrini, the Italian nun who emigrated to the United States to help poverty-stricken immigrants, and that of the social reformer Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago, a centre of social assistance and initiatives, is useful for Sennett to illustrate two different conceptions of how to give help. For Addams the compassionate initiatives of Sister Cabrini were the expression of a paternalistic vision, of a hierarchical religious regime, that practiced a type of charity which was hard to distinguish from a form of severe, moralistic social control. For Addams, who believed in democratic participation, it was more difficult to give help, precisely because she posed herself the problem of which way to go to find a form of solidarity between unequals that would be far from the risk of being a type of compassion that wounded and lacked respect for the needy. This is a lesson that he gains also from reflecting on his childhood experience of living in Cabrini Green, a council estate built in Chicago in 1942 by reforming urbanists who nurtured the ambition of being able to curb the flight of the white population from the city and promote integration between whites and blacks, offering the small white bourgeoisie and the working class with economic problems a free home in a mixed dwelling enclave. Cabrini Green was the fruit of that modernist architecture that many similar council building programmes realised in Europe and in particular in Great Britain already by the mid-1800s. The negative elements of Cabrini Green which decreed its subsequent failure consisted, for Sennett, above all of the passivity it took for granted and encouraged in its inhabitants, who were in no way actively involved in the management of their own lives. As the author has emphasised in his studies on the city, from The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities to The Uses of Disorder. Personal Identity and City Life (1970), up to Flesh and Stones (1994), the way in which urban space is organised is fundamental for the development of the individual’s identity, for the development of his sense of justice, for building his character and those “shared social instruments” that are for the social actor like “sheet music is for the musician” and teach the art of gauging times and distances of social

92 The Segregated City

relations. After showing, in works like The Conscience of the Eye and The Uses of disorder. Personal Identity and City Life, an image of the city that, paradoxically, precisely for its “vastness and loneliness” has a positive value for man; after having highlighted the virtues of urban space as a meeting-place of differences that arouses our curiosity towards the unknown, and also as a dimension in which the arts of urbanity, civility and courtesy are learnt, essential for living among different people; once more against the tide compared with the many nostalgic visions of the community in fashion today, Sennett invites us, in Respect in a world of Inequality, to reflect on the function of bureaucratic structures and, more in particular, on welfare institutions as facilities for mediating compassion, reproposing the image of a modern project to be re-examined, even radically, in the light of its pathologies, and to be reformed but not thrown away (Casalini 2004). The importance of bureaucratic structures as an interface of the public sphere is taken up by Ralf Dahrendorf in a “multicultural society” context as a desirable idea. Sitting, or more likely standing, in the “tube”, you never fail to be amazed at the naturalness with which people subject themselves to generally stressful situations: everybody – Jewish mothers or Muslim youths, businessmen from South Asia or youngsters from western India, etc. – try to smooth things over with mutually civilised behaviour. The experience of the terrorist attacks has demonstrated not only the willingness of individuals to help each other but also the spirit of a positive reaction of the city altogether. This is the positive side of a multi-cultural society. Nevertheless, the most attentive observers have always noted that this aspect is limited to the public sphere, or in other words, to the urban structures shared by everybody, but does not reflect the reality of families, and even less the habits of life in the private sphere. London has now experienced, also in this sense, the other, darker aspect of the multicultural society, and has had to realise how thin the paint of multiculturalism is. It does not take much for individuals belonging to a given group to rebel against those of a different group, even though they had always apparently cohabited peacefully. But to bar their way war is not needed, nor a “war on terrorism” with the vaguest rhetorical outlines. The need remains of reinforcing the sphere of common values and cooperation, within societies that want after all to remain multicultural. And it will be an arduous task, not to be faced naively. Differences will not, of course, be eliminated. And, moreover, this is not what we need – we need to give all citizens the security of being able to live in reciprocal trust. For this a way has to be found of extending and reinforcing that attitude of trustful civilised cohabitation that we already see in the public sphere. (Dahrendorf 2005).

Let us finally speak of one of the resistant utopias that may be defined the “neo-community utopia” referred to by Alberto Magnaghi. The “network of places” each equipped with its own ecological, cultural, historic and social features and linked by relations of the socio-economic type, is the now familiar scenario among ecologists and urbanists and

Flat Man 93

denotes the intention to exceed the aporia of the current model of sociopolitical set-up with a vision “from below”, capable of protecting the values neglected by them. Also following criteria dictated by a category that nowadays often appears to be disintegrating – ethics – but projected on practical requirements dominated by the need of impact on the different basic contexts. Coming from original working-class experiences of the 70s, Magnaghi has over time enriched his personal experience as an urbanist to the point of designing an approach that unites criticism of set-up with alternative project. Magnaghi’s vision is perfectly coherent with the “world as a network of places” quoted at the beginning and seeks to plan consequent local development. The aporia of the set-up model, first industrialist and today dominated by financial systems, and the continuous problems of economic concentrations and territorial megalopolises of our times are read by Magnaghi following the triad “territorialisation – deterritorialisation – reterritorialisation”. “Territorialisation” consists of the capacity each human society has of protecting and making good use of the anthropic and natural patrimony already deposited on the territory in the past, adding the current “ecological and quality” stamp. According to Magnaghi, western civilisation already overstepped the climax of its “territorialisation capacities” some time ago and from then onwards began to produce “deterritorialisation”, in terms of environmental and social decay, destruction of local cultures and economies, tendential elimination of the specificities and wealth of places, in favour of set-ups and scenarios with growing concentration, reductionism, decay and imbalance. Magnaghi first stated his plan, which could be summarised in the slogan: “stop deterritorialisation to favour reterritorialisation processes”. The scholar then illustrated the most recent data on the distortions produced by the globalising and metropolitan civilisation from the point of view of territory, environment, local cultures and “developing areas” (Magnaghi 2000, 2005). Magnaghi adopted, however, the representation of the world as a network of places where he intended to promote new care of the environment, new local identities, development that was again “sustainable”. The founding category of the approach was precisely the place: not a monad, but a “clear and open” identity, with its own ecologies, the endogenous vertical values, to assert, while keeping horizontal relations with the outside through socio-economic dynamics. Magnaghi’s “context” offers a perspective for the interpretation of reality and also constitutes a sphere to be developed. The territorialist project is a scenario of self-sustainable development and therefore territorial redevelopment and social regeneration to be planned through

94 The Segregated City

interaction of the inhabitants with the territorial patrimony deposited. The planner is both “expert and inhabitant”, wavering between the two conditions and supplying technical structuring for the construction of an eco-social plan built from the bottom up, in which to involve, or with which to overwhelm, the different institutional levels, and at which to direct any resources coming from the outside (Ziparo 2001).

Notes 1

For bibliography on the subject, cf. among others: Davis 1990, 1998; Ellin 1997; Bauman 1998, 2005; Lyon 2002; Agamben 2003; Virilio 2004. 2 See Forum 2004, Barcelona, but also a series of projects at the English and Dutch docks for the professional class. 3 This is the Magnitogorsk project, which develops over 25 km following the pattern of the linear city ideated by Soria y Mata, taken up again at the end of the 20s in the Soviet Union by a group of engineers and architects, of which Leonidov himself was part. The linear settlement meant for them the abolition of the city and they referred to themselves as “disurbanists”. They knew Soria y Mata’s publications and probably took inspiration from them. But their model, more elaborate, with rigorous zoning, served different objectives: the realisation of socialism and optimisation of industrial production (cf. Dethier and Alain 1994). 4 The essay offers a reflection on the roots of the criteria of detention and education applied in prisons and schools. 5 “At assemblies rebellions will be planned, safety walls will be set on fire and will collapse, the sale of weapons and their prices will go sky high in the oldest areas. The young Latinos will portray the old as parasites who enjoyed all the benefits of society when these were free and now continue to happily tax the workers to maintain their tenor of life. The oldest will portray the young Latinos as foreigners who have enjoyed benefits that should have gone to the elderly, and will portray them as “non-Americans” who are threatening the purity of American culture, like contagious criminals and outlaws. Each side will be ready for the last attack.” (Davis 1994). 6 “Air and earth make up an anthill, crossed by the various levels of communication routes. Air trains, trains on the ground, trains underground, pneumatic post; chains of automobiles dash horizontally, high-speed lifts pump masses of men vertically from one level of traffic to another; at the junctions people jump from one means of transport to another, and their pace, which between two speeds dashing and roaring has a pause, a syncope, a little crack of twenty seconds, sucks and swallows without a thought people who in the gaps in that universal rhythm hardly manage to quickly exchange two words …” (Musil 1954). 7 “The fact that Musil speaks of “superamerican” shows that this type of city is certainly a clear American invention, but one that will be all right beyond America to become the model, and with this global, of evolution of modernity. Without

Flat Man 95 meaning by this to raise doubts on the unusualness of urban development in Europe, we can nevertheless assert that the reconstruction of the bombed German cities, as well as the renewal and extension of European cities, have gone well beyond the model of disintegration and dispersion in space focalised by Musil. Ancient cities, distinguished by density, co-presence, synchronicity, correspondence between men and functions, have been subjected to a model of decontextualised system (Böhme 2001). 8 Gilbert and George, Flat man, 1991. 9 High Commission of the United Nations for Refugees (1997) Les réfugiés dans le monde, HCR/La Découverte, Paris 1997. High Commission of the United Nations for Refugees (1998) (V. Lassailly-Jacob, ed.) Communautés déracinées dans les pays du Sud. Autrepart n. 5, La Tour d'Aigues, Ed. de l'aube, Paris. 10 The focalisation of the analysis on cities leads to the national economy being broken down into a series of subnational components, some deeply articulated in the global economy, others not (cf. Sassen 1998).

Reinventing the City

Externity We have seen that discomposed city, generic city and segregated city are expressions referring to phenomena which have in common the loss of the city as a space of communication and social interaction and as a space of the public sphere. This loss is manifest in different ways. In the discomposed city, in sprawl, which is defined as the physical manifestation of modernity, the loss is linked mainly with the crisis in the space of proximity, which in our tradition was the place of personal social relations on a local scale, but also of the ephemeral, impersonal and cosmopolitan relations that characterised the birth of the metropolis. But “metropolis” has a new god: the infinite, a new experience of space and time that changes the idea one has of oneself and one’s way of experiencing one’s relationship with the world. If sprawl may be considered a phenomenon that causes the context as a condition of proximity to enter a crisis, we have seen how this reflects on the “destinies of our moral reason” (Bagnasco 1999), on ethics, which is inherently linked to spatial proximity relationships (Cacciari 1990). The crisis of the ethics of proximity (Bagnasco 1999) hits urban and territorial policies due to the new relations between society and territory which form at the boundary between proximity and the detachment from places, and which call upon territorial planning to record its position with respect to this conceptual geography, in particular as regards reflections of spatial organisation on the environment but, more generally, with regard to problems that present themselves to our moral reason once the physical relationship with places no longer seems decisive in the definition of territorial behaviours. As we have emphasised in the previous pages, it is in this detachment from corporality, from a life we have considered to be characterised by proximity, that our capacity to reconstruct an urban ethic is measured, even in a condition of distance from the place. 97

98 Reinventing the City

In the generic city the relationship between fiction and reality has altered, leaning clearly in favour of the first. The city shifts to an unreal plane. The loss of communication and social interaction is connected with the loss of the city itself as a conceptual unit. At this point it is its image that marches alone, like automatic writing that marches without a subject. This is what happens in the virtual: there is no longer a subject, it is calculation that works alone, the number, the logico-mathematical synthesis, the self-production of a system rotating on itself in a tautological way. It is in a certain sense – as we have already emphasised – the Dorian Gray syndrome the other way round, which leads men to grant the virtual the image they consider the best,1 and to split the time dimension, entrusting the real world with past time and the virtual with real time, the time we are in, in all parts of the globe and all corners of time (Baudrillard 1999). In this sense we entrust becoming to the real world and change to the virtual. This changing without becoming is the virtual world. It is the possibility to adopt all forms that is specific to a certain task on the computer and that constitutes a sort of morphism. And the morphism in this continuous formal change is exactly the opposite of the concept of metamorphosis (Baudrillard 1999). Referring again to the inverted Dorian Gray metaphor, metamorphosis is entrusted to the real world, morphism to the virtual, changing without becoming, without growing old. The world unfolds on its own, the virtual images observing us become autonomous, they acquire autonomous power and take us hostage to the point that we ourselves become an image, without identity, if this ever existed, since the world of images is autonomous, it unfolds on its own, it is self-referential. Everything seems possible, the “unity of the world” has finally ended: man is at a distance from the city and this distance has the dilated dimensions of a loss. The development of our shopping society, which is the matrix of the generic city with its manifold requests, seems in some ways to have the simulacrum city as its horizon, a non-city inhabited by non-citizens (de Azua 2003), entities indifferent to the public sphere and therefore to public space, both in the meaning delivered by tradition, and in the meanings nowadays associated with “contemporary public space” (Abalos 2004). In the segregated city the loss of communication is innate in the concept of segregation itself. The problem is conceptual, but above all factual, in the sense that – as we have pointed out – the city that is losing its conceptual unity, that is becoming a simulacrum of a city (de Azua 2003), is often the background to urban segregation phenomena that have different causes, among which the spatial agglomeration of the new urban elites, which creates social spaces that are powerfully structured and separated like fortresses (Merrifield 1994; Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1997; Low 2003a, b). Forms of spatial segregation are a phenomenon that is not

Externity 99

limited to the elites and the rejected, but which characterises our cities in that it has to do with the “modern fear of exposure”. But it is in elitist segregation as global identity (Böhme 2001) that a separative strategy, explicit or implicit, dwells, which has as its outcome the loss of the communicative and dialogical dimension of the city, and marks a detachment with respect to the city that tradition has given us as a privileged space for interlocution between different parties. The question we must ask ourselves is how is it possible to recreate the city as a space of dialogue and communication, create the spatial conditions of the public sphere, reinvent the city. And what might the features be of a city reinvented and restored to its citizens. We may assume that the main feature is its externity, its being external, in that it is not functional to the “city without city” (Sieverts 2002) passed on to us by the drifts of sprawl, genericity and segregation. To grasp this externity, we need to be able to know how to discern in the indistinct space and accelerated time of urban flows. To rediscover the city we need to see it, to know how to see the city in the crowd of the urban, almost like the Baudelairian flâneur in 19th Century Paris caught swarming with people. The flâneur that observes the crowd of the metropolis resulting from the industrial revolution tries to give it a soul, just as the rediscovered city that observes the contemporary “realm of the urban” looks for its soul, something that represents “the guiding lights of an urban path to invent”, which will oppose the “death of the city” (Choay 1994a). Adopting the analogy with Baudelairian flânerie as a “working metaphor”2 (Steiner G 1975), urban flânerie may consist of being both witness and participant of the urban path. Benjamin analyses in depth the relationship between Baudelaire and the crowd, this being an objective that imposed itself with more authority than any other on 19th Century men of letters. In Benjamin’s opinion, to give a soul to this crowd is the real purpose of the flâneur. Meetings with it are the experience he never tires of telling. Specific reflections of this illusion remain in the work of Baudelaire. It has – moreover – not yet stopped having an effect. Jules Romains’ Unanimisme is one of its later and most appreciated fruits.3 In these reflections can be glimpsed a retrospective glance in contemporary man’s attempt to find a city soul in the urban swell, a collective soul in each urbanised constellation, in the same way that each aggregation of individuals expresses a collective soul in Romains’ vie unanime (Romains 1908). Benjamin’s critical analysis records the antithetical positions of the literary attitudes that Poe and Baudelaire express with regard to the surprising crowding of the metropolis.

100 Reinventing the City

Of course the diversity of the London and Paris urban contexts counts in this differentiation of positions and the programmatic responses activated to face the new metropolitan sky. With regard to urban mutation that changes spatial relations, in effect Paris stands out on the European horizon as a glorious example that has left its imprint on most European cities. For Hausmann’s Paris, together with Wagner’s Vienna and Cerdà’s Barcelona represent inimitable experiences of the solution to the relationship between different scales of urban space in the process of mutation of the European city produced by the industrial revolution. Hausmann’s Paris, the outcome of one tradition and departure point of another, plays an inaugural role thanks to regulation imposed on it by the Prefect. For the first time he treats the series of heterogeneous spaces in the capital as a single entity that a global plan will endow with isotropy. He makes a system of communications of the whole city by a hierarchised network of roads that takes districts out of isolation and links up key points of the city with each other and with the railway stations; he enlarges the scale of the whole city, uniting opening-up operations with the integration of all free spaces intra muros, granting the city a respiratory system of green spaces (Choay 1994a). If the enlargement of the scale of roads and buildings broke up the situation of social relations of proximity characteristic of the pre-industrial city, the new situation of new conviviality replaced it. A small scale structure is set in the urban fabric, enlarged in its features, rigorously proportioned and perceptible with continuity. Made up of a diversified urban plan, conceived and installed with care, the small scale makes pavements and gardens the theatre of new social relations: random, anonymous, cosmopolitan. While the traditional city was exploding under demographic pressure, Hausmann realised an effective category of “urbanity”, in the sense that if we call urbanity the reciprocal adjustment of a form of urban fabric and a form of conviviality, then we can fairly speak of “Hausmannian urbanity” (Choay 1994a). During the same period the endless sectioning of London suburbs symbolised savage expansion of the city, so the pessimistic picture sketched by Poe certainly cannot be defined as “realistic”. In Benjamin’s words, in it there is a consciously deforming imagination at work. Its objective is “people” as such. In the spectacle they offer he notices something threatening. He mixes with them at length to suddenly zap them with a withering glance (Benjamin 1955). Compared with Poe’s man in the crowd, the Baudelairian flâneur knows how to observe the crowd, because he knows how to place himself halfway

Externity 101

between the private and the crowd that is developing as the new city public. Just as, compared with the London described by Poe, Baudelaire’s Paris maintains some traits of the good old days: galleries were still in fashion, where the flâneur was hidden from the view of vehicles, which did not tolerate the competition of the pedestrian and if there was the passer-by who slipped into the crowd, there was also the flâneur who needed space and did not want to give up his private style. Where the tone is given by private life, there is so little space for the flâneur, like in the frenzied traffic of the City. London has the man in the crowd. The guard Nante, a popular character of pre-forty-eight Berlin, is in some way his antithesis: the Parisian flâneur is halfway between the two (Benjamin 1955).4 We can say, using a literary analogy, that there are places rich in history in the city that are “participant observatories” of the urban path, which enable us to look at the realm of the contemporary urban and see the city. These places have in some way been initiated to the “principles of the art of looking”, like the protagonist of My cousin corner window by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, who has the faculty to amuse himself with living pictures that he manages to selectively gather from the swarming crowd without being dazzled by it (Benjamin 1955). 5 If we accept the hypothesis that perhaps the daily view of a moving crowd was for some time a spectacle the eye had first to get used to, we may perhaps suppose that once this task had been achieved, the eye could take advantage of every chance to show itself in possession of the faculty just acquired. Thus contemporary man may learn from places rich in nature and history the “principles of the art of observing” the city that is forming and, by adopting a different strategy of looking, obtain from the chaos a coherent city image. To explain this concept Benjamin borrowed the technical description of impressionist painting which, since it obtained its images from the chaos of blotches of colour, might be considered in some way an effect of experiences become familiar to the eye of the inhabitant of a large city. “A picture like Monet’s Cathedral at Chartres which is like an ant heap of stones, would be an illustration of this hypothesis.” (Benjamin 1968). To see the city we need to anchor its images to their history. A fundamental protective role of urban images that renders them external to the congestion of visual flows of the contemporary city may be covered by history. This is the recurrent concept in a refined worshipper of images like Wim Wenders: “As a cineaste I came to the conclusion that my images have only one chance of not being swept away by this immense visual flow of competitiveness and commercialisation: they have to tell a story. […] Only

102 Reinventing the City

the story, the ensemble of characters, gives credibility to each single image, ‘it founds a moral principle’, to use an artist’s jargon.” (Wenders 1992). But can an equivalent of what the story is for a film exist in the urban landscape? For Wenders the landscape represents a sort of additional figure: A street, a row of houses, a mountain, a bridge are for me something more than a simple background. For they possess history, a personality, an identity that must be taken seriously; and they affect the character of the men living in that environment, they evoke an atmosphere, a feeling of time, a particular emotion. They may be ugly, beautiful, young or old; but they are still present elements […] So they deserve to be taken seriously. Over the course of the last few years I have worked in Australia and have had the fortune to know the aborigines. And it surprised me that for them every single shape in the landscape incarnates a figure of their mythical past. Every hill, every rock brings with it a story intimately linked with their mythical epoch. (Wenders 1992).

A crucial problem is that of anchoring urban images, and more in general, the project of the city, to the histories of places, so that the images of the city, by narrating its history, save themselves from the visual flows of contemporary life, also avoiding dragging these places into the flood of images. It may be assumed that the places that narrate a story, or several stories, not be swept away by the flood of images but, on the contrary, save us from the flow of global commercialisation, to which the city’s cultural consumption belongs. This historic geography must show itself as true to settled societies for it is evident, since only in the ambit of their daily life can they have direct perception of “geographic space”, but a geography that today wants to uncover something new should not only acutely feel the insufficiency of what can be deduced from what we already know, but – all the more – should depart from the premise that the existing order (territorial “normality”) is unsatisfactory (Dematteis 1985b). This requires a cognitive act, of which integral parts must be both a necessary interpretation of the urban epic of places, the narration of a story that “the place embraces”, and the phenomenological need of a “basic description” of the context, able to critically highlight some justified and significant possibilities of modification (Palermo 1992). “Cities do not tell stories, but they can communicate something to us about History; they can conserve and show their history, make it visible or hide it.” (Wenders 1992). We therefore need to make sure that the city conserves and displays its history, continues to nurture the imagination of its inhabitants, by urban acts that consist perhaps of gently improving on the inhabitants’ closeness to the “void”, to the “small”, to history, to time, and to decay, in general to all those spatial concepts that are today the most interesting materials for the project for the city.

Recovering Sensitive Knowledge of the City 103

Recovering Sensitive Knowledge of the City Knowing how to see the city does not depend solely on the chance that urban places will reveal themselves with their stories, but derives above all from a tiring process of social learning, from a new “culture of urban knowledge”, in which the eyes of contemporary man, overwhelmed by the flows of visual messages, manage to activate a critical detachment, to retrieve a condition of externity so as to manage to interpret the signs of a “possible city” (Maciocco and Tagliagambe 1998). Benjamin develops this concept by exploring the relationship between seeing and hearing in the city, observing, for example, how the eye of the inhabitant of the large city is literally overwhelmed by security functions. In support of this statement he quotes a reflection from Simmel, who maintains that he who sees without hearing is much more worried than he who listens without seeing. This is characteristic of the large city. Reciprocal relations between men in large cities are distinguished by a strong prevalence of the activity of sight over that of hearing. Public vehicles are the principal cause of this fact. Before the arrival of the omnibus, railways and trams in the 19th Century, people had never found themselves in the condition of having to stay, for minutes and even whole hours, looking at each other without speaking a word. (Benjamin 1955). The prevalence of seeing over hearing leads to an emphasis that may be defined – as we will see better later – “representational” of reality and which hinders basic critical interpretation of it to imagine and construct possible worlds based on reality, this being a function clearly intrinsic in the project for the city. The glance lacking in projectuality may in a certain sense be associated with the “glance meant to feel safe”. On this matter Benjamin recalls Baudelaire’s observations, who, in Salon of 1859, studying landscape paintings, concludes with this seemingly strange confession: “I would dearly like to be taken again towards the diorama whose brutal, enormous magic is able to impose a useful illusion on me. I prefer to contemplate certain theatre scenes, where I find, expressed with the wisdom of art and concentrated in tragic representation, my dearest dreams. These things, precisely because they are false, are infinitely nearer to the truth; whereas the majority of our landscape artists lie because indeed they neglect to lie.” (Baudelaire 1992). The “impossibility of not lying” in depicting reality, asserted by Baudelaire, is rigorously analysed in Florenskij’s criticism of naturalism (Florenskij 1990), who, using Cantor’s well-known demonstration of the possibility of representing a square on its side, shows how representation is

104 Reinventing the City

unable to transmit the form of what is represented, of an object with an internally defined structure, in the sense that the content of the space is transmitted, but not its organisation (Florenskij 1990). Representation is always a symbol, every representation, whatever it is, is thus, which is why all images in the figurative arts, and more generally, visual communication, are distinguished from each other not because some are symbolic and others, so to speak, naturalistic, but because, all being equally non-naturalistic, they are symbols of the different faces of an object, of different perceptions of the world, different levels of synthesis: to represent means, namely, to be “the other of another”, which is simultaneously brought to mind and eliminated by the representation (Tagliagambe 1994).6 These reflections are found precisely in the representational: position of the project, which owes its weakness to the crisis experienced in cognitive sciences of the representational theory of the mind, which refers to the socalled linguistic-symbolic paradigm. The representational conception of a world already given has often been adopted in an explicit manner in the project for the city.7 Deconstructionist positions themselves appear today linked with a representational conception, even though very different positions are placed under the deconstructionism “umbrella”. But to represent the instability of the metropolitan city is certainly one of the principal objectives of this position, in the sense that architecture tends to reflect, indeed represent, the uncertainty of the contemporary city, so that a set of interrogatives is left that constitute an authentic disciplinary discriminator: whether the challenge of the contemporary urban condition should be answered by amplifying and celebrating the spatial manifestations of the city of today, its epiphenomenology, or whether we should try to penetrate the deepest reasons of a process of which spatial forms are the outcome (with their diffusion, instability, heterogeneity, their apparent chaos, their disorienting features). And above all whether in these deep reasons a concept of collective good is imaginable, whether there are collective values to disclose, even for a society that is fragmented and flexible from many points of view, and whether men need to become aware of these values for an urban ethic of spatial settlement of our times. Whether, finally, the architect, the urbanist, the planner, at all operative levels, can, with their techno-scientific capacity and their informative apparatus, promote awareness-making of these values to effectively improve human existence – rather than confirm, representing them, the existing ones. We have seen how the strategy of the glance may affect the capacity for designing the city and how contemporary man who “sees without hearing”, in some way retreats to a representational conception of reality, a replica of

Recovering Sensitive Knowledge of the City 105

an ontologically given world that holds him aloof from a constructive position in the planning of a new world. The need to use all the senses to have a complete sensory experience of the city and not emphasise the visual function, but adopt a correct strategy of looking, is analysed in a masterly way in the cinema by Wenders. The theme is one of the leading motifs of Lisbon Story,8 in which the film director, Friedrich, one of the protagonists, desperately calls his sound technician Winter for help, so that by recording lost sounds of the city he will manage to help him re-see Lisbon, by now withdrawing more and more from his eyes. It is the reaction of the city that no longer wants to reveal itself to an inappropriate glance, which claims its externity with respect to the world of “video-tourists”, a curious epithet that reverberates in the film almost to evoke the soulless glance that is behind the camera lens of the tireless army of cultural consumption in the contemporary city. Winter, the sound technician, seeks the city’s memory through the rare sounds still present in the historic heart of Alfama and records with care the variety lost in contemporary amnesia. The sounds are the metaphor of sensory cognition, of aisthesis the philological root of aesthetics, the sensory cognition that enables us to understand that “tale of what by definition is not tellable” (Tabucchi 1986), what Smailes calls the “sense of place”, the sense of the places of a city, that set of colours, sounds, smells that differentiate one city from another, a nucleus of sensations that “serve as access to something that is beyond the glance and the psyche, beyond the eyes and the intellect and what Bernardo Soares calls the soul”, the soul of Lisbon, the soul of each contemporary city made invisible by the flows of mobility and virtual communication. Wenders carefully avoids the commonplace elements of cultural consumerism, the worn-out paths of the “video-tourists”, precisely, where the city is a scenic fake in the contemporary urban swell, places where the divorce between urbs and civitas has been accomplished. In effect, the Tower of Belem does not appear, the mythical destination of tourist pilgrimages, nor does the Cultural Centre of Belem, the monument to the strategy of the image in the European top cities competition. Just as in the historic city there are no pictures of the Terreiro do Paço, almost condensed in the sounds of the maritime traffic at the legendary wharf. The Bairro Alto, the district of antique shops, offices and night entertainment is absent, and Baixa pombalina itself, the actual metaphor of the reconstruction and resurrection of Lisbon, is almost imperceptible, today besieged by jeans outlets. For Wenders Lisbon is urban conviviality still rooted in its soul, which is Alfama, the ancient Arab quarter, a place thick in “triple communication involving the exchange of goods, information and sentiments” (Choay 1994a).

106 Reinventing the City

Urban conviviality is the willingness of the bus-driver who stops to exchange information with the driver of the jeep taking Winter to Lisbon, introducing the sound technician to the borders between Baixa and Alfama in Lisbon’s fresh, random, impersonal, cosmopolitan conviviality, with its origins in the microscale of Alfama urbanity, the theatre of social relations linked with spatial proximity, shown in the smile of the washer-woman and the ancestral sounds of water running in the wash-house. Similarly, the shoe-shiner who takes care of Winter’s plaster-cast is a poetic symbol of the conviviality of the historic city attentive to differences, to dealing with the little things that give sense to urban life, keeping present in the minds of men the continuity between the order of daily experience and the order of the urban tale. For Wenders the city is life, the city is the community, not just a physical space that has no qualities if the men who care about it, look after it, inhabit it, are absent, if there is no interlacing of social relations between men. This is why the common places of cultural consumerism, the physical spaces not lived in by the community, are not filmed. Sounds represent life and listening, which is necessary to take in the meanings a place dense in memory and history like Alfama is capable of revealing to our attention, but also the listening that is antithetical to the distracted, hurried contemplation of the tour-men in the symbolic places that the ideological and cultural orientation of the media points out to the “mediatic” tribe. I really love this city. Lisboa! And there was a time when I really saw it, in front of my eyes …, but focusing the camera is like aiming a rifle and each time I touched it, it seemed like life was evaporating from my memories … and I kept filming, filming, but each time I turned the handle the city withdrew more and more, more and more … it was getting unbearable … at this point (addressing Winter) I looked for your eyes and for a while lived under the illusion that sound could save the day and that your microphones could save my pictures from their darkness … but no! there’s no hope …, there’s no hope, but this is the way and I want to follow it. Listen! I want an image that has not been seen … beautiful, pure, innocent. Till no-one infects it, it’s in perfect unison with the world … and if no-one has looked at it, the image and the object it stands for are the one and the other. Yes! Once the image has been seen, the object in it dies … (From the film Lisbon Story).

The film director, Friedrich, expresses to his friend Winter, the sound technician, the despair of men to whom the city no longer reveals itself and states that the city is dead, reduced to a mere object of cultural consumption. Here there is the anguish of the film director on seeing his work, the images, as a chosen instrument, privileged vehicle, of cultural consumption of the city and, in this sense, of its death. “Look here, Winter, my library of images not seen. Each of these tapes was filmed with no-one looking through the lens … no-one checking them … everything that was

Recovering Sensitive Knowledge of the City 107

filmed I had my back to. These images show the city as it is, not as I’d like it to be … images ready to be discovered by future generations with different eyes from ours.” (From the film Lisbon Story). “Different eyes from ours”, says Friedrich to highlight the importance of an appropriate look, “different”, to scrutinise the city and try to see it. In the city men’s way of looking has become the glance of cultural consumption, the glance that cancels out the existence of men, their life of reciprocal relations, of civitas, since it is directed solely at the spaces indicated and ordered by the media, where, as Pessoa writes, “I don’t think anyone really acknowledges the true existence of another person … others are nothing but landscape for us and, almost always, the invisible landscape of a known street.” (Pessoa 1982). Friedrich reaches the point of denying contemporary men the role itself of looking, the need of it to understand the city, invoking the “different eyes from ours” of future generations. But the city may also offer itself today to a different strategy of looking, it may reveal itself to men who make the effort to understand the indissociability of spaces from the lives of men. But this is difficult, it does not always happen, the city may withdraw as happened to Friedrich. Only “on certain days, at certain times, when who knows what breeze takes me, that opens who knows what door which opens – writes Pessoa (Pessoa 1982) – and suddenly I feel that the grocer on the corner is a spiritual entity, that the assistant who at this moment appears at the door above a sack of potatoes is a soul capable of suffering.” “Friedrich says that when these houses disappear, then all the stories they hide will come out into the light of day. He has met a lot of people there”. The film director’s glance at every man, at every story, is a glance looking for the the human roots of civitas, “… I notice – writes Pessoa – that the assistant at the tobacconist’s was, in some way, with his lopsided jacket and all the rest, the whole of humanity.” (Pessoa 1982). In the glance of cultural consumption there is the banal replica of reality, the image and reality are reflected in a mirror that prevents interpretation, the mirror of the media society, in which things have in themselves the image imposed on them, the images are rubbish-images, as Friedrich calls them, because the city withdraws, does not let its soul be filmed, and “life detaches from things whose end is identical, for a privilege that also embraces rubbish.” (Pessoa 1982). The “rubbish-images” in the library of images not seen by Friedrich are images detached from the reality of life, in that reality cannot be duplicated,9 it can only be interpreted; only the images that try to interpret reality are intrinsically tied to it because they show not only the external content, but above all include the form, the “structural organisation” and its evolutionary principles: this is the cognitive conception of the project

108 Reinventing the City

for the city and the contribution of images to it. In the interpretation there is the continuous project for the city, the exploration of possible worlds in which the city always acknowledges its structural organisation, in a certain sense its “soul”. But reality can only be interpreted by adopting an intentional point of view oriented towards interpreting the evolutionary, autopoietic potential innate in the soul of the city. The absence of this point of view, the absence of this particular glance leads to annulment of the city:the images detach themselves from it because the city itself – in that it embraces the uninterrupted projectuality of life – will unavoidably die, if it cannot be interpreted and planned. Another scene: dragged by the flows of mobility and accelerated time, Friedrich crouches down in the small unused car, incapable of reacting and affecting the reality surrounding him. The point of view is the fixed one of the windscreen, indifferent to phenomena, reality is simply represented, the camera celebrates the urban chaos, uninterruptedly filming an anonymous suburb that emblematically expresses it. The car-man and the flat-man, apartment-men of the contemporary urban swell, reflect the reality in which they are immersed, dragged by the flows of mobility and accelerated time, incapable of interpreting it by activating their point of view, concentrating their look through the lens of the camera, to see: “I have seen Lisbon”, asserts the film director referring to the time when he filmed the city without a break, which had urged him to call his sound technician to listen to its sounds, so that he might try to see it again. In the car-man image, men alone are reflected of the urban without community, incapable of expressing the “collective will”, which is the yeast of urban construction. In this sense in the film director’s reaction, provoked by the sound technician’s sensitivity, there is the shift of the modern intellectual to the sphere of ethics and the social legitimisation of its role, that requires it, and more in general the city technicians, to contribute with their knowledge to promote awareness of the collective values that preside over the evolution of the city and guide the project for it. In the frantic return to looking through the camera lens, there is reconciliation with the city and the project, the refusal and abandoning of a passive position, the courageous adoption of a point of view and social responsibility. In these dynamics of effective action there is the feverish state innate in the project, that is not a dream because it is not, like the dream, liberating. This is the state of continuous vigil of the project, that for its cognitive nature does not allow sleep, sleep that never comes, like in Pessoa’s Livro do desassossego (Pessoa 1982) which is an enormous insomnia, the “poetry of insomnia”, in that it is work in progress without end, a projectbook, like a process of continuous exploration of reality and its possible

Recovering Sensitive Knowledge of the City 109

evolution. The mosquito that prevents Winter sleeping is the stimulus, unconscious and elusive, that drives him to read Pessoa’s poem without stopping, to the interpretation without rest of reality, life as the impossibility of rest. “Poetically inhabits man”: interpreting Holderlin’s poetry, Heidegger links up to poiesis, doing, grasping reality, the feverish state of vigil of existentialism, the vital energy connected with inhabiting a place, which is something different from banal residing and circulating. In Wenders’ research, looking and listening express the strategy itself of the interpretative process that aims at understanding exactly the guiding elements of city construction that are effectively relevant for its “reproducibility”. For this, in the final part of the film, the eye of Friedrich’s camera and Winter’s microphone go back together to look and listen incessantly, almost in a “feverish vigil”, to try to “see” Lisbon, rediscovering hope in the commitment to the continuous projectuality ingrained in the human condition, which makes sure that each projectual experience, even the tiniest, is converted into a deed that makes the sense emerge of this indescribable web of relations between space and life that is the city. Wenders’ attention to sensory cognition, aisthesis, as the central vehicle of knowledge of the city also unfolds on the side of tactile knowledge. Analysing some aspects of the relationship the aborigines have with their land in the article The Urban Landscape, Wenders observes that they believed in something essential: they believed they belonged to that region and felt responsible for those places, each for a precise zone. They were effectively a part of the territory. The opposite thought, i.e. that someone could possess a piece of land, was unimaginable for them. In their eyes the land was the owner of men, never vice-versa. The land had authority. […] But our civilisation has completely extinguished or removed the idea of belonging to the earth, and urban images are the proof. Cities have made the earth invisible, almost as if to hide their sense of guilt. (Wenders 1992).

Among the constituent features of belonging, one is that men are “a part of the territory, that “the land is the owner of men”, whereas in our eyes it is unimaginable that someone possess the territories they belong to, such as, for example, the small islands of the Maddalena archipelago in northeast Sardinia, which have for some time been considered by the inhabitants as patrimony for collective fruition, territory that is a “free good”, private destination of which, thus limiting the social dimension of fruition, is unthinkable (Maciocco 1998). The territory as a “free good” belongs to that group of spatial concepts that are at the base of the sense of human territoriality; they have to inform the urban path in that they are structural to what Pareyson defines as the “forming form” (Pareyson 1988) of the city.

110 Reinventing the City

These spatial concepts are realised in local contexts, in that it is at this scale that a concept of collective good is thinkable, as the outcome of a process the urbanist favours, trying “to bring to the light a secret order to grant it a direction and enhance it, or to unify the scattered elements, old and new, giving a sense to them as a whole.” (Lucan 1992). It is, for example, the meaning given by the Tago in Lisbon as the witness of the urban epic: “E a cidade, chamamlhe Lisboa, mas é só o rio que é verdade, só o rio, é a casa de água, casa de cidade em que vim nascer.”10 Lisbon inhabits the Tago, the river is the city’s home. “It is called Tejo – says the musician of the Madredeus group – he speaks of the river, says that the Tejo is the only witness … do you say witness? … of our lives. Not the city.” (Wenders 1994). The “house of water” witness of urban life is par excellence the “place rich in nature and history” of Lisbon, the guiding element that presides over urban cohabitation, defining in its slow flowing the formation of a geography of man and the territory of the city as a human condition (Dematteis 1985b). It is on the local scale that the territory offers itself for exploration of the symbolic dimensions of the relations between natural forms and anthropic transformations. It is at this scale that an important reflection can be developed on the new spatial forms of the urban and the consequent processes of symbolic signification. A concept should nevertheless be adopted of critical belonging; we should retrieve what Pier Carlo Palermo calls “interpretative and critical belonging”, which is able to open to debate the actual situation; [that] on the other hand, does not try to impose arbitrary transformations, because it knows it must conceive each mutation within the frame of the basic possibilities of the place. The idea of belonging is not therefore separate from a constant projectual tension towards the mutation, which expresses intentionality, as a vision of possible forms directing the action in accordance with projects, but appears justified if it is able to acknowledge the fundamental historicity of places and local societies; according to an idea of the future plan that is not a utopian, nostalgic invention, yet always critical of some conditions and an enhancement of the value of some of the possibilities of the context (Palermo 1992). We have seen there can be no belonging without tactile knowledge of the city, without “touching the ground”, as the chance to encounter the city in its authenticity, in “something essential”. But the urban makes this very difficult; it has in a certain sense hidden the essential, cutting off temporal relations between past and future, while cities have a role in that they create a temporal relationship for their inhabitants, and place them in some way in a “no-man’s-land between past and future” (Wenders 1992). In this

Recovering Sensitive Knowledge of the City 111

situation, to describe the city in the urban is a very rare art because – as Wenders keenly observes – cities evade description. They can be perceived so easily by the senses, by smelling the odours, listening to the noises, with direct experience, through sight, obviously most of all through the eyes. […] In a film with a historic nature it is depressing to see the city unencumbered, with antennas dismantled, everything cleared away […] the idea of history on which we rely has completely filtered through. And I get the same impression when they try in a city to unearth the past with the same taste: I feel like I am watching a historic film. […] With these methods, instead of creating a tie with the past, the past is turned into a stereotype. It happened in Berlin, too, both in the east and the west, in the context of the city jubilee: they cleaned and adorned so many places that suddenly they no longer had any history but were just a stereotype of the past. Restoration is an exercise of balance, walking on a tight-rope, with the slightest exaggeration it is destroyed; it only needs excessive cleaning, making a frontage too beautiful and you end up with a Disneyland-style city. (Wenders 1992).

Urban cosmetics, urbanistic make-up, indeed hide the city, the “essential” behind the “islands of perfect efficiency”, like the large shopping malls, the recreation centres, that constitute the sign of our incapacity to “touch” the city to project a coherent path for it. But this is perhaps in our nature, which is changing. According to Pierre Restany, “what we are discovering, both in Europe and the U.S.A., is a new sense of nature, of our contemporary, industrial, mechanical, commercial nature. Arcadian landscapes have by now been driven back to the most mythical zones of our vision. What is the reality of our daily context is the city or the office. Extroversion is the rule of this world placed under the double sign of standardisation and efficiency. We can no longer allow ourselves to go back in time nor objectively take a distance. Direct appropriation of the real is the Law of our Present.” (Restany 1994). But in the present the real remains elusive, beyond our energies, the more incomprehensible the more we are immersed in the flows of communication and mobility. The city seems to evade understanding more and more, also because conventional points of view persist, those of a decisive conception of the project for the city, which leaves no space for critical interpretation of the relations with the context and with common sense, a conception that, once delegitimised by the events, leaves a desert of impotence seeming to submerge any disciplinary perspective for the architectonic paradigm of urbanistics. As Ignasi de Solà-Morales says, the form of the contemporary metropolis is, moreover, soft and malleable. It does not have a pre-determined structure, but seems to model itself depending on actions and reactions that different operations present it with. In other words, it is not fossilised once and for all in time, nor defined by someone, “the Authority, to use the name Le Corbusier would have used.”

112 Reinventing the City

Organic metaphors to describe these situations multiply and in recent years we have seen an authentic return to organic terminology and iconography for visualising these phenomena. “How can what is happening in Singapore, Tokyo, Canberra, Teheran, Mexico or Atlanta be explained?” The global nature of these processes no longer enables us to escape, using the alibi of regional cultures or past-inspired nostalgia. We are again faced with phenomena, the potent, savage reality of which is beyond our knowledge. We find ourselves faced with facts that make an issue of the capacity of architects to practice architecture with this form of perpetually active city expanding and unfolding blindly. “The metropolis, the city of present times, rises like a new “dark object of desire for architecture and architects.” (de Solà-Morales 1994).

Walking is the “Speech Act” of the City In the “feverish insomnia” that stimulates us to continuously explore this “dark object”, we need perhaps to rediscover the ways of “touching” the city, trampling on the soil of its origins, the soil of places rich in nature and history, walk in the most proper meaning of this term, which refers to a full sensory experience. Walking therefore has a moral function, in that it evokes materiality and with materiality, reality. To walk means to be external to fiction, to the simulacrum city, to “real virtuality” (de Azua 2003). It means to be external to the mimetic urban forms that reproduce the same model of movement and consumption ad infinitum. It means being external to the city anaesthetised by mass consumption, a post-city conceived and experienced without history or identity. Walking is one of the ways of “getting by in the large city, cohabiting with the metropolis” (Wenders 1992), but not the only one because it is extremely important to allow those who live in the city the chance to accept all its aspects. For this reason places for walking should be those that have this vocation almost innate in them and are something different compared with the pedestrian shopping islands, rigidly regulated, of large cities, a sort of open-air shopping centre, forms of cut-off microcosm, the same everywhere, a pedestrian simulation of the car-man, an indication of our incapacity to fully “live” the city. “Places for walking” tie up with Baudelaire’s flânerie if translated as the capacity of not being dragged by the crowd, by urban noise, but at the same time needing this collective noise to make observing significant, to receive the changing city in a significant way. These places represent the city which, in the face of the still inscrutable urban, exerts its flânerie in

Walking is the “Speech Act” of the City 113

the same way as the flâneur faced with the crowd of the 19th Century metropolis tries to keep his privacy, his individuality, but also a collective space enabling him to observe the crowd, like the city observes the urban to scan it for perspectives of a path to invent. These places tell of the city in that they are the main characters and witnesses of its life and repositaries of its autopoietic capacity; it is as if they contained its secret formula, which can perhaps be discovered by walking, exerting a form of sensitive knowledge that allows us to “touch” the city. On the ways of “touching” the city, of “full sensory experience” that favours collective reception of it, the deep reflections still seem up-to-date that Benjamin, in his famous essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,11 dedicated to the fruition of the work of art, comparing architecture and the cinema against the background of the relationship between distraction and concentration (Benjamin 1968). In Benjamin’s words, distraction and concentration are opposed in such a way as to permit this formulation: he who concentrates on a work of art is absorbed into it; he penetrates the work. On the contrary, the distracted mass let the work of art collapse in their own lap. This happens in the most evident manner for buildings. Architecture has always provided the prototype of a work of art, the reception of which occurs in distraction and by the collectivity. The laws of its reception are the most instructive. Buildings have accompanied mankind since prehistoric times. Many forms of art have been born then died. But man’s need of a dwelling has not ceased. Architecture has never known a break. Its history is longer than that of any other art; to realise its influence is important for any attempt to understand the relationship between the masses and the work of art. Our fruition of buildings is twofold: through use and perception. Or in more precise terms: in a tactical and in an optical manner. It is not possible to define the concept of a similar reception if it is imagined as being like those gathered, for example, by travellers faced with famous constructions. There is nothing on the tactical side that could be the counterpart of what, on the optical side, is constituted by contemplation. Tactical fruition does not occur so much on the plane of attention as on that of habit. With regard to architecture, on the contrary, the latter greatly determines even optical reception. This, too, in itself, happens much less with careful observation than with occasional glances. This kind of reception, that has been generated in relation to architecture has, nevertheless, in certain circumstances, a canonical value. Since the tasks delegated in epochs of past history to the human perceptive apparatus, cannot be accomplished in merely optical ways, i.e. contemplative. We manage it gradually, thanks to the intervention of tactical reception, of habit.

114 Reinventing the City

The distracted person can also get into the habit. Furthermore: the fact of being able to accomplish certain tasks even in demonstration proves, first of all, that for the individual in question it has become a habit to accomplish them. By distraction, which is offered by art, it is possible to check to what extent apperception is able to accomplish new tasks. Moreover, since the individual will always be tempted to avoid these tasks, art will face the most difficult and important one when it manages to mobilise the masses. Currently it does this through the cinema. Reception in distraction, which is making itself felt with increasing insistence in all sectors of art and which constitutes the symptom of profound changes in apperception, has found in the cinema the most authentic instrument on which to practise. Thanks to its shock effects the cinema favours this form of reception. The cinema belittles cultural value not only by leading the public to a judgmental attitude, but also due to the fact that at the cinema the judgmental attitude does not involve attention. “The public is an examiner, but a distracted examiner.” (Benjamin 1968). Walking in propitious places to favour collective “tactical reception” of the city, to “examine it distractedly” stimulates narration of the urban epic with the language of the places of the city. The analogy between walking and narrating is to be rediscovered in one of the most famous paragraphs of Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1958 quoted in Soutif 1994), in which Wittgenstein compares language to an old city: “a labyrinth of lanes and little squares, old and new houses, and houses enlarged in different periods; and all this surrounded by a number of new quarters with straight roads lined with houses all the same”. As Daniel Soutif notes, “the diversity of the play of words is thus similar to that of these quarters or other urban structures, and the description of this play – description that constitutes the task assigned by Wittgenstein to philosophical grammar – would be related to a type of map, also able to include traces of paths”. In fact, in another paragraph of the same book, the comparison makes a change by substituting the paths with the space in which they unfold. According to this text, language is not similar to a “labyrinth of lanes and little squares …” but to a “labyrinth of paths”: “you come from one side and know where you are; you come to the same place from another side and no longer know the way.” (Wittgenstein 1958). Inverting the comparison, i.e. taking language as the model of comprehensibility, if not of cities, at least of the spatial practices they give rise to, Michel de Certeau puts forward the hypothesis that there is a “rhetoric of walking” in the urban environment (de Certeau 1990). In the same way as an art of “turning” sentences around exists, “an art of turning routes around” might be conceived with its tropes and elements of style.

Walking is the “Speech Act” of the City 115

By arranging in paths – others will say “walks”, yet others dérives – successions of topoi, the walker’s tropes, his directions, will enable the various styles generated by “pedestrian speech” to be classified. According to de Certeau, in fact, the act of walking would be “to the urban system, as the “speech act” is to language or statements made” (de Certeau 1990). There are, in effect, ways of walking, passing through, which link up with speech as an inaugural test of language, the primary testing of its communicative possibilities, walking as the experimental test of the urban form, of its possibilities of revealing itself to inhabitants, to communicate, begin to narrate, just as language inaugurates the tale with speech. A consequence that follows from this hypothesis concerns the relationship that this act of walking maintains in areas like these with representation on paper and other plans: whether it is definitely possible to mark on them the trajectories of the walker, “these curves en plein et en délié refer only like words to the absence of what has passed” (de Certeau 1990). The traces mapped of the route are nothing more, in short, than a relic “placed on the non-time of an area of projection”, and visibility of this relic only has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible (de Certeau 1990). But even a single “way of being in the world” is a possible world, a possibility for the project for space that may indeed be wasted by crystallisation of itineraries, of routes traced on a map. Maps that crystallise paths for walking in places rich in nature and history therefore realising “figures of absence”, deny those same possibilities offered to walking to discover reality and the seeds of possible evolution. It is a question of an aberrant use of maps and plans that disguises the absence of a spatial referent, which is the place. This forgetting the place surfaces more and more clearly if we consider that maps of cities and other plans of flâneries, dérives and other urban routes have become an unusual artistic form, which is almost an acknowledgement of the progressive disappearance of the spatial referents of walking. This is a fact not registered solely in a history, the origin of which would coincide with the Baudelairian discovery of the flâneur12, and the outcome of which would be the situationist invention of the derive (Martin 1980; Hollevoet 1992) and its extensions in conceptual art. Soutif observes that from the first hints of an aberrant use of the geographic system for artistic or para-artistic purposes – be it the plan of Brussels englobing Paris by Wertz, or the phantasmatic plan of Berne drawn up by Adolf Wölfli – the trait was in fact already present, which would formally characterise what might be called the “urban works” of the situationists, in particular Guy-Ernest Debord and Constant, then certain conceptual artists like Douglas Huebler and Stanley Brouwn.13 All these works – in many cases we are dealing more with outlines or plans of works

116 Reinventing the City

rather than actual works – actually have in common making the geographical form of the map, or urban plan, play, like a linguistic sign that is perfectly identifiable as such, but clearly deprived of its capacity to refer to its normal spatial referent. As Soutif says, no territory can be described by these diagrams or fragments of real maps, planimetric structures; indications similar to airways are combined as if to the satisfaction of a cartographer hit by blindness in respect of the relationship his work should have with a precise space (Soutif 1994). Of course, every map is, as Nelson Goodman has noted, “schematic, selective, conventional, condensed and uniform”, and these features are more “virtues” than “defects” since without them the map would tend, according to the well-known hypothesis developed by Jorge Luis Borges, to merge with the territory to which it refers. But we should also add that what is projected in plans that are aberrant to the point of losing their reference point is nothing more, probably, than the loss of the reference point as such, this loss affecting any debate on language, the same loss perhaps that affects the inhabitant when he tries to imagine the city.14

“Dynamic Traditionality” as a Requisite of Urban Innovation If – as we have seen – walking corresponds to the speech act, to expressing, then to discover what de Certeau calls the “rhetoric of walking” means to give language the chance to be expressed, spoken, said “in a significant way”, to give a story the possibility of being narrated in a significant way from the ways possible. This concerns the mechanism of innovation and is not simple to obtain because, as Steiner writes in a masterly manner: The man who has something really new to say, whose linguistic innovation is not merely one of saying but of meaning – to poach on H. P. Grice’s distinction – is exceptional. Culture and syntax, the cultural matrix which syntax maps, hold us in place. This, of course, is the substantive ground for the impossibility of an effective private language. Any code with a purely individual system of references is existentially threadbare. The words we speak bring with them far more knowledge, a far denser charge of feeling than we consciously possess; they multiply echo. Meaning is a function of social–historical antecedent and shared response. Or in Sir Thomas Browne’s magnificent phrase, the speech of a community is for its members ‘a hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world.’ (Steiner G 1975).

These ideas belong to the sphere of criticism that Steiner addresses to the generative-transformational grammar of Noam Chomsky – founder and head of the “generativism” school15 – of which he challenges the “axiom of

“Dynamic Traditionality” as a Requisite of Urban Innovation 117

observation without restraint”, that can lead to making innovation correspond to each of the possible syntactic combinations of linguistic symbols. To explain the mechanism of “really significant” linguistic innovation, he uses the game of chess as an analogy: At this point, – Steiner maintains – again, the transformational generative model needs amendment. Chomsky’s emphasis on the innovative character of human speech, on the ability of native speakers to formulate and interpret correctly a limitless number of previously unspoken, unheard sentences, served as a dramatic rebuttal to naïve behaviourism. It demonstrated the inadequacy of the stimulus–response paradigm in its Pavlovian vein. Chomsky’s observation, moreover, has had notable consequences for education and speech–therapy. But looked at from a semantic point of view, the axiom of unbounded innovation is shallow. An analogy with chess may clarify the issue. It is estimated that the number of possible board–positions is of the order of 1043 and that there are, within the constraint of accepted rules, some 10125 different ways of reaching these. Until now, it is thought, men have played fewer than 1015 games. But despite this boundless potential for novelty, the occurrence of genuinely significant innovation, of inventions which in fact modify or enlarge our sense of the game, will always be quite rare. It will always be in minuscule pro portion to the totality of moves played or playable. (Steiner G 1975).

This “rather rare fact”, that corresponds to the “occurrence of really significant innovations” is typical of innovation in the process of urban autopoiesis. A significant example can be given referring to Gropius’s urbanistic vision, which produced a profound change with the Dammerstock quarter of Karlsruhe in 1928 in the concept itself of quarter, which – as Leonardo Benevolo observes – was no longer a composition enclosed within itself, but “an intervention in the amorphous picture of the city suburbs, a calculated, tidy modification in a casual, untidy environment” (Benevolo 1971), an innovative solution in that it manages to combine and significantly link these different realities. But it is interesting to note how this compositive process that leads to innovation may be compared with some of Paul Klee’s contemporary research, such as, for example, the drawing of 1928 entitled Mechanics of an Urban Area, which shows “an analogy of mental processes and a probable genetic relationship” (Benevolo 1971) with Gropius’ quarter. The common element of the composition is the right angle – Dammerstock is based on the constancy of the right angle – which in Klee takes on the propulsive role of possible combinations: “Klee shows the qualitative variety that can come from repeated application of this principle, as long as we do not proceed mechanically but bearing in mind at each step the endless range of possible decisions” (Benevolo 1971); with Dammerstock,

118 Reinventing the City

Walter Gropius gathers within this range a significant combination, where the “right angle” and its significant combinations departing from reality metaphorically represent the “secret formula” of urban autopoiesis, that we can perhaps observe in the places of the city rich in nature and history. It is, in effect, the characteristic of combinatorial meaning that leads to the “opening up” of systems of linguistic combination and allows the user “productivity” or novelty of expression …” (Luhmann 1990). Something similar happens, for example, in artistic creation, through the metaphor which in a certain sense takes on a combinatorial meaning when it joins together dissimilar experiences, finding the image or symbol that unites them at a deeper level of signification, exceeding the literal, extrinsic modes of normal connections. Bruner illustrates this concept by analysing the “combinatorial” function of the metaphor in passing from the painting of Cimabue to that of Giotto, which entails a gradual process of humanisation of the figure of Christ, from calm without pain to the fusion of the conception of God and the human condition, with Christ in agony, at the limits of resistance, where a set of perspectives, divine and human, are unified and depicted. What we notice in ourselves and in the author is the effort to connect different experiences, which therefore concerns not only the creation but also the understanding of the work, which links, that is, construction and knowledge (Bruner 1975). In the sense that we cannot understand the world exclusively by representing it, but we need to build it, design it, operatively influencing the environment, understood as a background, and exploring the “possible” departing from reality, in our case an urban reality that feels the effects of the traces of the tale of a settlement that has led to the current situation. We can therefore assume – pursuing the comparison between walking and expressing which we have extended with Wittgenstein to the city and language – that exploration of the possible, of the possible alternatives departing from reality, is an innate feature of innovation and therefore of urban autopoiesis, just as the exploration of possible worlds to be narrated is innate in language autopoiesis, in its innovative potential. Language has a constructive force, which is a central example for the city project. In After Babel Steiner explains this concept very clearly suggesting that: After Babel argues that it is the constructive power of language to conceptualize the world which have been crucial to man’s survival in the face of ineluctable biological constraints, this is to say in the face of death. It is miraculous…capacity of grammars to generate counter–factuals, ‘if’–propositions and, above all, future tenses, which have empowered our species to hope, to reach far beyond the extinction of the individual. (Steiner G 1975).

“Dynamic Traditionality” as a Requisite of Urban Innovation 119

In its prodigious capacity for narrating the possible future, language emulates the project, in that “walking” in places that reveal themselves to those who want to significantly narrate them corresponds to expressing the numerous possibilities of language to explore “future ways of being in the world.” We endure, – Steiner goes on – we endure creatively due to our imperative ability to say ‘No’ to reality, to build fictions of alterity, of dreamt or willed or awaited ‘otherness’ for our consciousness to inhabit. It is in this precise sense that the utopian and the messianic are figures of syntax. Each human language maps the world differently. There is lifegiving compensation in the extreme grammatical complication of those languages (for example, among Australian Aboriginals or in the Kalahari) whose speakers dwell in material and social contexts of depravation and barrenness. Each tongue – and there are non ‘small’ or lesser languages– construes a set of possible worlds and geographies of remembrance. In the past tenses, in their bewildering variousness, which constitute history…When a language dies, a possible world dies with it. (Steiner G 1975).

But we need to be careful because – Steiner observes – in this there is no survival of the strongest because, even when it is spoken only by a handful of people, a language contains in itself unlimited potential for discovery – “sometimes Shakespeare seems to ‘hear’ inside a word or an expression the history of its future resonance” (Steiner G 1975) – for recompositions of reality, of structured dreams that we call myths, poetry, metaphysical hypotheses and legal discourse. These are considerations that may count for some places of the city, places where it is still possible to “touch” the city, places rich in nature and history, that contain this “unlimited potential for discovery” of urban history and the future of the city, but that at the same time are exposed to the dangers of uniform “dragging” by the flows of the contemporary urban, just like the languages of small communities are subject to the danger of acceleration of the disappearance of languages all over the earth, to the destructive hegemony of languages said to be “major”, that owe their dynamic efficacy to planetary diffusion of mass marketing, technocracy and the media (Steiner G 1975). The prodigality of the historical atlas of these places favours innovation, it is precious material for significant urban innovation, for singling out possible worlds of space organisation, nurtured by the autopoietic capacity of the city of which these places are, in a certain sense, “participant observatories”. The possibility of an innovation materialising seems, that is, all the stronger the richer the history of the places producing it, which – continuing with the Wittgenstein comparison again – is what happens in language. As we have seen, to define the process of recapitulation of “historic and social antecedents” – in a certain sense analogous to the

120 Reinventing the City

memory of the city and the territory in the formation of the settlement – which is at the basis of the innovation of meaning, Steiner coined the expression “dynamic traditionality”, as a process of combination of elements of the “historic and social antecedents”. This combination process is made possible by the historic atlas which we have seen can be explored by walking around the places of the city rich in nature and history. But there are still other just as important aspects that decisively affect this capacity for expressing, for narrating the city, connected with walking, trampling on the ground, “touching” the place.

Narrating the City Means Designing its Possible Future The capacity of narrating the city involves, as well as a different relationship with space, a different relationship with temporality, that is external to the code of time that characterises the present urban condition, detached from the past and the future, just as it appears in Kundera’s description, “man bent over his motor-cycle all concentrated on the present instant of his flight; he clings to a fragment of time split from the past as from the future; he has taken himself out of the continuity of time; he is outside of time” (Kundera 1995). Speed is the form of ecstasy that the technological revolution has given man. In contrast with the motor-cyclist, the man who runs on foot is always present in his body, forced as he is to think continuously of blisters, of breathlessness; when he runs he notices his weight and his age and is more than ever aware of himself and the time of his life. But when man delegates the power of producing speed to a machine, then everything changes: “his body is out of the game, and the speed to which he abandons himself is bodiless, immaterial – pure speed, speed in itself and for itself, speed ecstasy.” (Kundera 1995). This different relationship with time, induced by the city becoming a metropolis, is explored by Benjamin who recalls some of Paul Valery’s reflections. “Civilised man of the great metropolises – writes Paul Valery, sharply analysing the ‘technical civilisation’ syndrome – relapses into a wild state, i.e. into a state of isolation. The sense of necessarily being in relationships with others, first continuously revived by need, is dulled bit by bit in the functioning without friction of the social mechanism. All enhancement of this mechanism renders certain acts, certain ways of feeling, useless.” Benjamin carries out conceptual development on Valery’s reflections linking the radical change in the code of time, which underpins the new ways of life, with the introduction of the “abrupt gesture” in many fields of

Narrating the City Means Designing its Possible Future 121

human activities of the period. As Benjamin says, (Benjamin 1955) towards the end of the century a series of technical innovations began that had in common the fact of replacing a complex series of operations with an abrupt gesture. This evolution took place in many fields; it was evident, for example, in the telephone, where the continuous movement needed to turn the handle of the first apparatuses was replaced by picking-up of the receiver. Among the numerous gestures of activating, launching, pressing, etc., the photographer’s “click” was particularly weighty in its consequences. You just had to press with your finger to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The apparatus instantly communicated, so to speak, a posthumous shock. Beside tactile experiences of this kind optical experiences were added, like those provoked by the advertisements section in a newspaper, but also the traffic in large cities. Moving among traffic entails a series of shocks and collisions for the individual. “Baudelaire speaks of the man who plunges into the crowd as if it were a tank of electrical energy. And defines him immediately afterwards, describing the experience of the shock ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with conscience’”. In the car devouring the road at great speed heading for Lisbon, the sound technician Winter looks through the windscreen – emblematic observation point of contemporary man – at the realm of the European urban more and more undifferentiated and giving in to the centrality of networks of mobility and communications.16 In these initial images of Lisbon Story is pictured the relationship with temporality that characterises the present urban condition. Along the route leading Winter, the sound technician, to Lisbon, a series of accidents put his car out of action and it betrays him, leaving him stranded just outside the city. Abandoned by technology, he becomes conscious of his limits in adapting to unusual situations – an example is the clumsy way he loses his spare wheel, which rolls down the slope and falls into the water – and he discovers, not without effort, his corporality, which reminds us of the unframeable reality of our natural condition, the fact that however immaterial or abstract the manifold relations city-dwellers mutually engage in across the planet, they are, we are, in spite of ourselves, thrown into space and forced to live there and settle there somewhere (Choay 1994a). Through Lisbon, shimmering “in the blue of an Atlantic breeze” (Tabucchi 1994), as he heavily drags his leg in plaster through the alleys of Alfama, Winter leads us to discover that the city demands direct experience of three-dimensionality, a wholebody investment that no simulation can replace, for the body thrown into space establishes “intersomaticity” (Formaggio 1976), which, in its turn, establishes urbanity. In this slow contact between bodies memory is discovered, because the slow code of time is memory itself and memory is everything. In

122 Reinventing the City

Kundera’s words, the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of oblivion. From this equation various corollaries can be deduced, such as the following: our epoch abandons itself to the demon of speed and this is why it forgets itself so easily. But Kundera prefers to invert this statement: our epoch is obsessed by the desire to forget, “and it is to realise this desire that it abandons itself to the demon of speed; if it accelerates the pace it is because it wants to make us understand that by now it no longer aspires to being remembered; that it is tired of itself; that it wants to put out the quivering flame of memory.” (Kundera 1995). It is the slow code of time that permits narration. In The Sky above Berlin,17 while the camera focuses on the library, slowly as in a story, hymns and prayers are heard. The library represents the story and the story connects us with the sky because it connects us with the infancy of mankind and only through infancy can mankind reach the sky. The incipit is a sky that opens up revealing an eye looking at Berlin from above, Berlin with its great blocks, while the sun illuminates the colours of the eyes of men in a different way from how the blue of Lisbon illuminates them in Lisbon Story: the stories of men are the stories of the city. “Name for me the men and the women and the children – they are the words of Homère – who will look for me, their narrator, cantor and coryphaeus, because they need me more than any other thing in the world…” (from the film The Sky above Berlin). If the city becomes one of the many places of the urban, of accelerated time, if it is no longer a place of walking, it will not be able to be narrated by the inhabitants, the cantor will lose his voice and, with his voice, language, his capacity to tell of possible worlds, to design the city. This is Homère’s anguish: “Deeds of peace, one’s worth the other … No-one has yet managed to sing an epos of peace. What is there in peace that in the long run does not excite and lend itself to narration? … Should I give up now? If I give up now, then mankind will lose its cantor and when mankind has lost its cantor it will have lost its infancy too.”18 To lose the cantor means to lose the origins, the roots of identity, but to lose origins means to lose childhood, which is the same as losing the capacity to be amazed, to be curious, to look and listen with attention, in a certain sense it is the same as losing life because in astonishment there is life.19 It is a slow code of time, that required by narration, which reminds us that in the city there are different dimensions of time and that we should design the contemporary city not just through a different conception of space, but also with a different relationship with temporality. In the same way as the contemporary city expresses itself through different spatial forms of the urban condition (historic city, suburbs, urban

Artists Take the City by the Hand 123

dispersion, inhabited territory, etc.), it also expresses itself through different temporal forms. Slow codes and accelerated codes, times of services, times of mobility, times of work, times of recreation, differentiated times of reflection on the differential conditions of existence and belonging to the city, different times of subjects that have a different voice or do not even have a voice. These times related with spaces form a city with spatio-temporal differences, a network of alternative and complementary opportunities, of supply of urban functions which differentiate with respect to space organisation and to the related codes of time. But also a set of places to care for, not just with spatial attention but also with coherent codes of the perception of time in these places. The city sets its chronometer to the times of lifestyles and the lifestyles in turn have to adapt to respecting in certain spaces the codes of time, even the slowest, that represent a value, just as the quality of space is a value. New and more appropriate ways of thinking of the time-space of the city may then materialise if a “territorial” conception of the city is adopted, in which the “notable places”, “single, particular complexes of relations” according to Cacciari’s expression (Cacciari 1990), follow both the slow time of the non-negotiable values of the contemporary spatial condition, and the accelerated time of its demands for communications and mobility. They are spatial places and concepts rich in nature and history, where – according to Alvaro Siza’s beautiful expression – “the whole world and the whole memory of the world project the city endlessly” (Siza 1994), they are passages of the story of settlement of the European city, the theatre of a new, metropolitan conviviality, perhaps random, not tied to the local proximities of the neighbourhood, but still urban, if by urbanity is meant the correspondence between a physical form and a form of conviviality. As Françoise Choay writes, these are places that differentiate the future of the European city from a “collage city” (Rowe and Koetter 1978), in that its future could never be a juxtaposition of the modern on the ancient, but because of the way it is formed and discomposed, will be a “realm of the urban” in which the notable places of slow time, of its natural and human history, will emerge as the reference base of an urban path for a city to invent (Choay 1994a).

Artists Take the City by the Hand Up to now we have examined the difficulties, but also the potential, connected with the need to see a different, external city, as not dependent

124 Reinventing the City

on the “city without city” (Sieverts 2002) passed on to us by sprawl, genericity and segregation tendencies. But to see the city we need to plan it, in the sense that knowledge, representation and planning constitute a unicum, a “radical construction”. This is the position stated by so-called “radical constructivism” (Von Glasersfeld 1992), an epistemological trend which proposes the consideration of all content of knowledge, in terms not of discovery or duplication of an “ontologically existing reality in itself”, but in terms of construction operations; construction of new meanings, detaching elements conveying meaning from the referents to which they are usually tied, and reintroducing them in a fabric of combinations, governed by a set of conventional rules. This seems to be the mechanism which regulates the passage from experience to innovation, and that perhaps enables the city to positively absorb, as combinations of previous materials and experiences, processes of transformation. What the city must manage to interpret correctly and express concretely is the compensation for the lack of projectuality that is making itself felt more and more in our epoch and our culture, steeped in a cynical realism that often digresses into justification a posteriori and at any cost of the “strength of reality” and the reasons for the latter. This lack appears all the more serious and deleterious if we consider that the project, in its most authentic accepted meaning, is the intellectual and material activity by which man, intervening in an aware manner in the world, manages to change his condition of existence and create the premises for a new reality, acting within the field of possibilities compatible with the ties imposed by the “existing”. For this it would seem a priority, for the purpose of claiming the need and rights of the latter, to re-establish the balance between “sense of reality” and “sense of possibility” of which Musil speaks at the beginning of his The Man Without Qualities: If the sense of reality exists, and no-one can question that its existence is justified, then there must also be something that we will call sense of possibility. He who possesses it does not say, for example: here this or that happened, will happen, must happen; but he imagines: here this or that thing could or should happen; and if you tell him that a thing is as it is, he thinks: well, it could probably also be different. So that the sense of possibility could also be defined as the capacity to imagine everything that could be and not give more importance to what is, than to what is not. (Musil 1954).

The planning process is part of a “dance” in which our “structure of possibilities” (Winograd and Flores 1987) is formed, a “dance” in that this process has a swinging, pendular nature: “the world determines what we can do and we determine our world” (Winograd and Flores 1987), based on a perspective according to which it is what we already are and do that

Artists Take the City by the Hand 125

will set the conditions for what we will be or do; and, at the same time, the implementation and realisation of the possibilities that make up our horizon of projectuality will deeply affect our way of being in the world, and so on, in a circle without end. On the relationship between reality and possibility, Ernst Bloch departs from an initial assumption according to which given reality never fully gratifies the subject, and from this point of view is not “true”: the truth to which the subject tends, imagining and yearning for what he is missing, is not given, but is a utopia, which transcends the present in the direction of the future (Bloch 1986). Bloch thus refuses all forms of contemplative thought, conceived as merely passive mirroring of what has already been, fixed in an eternal present. Bloch speaks out against the myth of the impartiality of presumed objective knowledge: in actual fact, thought is always partial and contemplation is essentially equal to the acceptance of existing reality. Whereas utopian thought may discover traces of the future in the past and always goes beyond what is given to aim towards the future, which rises to a position of supremacy. Bloch builds an authentic anthropology: man is a being characterised by needs and instincts; of these, the fundamental one is self-preservation, which is manifest in the sense of hunger. In man it becomes refined and rises above immediacy, enriching itself and turning into sentiments, especially those not able to be quickly satisfied, which are postponed to the future: in this panorama, hope, as the anxious wait for the new bringer of salvation, occupies a position of supremacy among sentiments. The “new” never has completely defined traits, it is always wrapped in obscurity: for this reason an unconscious dimension is intrinsic in man, which is felt as not yet conscious, illuminable only in a hoped-for future and which is translated into tension and the search for it (Sechnsucht in German). Here, in Bloch’s opinion, the limit of psychoanalysis surfaces, which reduces the sphere of the unconscious to the past, to what has been removed and forgotten, is no longer conscious. In actual fact, there are also daydreams, correlated with what has not yet happened, anticipating the future. In the third part of his substantial work, The Principle of Hope, Bloch constructs a sort of encyclopaedia of desires and hopes, of which he searches for traces in fairy tales, in popular detective and adventure novels, in advertisements, in circus shows and so on. To these are linked up, on the one hand, Bloch’s taste for the details and trivialities of everyday life and mass civilisation, in which some part of truth always shines through, and, on the other, his style rich in metaphors, images and parables, able to express these tensions towards the future. Bloch is of the opinion that this constant tendency of man to transcend each time what is given, has a real base in matter itself (Fusaro 2005).

126 Reinventing the City

As well as in everyday experience, hope is manifest, according to Bloch, in works of art. Works of art are for Bloch a refined, condensed experience. In Bodei’s opinion, Bloch does not set art against life, he does not leave it all up to museums and books to find the point of existence, but on the contrary, the smallest, most trivial, most everyday things have an important nature. Bloch indeed makes the effort to show us again the importance of what seems obvious, but works of art have this advantage: they are the essence of experience, great experience, therefore the work of art puts us in touch with this element of mystery and undecidability. Bloch, for example, really loved De Chirico’s metaphysical art and remembers how De Chirico signed his pictures in around 1908 adding the Latin motto: Et quid amabo nisi quod enigma est?, “And what shall I love if not that which is enigmatic?” In Bloch there is no, so to speak, Illuminist taste for making everything clear and transparent.20 It is music that, more than any other art, enables expression of this “inexpressible” and of the respective utopian tension, because it is for Bloch the art most suited to subjective restlessness and sentiments of hope. The purpose of the principle of hope is to try to give a sense to our lives at a distance from ourselves, therefore the utopian ideal par excellence is to rediscover ourselves, to rediscover the sense of ourselves in a collectivity, not a solitary sense. “We live together with others and so it is also through others that we understand a part of ourselves. The us is more hospitable than the I. The I, however, belongs more to ourselves, so when we encounter the I we also encounter the us, and when we encounter the us we encounter the I, namely it is only by living in this community of all men that the work of art puts us in contact with what most belongs to itself.” (Bloch 1986). Art can contribute to the project for the city if artists “take the city by the hand”. When the trajectory of the urban utopias breaks off and urban strategy becomes business strategy and urban communication enters the marketing sphere, when the city “enters the market” and, being hetero-directed by the market, cannot be planned, artists open up new urban visions. When artists appear without warning they make the environment waver in the register of ordinary things, the generic city is cancelled, only the event is present. Pulled repeatedly in all directions, the city has nevertheless entered a phase of escape forwards and has all at once become magma in permanent implosion and an expanding conglomerate as chaotic as it is controlled. Devoted to the cult of gigantism, the city squashes in its centre its social body and wraps it up in its suburbs. It develops its pollution and finds itself at the mercy of greater technological risks. Huddled into itself, in the temporal confusion of a cultural collage that is merging its future, past and

Artists Take the City by the Hand 127

present, it has become the place of no-return of its internal history. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s allegory of “good government” no longer has the right to citizenship. As Baudson notes, the city has become at the same time a projection of an apocalyptic ralenti and indicator of a regeneration process. This situation has given place to a real dialogue between contemporary art and the city and the visions it has generated (Baudson 1994). A dialogue that refuses any possible confusion between the old-fashioned, voluntarist concepts of urban art, coming from public or private clients, and the new, differentiated visions of artists. Namely, it is not a question of make-up that badly hides a bad conscience, manifest or latent, in the face of the city’s becoming. Having become instruments or machines to inhabit, cities no longer inspire images like those of Impressionist daily reality. Vision has been focused through the glance of the photographic lens: hyper-realistic painting, in particular that of Jurg Kreienbuhl or Heiner Altmeppen, gave an account of the architectonic brutality of the dormitory city, a vision of a city without life nor joie de vivre, as in the paintings of Richard Estes; a city like that denounced by Arman’s accumulations, Raymond Mason’s references to solitude in the crowd, such as in Birmingham. In Memoriam of 1958, or also Joan Rabascall’s series of villas, Douce France, of 1971, kinds of architectonic surrogates where vacuity and vanity compete feebly, a city, therefore, transformed into a container for object inhabitants (Baudson 1994). Michel Baudson describes for us with the geography of pathways of artists the vision of a city emptied of its substance, seen from above and coldly cut up into quarters for the strategist’s glance, like in Gerhard Richter’s paintings, the German artist who already at the beginning of the 60s faced the problem of temporal depth and the ambiguity of the photographic and television image with particular analytical and conceptual values. It is the vision of a city, in which Tony Cragg only preserves for his sculptures the stereotyped materials (building materials or plastic refuse). The encounter between the rational and the void has been accomplished, function prevails over the human. The apocalypse is behind, but it is also in front of us, with Wolf Vostell’s concrete caps over the city, Michael Downs’ conglomerates, Maryvonne Arnaud’s pilgrimages to Chernobyl in the trenches of panic and the hurried escape. The void has been affirmed. “To checkmate anguish, certain artists prefer to pass from victim to slaughterer.” (Baudson 1994). Jack Vanarsky thus straightens the course of the Seine to a straight line on his Parisian plan and Ingrid Webendorfer dries up the river bed to dig a canyon in it.

128 Reinventing the City

But the social body may still lead the game and the artists propose new urban visions. The social body builds Babel there with Robert Combas, Jean Dubuffet reinstores the poetic sense of the city, seen as a house with its walls in Rues et immeubles de la ville, a work of 1969. Gilbert & George with Flat man (1991) proclaim the vitality of the immigrant generations. There are inhabitants that look at us, or embrace in their glance the urban panoramas reinvented by Marin Kasimir. Here the human triumphs out of the urban, the checkmate realised by the architects and urbanists is again subordinated to the panoramic vision of individuals. Man may also, like in Roland Sabatier’s work La maison ideale (1987), rediscover his domestic intimacy (Baudson 1994). The artistic perspective proposes, with Dani Karavan’s perspective, new human dimensions for the city, and gives back to imagery – developed by, among others beyond past reference, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Miquel Navarro and Alain Bublex with the ramifications of the city on the territory and the environment, or François Schuiten – the power to open up new urban visions (Baudson 1994). These global visions coexist with a fragmentary glance, which gathers the new points of visual attack of the city, like the imprint of a tyre taken in the road on a piece of paper, pieces of poster detached and taken from walls and city surfaces, there a piece of poster, here some graffiti, there again the end of a fence. It is in some ways the prelude to the artists’ transition from critical but detached global visions, to the epistemology of effective action, to the different methods of artistic action. A conceptual artist like Stanley Brouwn memorises on paper his walks (This Way Brouwn 1960). The city is just as much the place of personal journeys, which call for new photographic or video explorations, like in the work of Fitzgerald and Sanborn, “Ear to the ground”, in which the percussionist David Van Thieghem makes the streets of the city vibrate as he passes (Baudson 1994). This work on creative imagery introduced in the 50s by the Situationists, Constant and Guy-Ernest Debord (Debord 1955, 1956), dismisses the more theoretical work of the urbanists and architects. The most fragile, the artists, open up new perspectives for the city. It is the moment of direct grasping of reality, the moment in which the urbanists’ utopias and the urban ideas of artists meet in the sphere of ethics and social legitimisation. A sphere that calls them all back to a confrontation of values and therefore a cooperative commitment to the project for the city. This way of considering the city also entails an attempt to reflect on issues of an aesthetic nature, in the sense that new aesthetics may originate from this position, the foundations of which rest on a grid of

Artists Take the City by the Hand 129

interpretation made available by artists. It is the city that becomes a “moving garden” (Clément 1994), a metaphor for the construction of the polis that acknowledges unpredictability and the encounter with the other, like in the “moving garden”: for example, moles, which are killed, driven by every means out of the traditional garden, in a moving garden provide instead precious forms of Land Art (Clément 1997). Or pioneer plants, “capable of living in an ungrateful environment” but that “are, in effect, fragile: out of this environment, they die”. Or again “vagabond” plants, which die in one place to be reborn the same, a little later, a few metres away: “they are always there where they’re not expected” (Clément 1994). “Tradition excludes from the territory of gardening all living animal and vegetable species that escape the gardener’s control. There is no room for vagabond beings.” (Clément 2004a). A seminal role in this direction is to be assigned to the Earth Art experience, which faces with extraordinary critical strength the need for relations between art and context. The charm of Earth Art recalls to some extent the passion for desert landscapes and cities, which is strictly correlated with the genuinely romantic charm exerted by the fragment, the ruin, together with incompletion. But it is an attraction that can make the imagination thrive and at the same time it is a place of memory (Ursprung 2004). Such attraction had a strong tie also with what Ignasi de SolàMorales has defined terrain vague, namely the passion for uncultivated fields, where “the memory of the past seems to predominate over the present”,21 but it also seems to make itself available to imagine a future that is not predictable, not won over by the unavoidability of the “federal bulldozer”, this being an acknowledgement of the positive ambiguity of these places. From another disciplinary side, but still from a position that aims at exploring the positive ambiguities of space, Robert Smithson came up with an interesting theoretical development in 1968 with his work A non site: Pine Barrens, New Jersey. The sculpture is formed of six rows of five blue aluminium containers that get increasingly higher and wider, filled with sand from the land surrounding the airport. At the centre a hexagonal tank is place, also filled with sand. The hexagonal map and the description of the site constitute an integral part of the work. This invention was to offer artists the possibility of adopting in their own field an instrument that belonged at the same time to architecture: the “non-place”. The non-place enabled a dialectic connection to be established between the context in the expositive space and another place. The invention of the non-place opened new doors to art. Departing from New York, artists swarmed in subsequent years towards new expressive forms opening up new territories for themselves and keeping them alive in the expositive spaces of the

130 Reinventing the City

galleries. The matter of place and that of relations between work of art and surrounding territory became the centre of interest of the new research. Starting with Smithson’s “non-place” the artists indicated their intention to concretely occupy the spatiality of new territories, “to take the city by the hand”, indeed. New concepts like that of “site selection”, i.e. the choice of a suitable place, and that of “site specificity”, i.e. the idea that a work of art should exist exclusively for a particular context, were introduced into art terminology (Ursprung 2004). The artists’ ability to facilitate the passage from enigmas, myths and legends to life lived saves the city. Just as the community of Ulassai, through the work of Maria Lai, has metaphorically been saved from the collapse of the mountain, rediscovering its own ethnic roots and historic memory (Menna 2006). It often happens that artists, with their sensitivity and creativity, manage to understand well in advance themes later destined to become the subject of a wide-ranging cultural and political debate. It was like this in Sardinia, too, where over twenty years ago the performance of an artist like Maria Lai posed the theme, nowadays fundamental, of the relationship between physical space, place and community. The scene of this memorable intervention was her hometown, Ulassai in Sardinia, shaken by internal tensions and rivalry, which made it a cluster of buildings but not a united social group. Maria tied each house to the next with coloured ribbons in a lively, rich game of construction of links and interactions, thanks to which the image was obtained, visualised in a indelible fashion, of a space of relations between the different dwellings (Tagliagambe 2006a). According to Tagliagambe, all those who were involved in this game were forced to understand that “Ulassai”, its soul, its intimate essence, its identity were represented much better and much more by the ribbons than by the houses and the streets, because a village is, first and foremost, a heterogeneous group of people who communicate across the space. Following this process of communication the village is no longer just a physical space, made up of details and measurements, but it becomes a place, into which time is inserted immediately and forcefully enters. Time as common past and collective memory, and time as future, as expectation, as a shared project. Only by this welding of space and time in a homogeneous, resistant weft can a community emerge, which is, indeed, a series of links and relations having to do with belonging to a place and belonging reciprocally to each other, and such, therefore, as to always implicate, in an explicit or implicit way, the problem of the identity of this place (Tagliagambe 2006a). On 22 January 2003 Michael R. Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City, announced that the city had authorised the artists Christo and JeanneClaude to realise their temporary artistic project: The Gates, Central Park,

Artists Take the City by the Hand 131

New York, 1979–2005. 7532 vinyl, orange-coloured gates, five metres high, were placed along 37 kilometres of paths in Central Park. From the high horizontal part of the structures panels hung of saffron-coloured material which fluttered freely, at a height of approximately 2 metres above the ground. The structures were 3–4.5 metres apart, thus enabling each panel to sway towards the next one and to be seen even from afar through the branches of the trees that were bare due to winter. The “Gates” temporary project stayed on its feet for 16 days and subsequently the structures were removed and the material recycled (Giussani 2005). With The Gates Christo and Jeanne-Claude placed themselves in a certain sense within the same trend of designers of processes of social cohesion, of civitas, promoting in this case ephemeral, impersonal, cosmopolitan social relations, in a park that recovered, though in different forms and modalities, the role of counter-space compared with the space of flows of the metropolis. Walking through The Gates it was possible to enjoy the work through the play of warm coloured shadows. Seen from the skyscrapers surrounding Central Park, The Gates looked like a golden river that appeared and disappeared among the trees, highlighting the route of the pedestrian paths. New York is a city of sidewalks and pedestrians. Of crowds that move on foot, quickly and nervously, guided by the white and red lights of the pedestrian crossings that say “walk” and “don’t walk” and by instinct that dictates small trajectory adjustments to avoid colliding with those walking in the opposite direction. It is a classical, unmistakeable image also for those who have never been to New York: having seen it over and again in an endless number of films. New York is the most “walked” city in the world. It was surprising to see many New Yorkers walk so slowly absorbed in contemplation of the work, speaking almost in a whisper and with genuinely happy expressions on their faces (Giussani 2005). The contrast with the latent impatience and hostility of the pedestrians on the sidewalks could not have been more marked. The “Gates” are the largest artistic installation ever realised in New York – and probably therefore in the world. The wind makes the nylon cloths dance, the sunlight plays with them, and their Euclidean precision and formalism contrast with the sinuous curves of the hills and the paths of the large park in the centre of Manhattan, with the bare branches of the winter trees and the skyscrapers in the background. The work is a magnificent creation of a public space that even the two artists recognise to be without use, without a message, with no other purpose than that of creating amazement and joy. Christo’s art aims at changing the way we see the world and even if Central Park is marvellous as it is, walking under the orange curtains we can have the impression of being in a procession, under a “sky” of warm, reassuring reflections, taken from

132 Reinventing the City

wonder and made to smile. The “Gates” cannot really be explained: you can only experience them in the physical space, but above all you can experience the climate of social cohesion they create (Giussani 2005). The ribbons used by Maria Lai, like Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s curtains, are symbols, the material equivalent of immaterial meanings, like reciprocal trust, the desire to converse and confront others, openmindedness, spirit of friendship and of collaboration. As Tagliagambe says, symbols present themselves like an amphibian living simultaneously in the internal world of man, in the form of ideas, values, sentiments and emotions, and in the external one, where they take the form of a material vehicle of any kind (Maria Lai’s ribbons, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s curtains, the banners or flags but also, for example, words, that are still always a concrete, perceptible expression of the sense of our thinking) and, indeed for this reason, are the most effective instrument of mediation between these two different environments. They are effective, then, precisely if, and inasmuch as, they manage to maintain this amphibian nature of theirs, which means that they have to trigger movements in two directions: from the internal world of man, towards the external world, as reflection and activity of subjects, individual or collective, that slip into its interior causing tangible consequences and effects; and as an action that is born outside this internal world and received by the latter, rooting deeply within it new concepts and new emotions, so strong as to manage to move the boundary of the mind and the body with respect to their usual position, that is to trigger specific effects on/in reality ultimately, to modify it through the project (Tagliagambe 2006a). The capacity of artists to deal with symbols has to do with the project for the city because the city is the place of inhabiting, in the sense Heidegger gives to the term and which, as Silvano Tagliagambe shows us, “makes us understand that to inhabit a place it is not enough to be, objectively, “at home”, inside a built dwelling or at least a place, natural or artificial as it may be, which functions as a refuge, but we need instead to feel at home, i.e. to fill that place with a series of symbolic meanings that goes well beyond the need for a shelter, which are the expression of an emotional need, before, and even more than, a biological need. The home of our origins is not a building, it is not something “constructed”, but the result of a conscious modification, on the part of man, of a small part of the environment in which he lives, of reorganisation of the space aimed at making it a welcoming place and above all familiar, where he recognises himself and feels at ease precisely because of the symbolic reassurance it is able to transmit due to the interventions, maybe small but significant, that the person owning it has carried out (the building of a hearth; the repeated imprints of hands on the rock, coloured white, ochre, red and

Horizons of Contemporary Public Space: Intermediate Spaces 133

black; the walls painted with scenes from daily life). The world of symbols is therefore a fundamental, constituent aspect of dwelling, of “feeling at home”, exactly because to inhabit in the authentic sense we need to have roots, to be able to mediate between the external environment and the internal universe, between the visible world and the invisible one. The symbol is the most efficient instrument we have for carrying out this mediation for, as Pavel Florenskij, who has studied its nature in depth and made it the cardinal point of his philosophical and scientific reflections (Tagliagambe 2006b), emphasises, it is a binomic unity, unity in diversity, in which concrete reality and invisible mystery, finite and infinite, signifier and signified, but also knowing subject and investigated object find themselves synergically fused, though not muddled (Tagliagambe 2008). On the other hand the action of artists also has the meaning of filling the void that should be traced back to the incapacity shown by architecture to create what Henry Lefebvre had defined “monumental spaces”. In his book La production de l’espace, Lefebvre highlights the fact that architecture was no longer able to give life to these spaces (Lefebvre 1991). His incitement to recreate “monumental spaces” was greeted at the time only in the sphere of art. The enormous demand for museums and spaces of remembrance from the 80s, shows that Lefebvre’s analysis is still valid. And still today, when monumentality is at stake, architects vibrate in the direction of art (Ursprung 2004). The setting up of relations carried out by Maria Lai in Ulassai and by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in New York, but also the socialisation connected with football in Salvador de Bahia, for example, or the formation of a city culture on the one side by three carnivals (those of Notting Hill in London, Salvador de Bahia and Tumaco in Colombia), and on the other by the symbolic interpretations of the city that supply legends or rap, are indications of the city taken by the hand by artists and reinvented (Agier 1999a). Against those that diagnose the end of the city, they show that the accent needs to be put on relations, interactions and shared values.

Horizons of Contemporary Public Space: Intermediate Spaces Artists demonstrate that by taking the city by the hand it is possible to design it in our epoch, too, in which the sphere of urban decisions seems decidedly to have been shifted to another urban universe, an inaccessible elsewhere, an elsewhere in which increasing speeds make sure that an

134 Reinventing the City

ever-wider range of urban experiences is a reality of flows rather than of things, in spite of the great quantity of materiality that surrounds us. But one of the principal objectives of research on globalisation and digitalisation is exactly that of retrieving the fixedness and materiality underlying a large part of the global and the digital, and dimmed by the dominant conviction that everything is becoming a flow (Beckmann 1998). Moreover, it has been shown that the globalisation of activities and flows depends to a large extent on a vast network of places, constituted above all by global cities. These sites have many types of fixed resources within them. Things and materiality are fundamental for digitalisation and globalisation, and places are important for global flows (Sassen 2006b). At the same time as impressive projects are proliferating these cities enclose, however, many under-used spaces, often characterised more by memory than by a current meaning. In some ways and on a different scale, these under-used spaces also include the territories external to dense metropolises, the small and medium cities of low-density territories. For these spaces are part of the interior nature of the city yet have an intrinsic externity, in that they remain external to its spatial schemes and its organising logic based on the principle of utility. To throw ourselves onto these spaces to develop property there would be a mistake, whereas to maintain part of this opening might have more sense in terms of capitalisation on future options at a moment in which utility logics are changing with such rapidity. There is a type of urban situation that dwells between the reality of the impressive structures and the reality of abandoned places and which can be central to the experience of the urban in that it enables interpretation of the transitions and transformations of specific spatio-temporal configurations. The work necessary to capture this fleeting quality that cities produce and make legible is not easy to implement. Utility logics will be of no use. As we have seen, artists may be a part of the answer, in the sense that important artistic practices, going well beyond the “theme-parking” of the city, its thematisation (Sorkin 1992; Warren 1994; Jacobson 1998; Augé 2000; Glaeser et al. 2001), enable something of this elusive urban quality to be captured (Miles 1997). The creation and location of public space is one of the lenses with which it is possible to penetrate these types of issues. At this moment we are experiencing a sort of public space crisis, deriving from its commercialisation, privatisation and theme-parking, from the form of “city without city” (Sievert 2002). In a paradoxical fashion, the “city without city” or the “non-city” that today conceals everything again becomes, once more – as De Azua points out:

Horizons of Contemporary Public Space: Intermediate Spaces 135 the true mirror of society and its most faithful representation, like the Gothic or Neoclassical city represented their societies. This would extend the matter to the urgent study of the noncitizen, or the simulacrum of the citizen, who believes he/she is free, lives in the heart of a democracy and has a real decisional capacity over it, but not in the way of the Parisians of the French revolution, the founders of American democracy or the Russians of 1917, but of their images just as they appear in Hollywood films: bidimensional simulacrums, images of desire. Without ideas, without effort and without a struggle. (De Azua 2003).

Also in the non-city of the non-citizens the space accessible to the public is an enormous resource and such space is necessary in greater quantities. But do not let us confuse the space accessible to the public with public space. The latter needs to be external to the public space simulated by the simulacrum city, in that it needs to be created by the practices and subjectivity of individuals; with their practices space users end up creating various types of “public dimension” (Williamson et al. 2002). Researching this externity poses, however, some important questions. What, nowadays, is the true public sphere in contemporary societies? What is the contemporary public space that corresponds to it? How can we design it? And, to stay on the subject of this work, in what way can the project for the city construct contemporary public space? Alberto PérezGómez affirms that traditionally, the main objective of the city project was the revelation of social and political order, therefore the vocation inherent in the project for space is the configuration of public space, in its precise meaning of a proposal for order (Pérez-Gómez 1994, 1996a). It may nevertheless be argued that the privatising tendencies of the majority of modern societies continue to increase, and “symbolic space” does not interest the individuals of the industrialised, developed world. In an emblematic way – we have already emphasised this – Richard Sennett speaks of the “modern fear of exposing oneself”, linking it with the ghettoisation of differences, a recurrent way in which the city has taken shape in the metropolises, removing social contact (Sennett 1991). The French revolution, unequivocally giving an example, perhaps for the first time, of an authentic historical change, announced the values that we associate with democracy and modern individualism. This occurrence, which – as Foucault observes – defines the end of the “era of representation”, in some ways ratifies the end of public space as the space of representation of power, but also as the space of identification with power. This has determined a profound epistemological change, deeply transforming society’s expectations with respect to spaces shared by society itself. The private sphere becomes more and more important, while public ritual sees its legitimacy questioned (Pérez-Gómez 1994, 1996a). The significance of public space will never again be an undisputable fact, in the sense that it is to be considered as a cultural reality under

136 Reinventing the City

transformation, intimately related with the historicity itself of culture. This is why contemporary public space can neither be conceived as the “space of representation” of power (for example of the ‘mediatic’ power of the simulacrum city), nor in a simplistic manner as a typology of public squares or “designed” areas of the city, however attractive they may be formally (Pérez-Gómez 1994). But which then is the public space of today? Are there alternatives to the telematic space that seems more and more popular as a substitute forum for public interaction? Perhaps it is possible to demonstrate – following Pérez-Gómez’ arguments – how our tradition might offer other alternatives (Pérez-Gómez 1994). Public space derives in the first place from the human condition of plurality, the preliminary requisite of that space of appearance that is the public sphere, the space of visibility in which some appear to others and they acknowledge each other, which basically constitutes the condition of possibility of “being-together”.22 If the agorà was the unequivocal space for public speaking, there is nevertheless a tradition of alternative public space related to the Greek theatre, where catharsis took place, a purification that allowed each citizen to discover a sense of purpose or belonging. This recognition that made each spectator “a whole” took place, not so much through the predictable actions of the actors, but through the mediation of the chorus, a group of men who sang and danced, acting on the circular dance platform, the platform of the orchestra, a liminal space, a “threshold” space, for interaction between the chorus, which represented the public, and the actors moved by the will of the gods. The orchestra platform was not the space of the spectator or the actor, it was the centre of attention for everybody, it was an “intermediate space” (Pérez-Gómez 1994, 1996a). A space for the mediation of messages, an intermediate, uncertain context and therefore propitious for transformation, where it was possible to carry out the transformation of the gods’ messages, where it was possible, indeed, “to move without feeling manipulated” (Abalos 2004). The theme of intermediate space is dealt with by Silvano Tagliagambe in his essay on the Russian philosopher Pavel Florenskij with reference to the theory of the symbol worked out by the latter (Tagliagambe 2006b). Florenskij’s intermediate spaces are the spaces of the invisible that the project makes visible, i.e. an intermediate world between subjective and objective. Florenskij studied the nature of the symbol in depth and made it the cardinal point of his philosophical and scientific reflections.23 It is a binomic unity, unity in diversity, which is inseparable from the presence of the skacok, the intermediate zone, namely where conceptualisation of the mystery of the invisible should be realised. Reference to this “zone” represents one of the most problematic questions, as it is difficult to define

Horizons of Contemporary Public Space: Intermediate Spaces 137

with the rational instruments at our disposal. Nevertheless, we are dealing with an essential entity for interaction between the two dimensions, apparently irreconcilable, of the existence of man, the visible and the invisible, everyday experience and the insuppressible tendency towards an aldilà, to something “further” compared with this (Tagliagambe 2008), a concept that corresponds to the cognitive process we associate with the project. In the anthropology of Fink, a great pupil of Husserl, man knows himself to be in his work an agent of the reality that surrounds him and a part of a society which he confronts and collides with; in the loving relationship he is only a fragment in need of completion; in play, finally, and here Nietzschean suggestions transpire more vividly, he may inhabit the intermediate spaces of the “as-if” and the passages between the real and the imaginary, or that unreality in which sense and significance are heralded (Fink 1979 quoted in Baptist 2001). Like in the Greek theatre orchestra, in the intermediate spaces it is possible to mediate and transform the messages coming from the immense visual flow of competitiveness and commercialisation of the contemporary city (Wenders 1992). In these spaces we have the chance to refuse the claims of vertical knowledge and dogmatic truths. This is the “transverse reason” spoken of by Wolfgang Welsch,24 who discovers, however, the substantial reference back to the understanding of knowledge as a horizontal adventure and as a capacity for crossing intermediate spaces, this being a concept constituting the heart of the post-modern modality of knowing and being. The concept of intermediate space thus designates the symbolicpractical complex around which a society can recognise itself. Intermediate spaces, then, understood not just or not so much as boundary zones in the territorial sense, but rather as zones of cultural and disciplinary interchange, as attempts to “get over” constituted mental and cultural orders. Attempts that are possible only in territories external to the metropolises. In the context of our contemporary metropolises, the border areas, obsolete, forgotten by development, present themselves with this character. These marginal areas, the representation of the black holes in the conscience of a city, residual spaces, discarded, no-man’s-land, interstitial spaces where neither private property nor public law exists, seem to offer possibilities for new participatory situations to emerge. Ignasi de SolàMorales has expressed the origin of this perception in the art of photography and has illustrated the relevance of the theme of the outsider and alienation (de Solà-Morales 1995).. They are the spaces where the “city of places” re-emerges in the “city of flows”. But the city of places is in some ways latent, veiled, and only shows itself as a set of traces. Where

138 Reinventing the City

the concept of trace cannot be reduced to the historic palimpsest of classical analysis, but – as Derrida notes – “it relates what we call future no less than to what we call the past” (Derrida 1998). In these spaces the landscape project has to do precisely with the revelation of the traces of the city of places, of its externity with respect to the world of urban flows. In these spaces, far from the flows, the urban landscape project creates conditions that are propitious for social practices, even new ones that make a new concept of public space constructed by people’s habits imaginable, what we call “contemporary public space”, going beyond the monumentalised public spaces of the institutions or the spaces of commercial representation. While the historic models of public space supported narrations linked with religion, justice or military power, this space does not represent any special type of power, in the sense that it is an empty space in the midst of a crowded context, a place without a plan. More and more introspective spaces are the only environments that manage to communicate a sense of truth to our society. Their nature is such that they allow us both social contact and the idea of the “individual isolated in the midst of a crowded environment” (Abalos 2006). We might say that the representative role of public space combines a collective ideal with an individual ideal.

Counterspace and Disenchantment with the Modern City As it is external, both to the concepts of tradition and to the concept of public space of the simulated city, intermediate space introduces the concept of “counterspace” and for the city opens up the perspective of being reinvented precisely in its counterspaces. In the contemporary city, counterspace is in some ways the place of many little things miraculously saved from an inexorable process of simplification in the direction of what is large, which is a disease of the contemporary city. The category of counterspace – observes de Solà- Morales – refers to past time. Just as the introduction of public parks in capital cities in the 19th Century aimed at bringing nature into the city as counterspace, at the moment when the cities of the first industrial revolution were built, as an antidote to the new industrial city, so our post-industrial culture calls for spaces of freedom, of indefinition, of unproductiveness, but this time not linked with the mythical notion of nature but with the experience of memory, of romantic enchantment with the absent past as a critical arm in the face of the banal productivist present. This absence must be saved at all costs; the difference between the “federal bulldozer” of transformation at all costs and sensitive closeness to these places of memory and ambiguity

Counterspace and Disenchantment with the Modern City 139

must be emphasised. If the notion of “mutation” is the fittest for understanding urban transformation phenomena, the notion of terrain vague constitutes practically its partner in counterpoint, its counterspace, the other side of the metropolitan coin. Only equal attention to both the values of innovation and the values of the memory of the absence will be capable of keeping faith alive in a complex, plural urban life (de SolàMorales 1995). The theme of counterspace is nowadays connected with disenchantment with the modern city, which characterises a critical tradition always in search of alternative spaces outside or within the city, real and acceptable compared with the daily reality of aggressive, anonymous, ugly metropolises. A disenchantment inherent in the urban pessimism, which characterises the tradition of city disciplines and considers the city of the present a foretaste of a better life.25 But the concept of counterspace is also related to the appearance of the notions of “environment” as a concept that transcends the isolated value of single buildings: urban environment, urban surroundings, notions coming from the landscape tradition in which formal values cannot be separated from evocative, significant and historic ones. An interest is growing out of these conditions, a passion for urban situations like the terrains vagues: vague in the sense of vacant, empty, free of unproductive activities, often wasteland; vague in the sense of unclear, undefined, vague, without specific limits, without an urgent future. Our cities are rich in these territories. Policies try to integrate them into the efficient, syncopated, busy, effective city, but sensitive people react to this type of disenchanted policy. For the terrains vagues are the places where the present and past meet, the best places of identity, the only uncontaminated ground to exercise individual or small-group freedom (de Solà-Morales 1995). They are for the city what Gilles Clément calls Third landscape.26 “In the farthest and sometimes poorest countries the first thing that shows itself to you is the last building: it is a conquest. In a country like France, when a town council has areas that have been abandoned, the mayor is alarmed: he is ashamed. These two behaviours go in the same direction. A withdrawal in the visible power of man is considered a serious defeat.” (Clément 1994). To observe the residual waste, its functioning. To observe behaviours that are carried out in these places, the beings who find citizenship there. In the glance that rests on the Third landscape, namely on the other side of the organised world, there are cues for relevant, original and subtly subversive criticism against some planning techniques (De Pieri 2005). Counterspaces are therefore the places for the contemporary city project. They are the places where the uncertain city lives (Agier 1999a), where

140 Reinventing the City

one can act, where one can be self-directed, not hetero-directed by mass organisation. They are the places of wonder, the same type of wonder that is established between a man and a woman and that Wenders (The Sky above Berlin) considers inherent in reproduction, and that for the city is an introduction to the project and to regeneration. The theme of wonder as a feature inherent in the project is recalled by Carlo Migliaccio in his essay devoted to the relationship between music and utopia in Bloch (Migliaccio 1996). In a letter to Lukács, Bloch refers to listening to Mahler’s Lied von der Erde and Wagner’s Tristan with words that indicate the idea of listening to music as a subjective experience, a journey towards the centre of ourselves: “It sings endlessly in me”. This receptive centre of subjectivity and musical experience is characterised for Bloch as something latent or lacking, and this ties up with the philosophical reflections on the moment lived and on wonder. For the moment is an impalpable beat that precludes any vital experience: it cannot be seized except at the moment in which it is not, when it has already passed and when it has yet to come. Inserted, therefore, in a dimension of obscurity and distance from itself and from the world, subjectivity has simultaneously the capacity to seize in the “cracks” of its own inauthenticity – or its own collocation in an objective, spatialised time – the code of a potential aperture to the new, to the “not-yet” contained in every moment, which before becoming explicit appears as a glow, as something unheard, object thus of marvel and wonder. It is music which, more than any other art, enables the expression of this “inexpressible” and the respective utopian tension, because it is for Bloch the art most suited to subjective restlessness and sentiments of hope (Bloch 1986; Boella 1986). The German philosopher concentrates his attention on western music and a historic span going from the origins of counterpoint to atonality. The fulchrum of this path is undoubtedly the figure of Beethoven, the musician who for Bloch embodies more than others dissatisfaction with the present and anxiety for the new. A century later, Gustav Mahler represented the same utopian needs (Migliaccio 1996). The trajectory of urban utopias was interrupted when urban strategy became business strategy. The break in this trajectory marked the impossibility for the city to be planned any more; for this an externity needed to be sought with regard to the market, and counterspace to be designed in respect of the spaces of the “consumercity” (Glaeser et al. 2001). In this sense counterspaces are the places of the “fragile”, but also creative places par excellence, places where artists can take the city by the hand and open up new urban visions, as we have seen with Maria Lai and Christo, places where awareness is grasped of the environmental infancy of the city. In the city’s counterspaces, which are external to

Counterspace and Disenchantment with the Modern City 141

the “market city” it is possible to open up new perspectives for the city, perspectives that take the city as a collective, self-organised fact, where the city finds the reasons and strength to assert the solidity of its “structural organisation” (Maturana and Varela 1987), and with this the deep meanings of the landscape inherited. The purpose of the project for space is to reveal in the places of the city these meanings that “we drag along with us and which drag us along with them” (Piccardo 2001). Where these meanings are revealed, there contemporary public space is manifest, which allows each citizen to discover a sense of purpose or belonging, but also makes each citizen “a whole”, an individual in a crowded space, a recognition similar to what came about, as we seen, in the Greek theatre, and which took place not so much through the predictable actions of the actors, but by the mediation of the chorus (Pérez-Gómez 1996a), the intermediate space, which – as we have remarked in the previous pages – is an innate feature of contemporary public space. For this, every gesture, even the smallest, has the task of revealing the meanings of this common world. Small gestures, present for example in the works of the landscaper Georges Descombes (Léveillé and Descombes 1991; Wrede and Adams 1991; Corner 1999; Nicolin and Repishti 2003), such as in the park of Lancy, on the outskirts of Geneva, where on muddled, degraded territory a few marginal elements have recreated a microgeography of elements equivalent to pre-existing ones and have given origin to a specific place. The conceptual themes of the relationship between architecture and landscape and the “walk” to explore, recurrent in the work of Descombes, are also reflected in the Voie Suisse, a physical and conceptual park-walk which winds for 35 kilometres around the lake of Uri, marked by elements and presences that reinforce the exploration and understanding of natural places, otherwise hidden. Artists also have the capacity to facilitate the passage from enigmas, myths and legends to life lived which may save the city. But there are also large gestures like that carried out by a large city like Barcelona which updated its urban perspectives in the 90s, integrating the double spatial grid of Cerdà’s ensanche with the dominants of its environmental system, the Collserola, the coastal strip, the Besòs and the Llobregat, the two rivers respectively defining the northern and southern edges of the city. In a certain sense this is a matter of another grid, not geometrical, which, together with the double spatial grid, constitutes the generative structure enabling the city to develop without discomposing. The urban life of Barcelona, which is shifting to the coastal strip, where the city seeks its natural environment by reconstituting the beaches in place of the railway goods park, is proof that the city of places can reveal itself also in the city of flows. The urban landscape project for the coastal

142 Reinventing the City

strip of Barcelona has effectively made the meanings of the environmental system of the city emerge and has prepared the citizens to adapt, in an environmental sense, their behaviour. And it has shown them a possible way of contributing to public awareness and the construction of contemporary public space revealing the “city of places” in the “city of flows”. This type of behaviour is explained for biological systems by Maturana and Varela’s “theory of autopoietic systems”(Maturana 1988; Varela 1987, 1989; Varela et al. 1991), which surpasses the classical evolutionist paradigm of cognitive processes, revealing promising perspectives for the city project. According to this theory the evolutionary process of a system is the result of evolution between system and environment – therefore between different systems – which depends both on the continuity of the internal organisation of systems and the system-environment balance.27 This entails a radical change of paradigms of cognitive processes, and in particular of those used to analyse the projectual process. According to Tagliagambe, from this point of view, the world ceases to appear as an object, an event, a process in itself. Actually it resembles more a background, a scenario and a field of action for all our experience that, however, cannot be found separate from our structure, our behaviour, our cognition (Tagliagambe 1994). It is the transition of the project towards effective action, towards a relationship with reality that forces us to bring into play and compare our moral values. For this reason Maria Lai’s project emblematically shows how the project has now escaped from its self-referential condition of merely technical instrument to move towards the sphere of ethics and social legitimisation. We are also in this case in the sphere of what we have defined “radical constructivism” (Von Glasersfeld 1992), which proposes that all content of knowledge be considered as a operation of construction. This means that we cannot pre-establish a route, an algorithm, in our mind and then develop it in practice, like in the algorithmic conception of the project, but we build the project while we are developing it. Only in this way is the construction of new meanings possible, detaching elements conveying meanings from the referents to which they are usually tied, and reintroducing them in a weave of combinations, governed by a set of conventional rules. It is, in effect, the characteristic of combinatorial meaning that it leads to the “opening up” of systems of linguistic combination and allows the user “productivity” or “novelty of expression…” (Luhmann 1990). We have examined in previous pages the illustration of this concept by Bruner who analyses the “combinatorial” function of the metaphor in passing from the painting of Cimabue to that of Giotto, which entails a gradual process of

Counterspace and Disenchantment with the Modern City 143

humanisation of the figure of Christ. We have also argued how the combinatory effort to connect experiences concerns not only the creation but also the understanding of the work, which links, namely, construction and knowledge (Bruner 1975), in the sense that we cannot understand the world exclusively by representing it, but we need to design it (Tagliagambe 1994). The project for the city has in some ways the same modalities, in that it is configured as a form of action which explores the possible alternatives departing from reality, combining the traces of the tale that has led to the current situation. The city seems to include the categories and modalities that preside over urban formation like a thesaurus, enclosing in a certain sense the genetic secret of its urban autopoiesis. According to the “theory of autopoietic systems”, the fundamental components of the evolution of a system reside in its “operational closure” and in its “self-referential aperture”. The latter component, in particular, has a more marked “external” dimension; in a certain sense externity is an intrinsic feature of autopoiesis. In the case of the project for the city – we might say – externity is an intrinsic feature of the regeneration project. This is why we are seeking urban situations that will possess this feature or into which this feature may be introduced. Calvino’s Le città invisibili may help us to grasp the problem we are dealing with in its basic meaning. “Speaking of Despina, a city that can be reached in two ways, by ship or by camel, and which looks different depending on whether you arrive by land or by sea, our author emphasises that “each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and thus the camel-rider and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts” (Calvino 1972). We may call “self-referential aperture” this process of identity that derives indeed from this opposition in respect of the environment and from the perception of the difference between one’s own internal organisation and that of the context of reference. What the theory of autopoietic systems and the concept of self-organisation aim at highlighting is that any agent seeking to know his own world, being always and completely immersed in the latter, can never put himself outside it, to understand and verify how its contents agree with the representations he creates of them. His action aims rather at “cutting out” or “placing in front” – of a multiple, heterogeneous background, which lends itself to different possibilities of “reading” – the relevant contexts and problems to which to refer at any moment in his existence: and these contexts and problems are never “given”, they are not “grasped” or “received” like something that is pre-packed, but are the result of a set of “knowledges” and “skills” that shape the world, categorise it, make details emerge from it, on each occasion applicable and relevant (Maciocco and

144 Reinventing the City

Tagliagambe 1998). Just as “each city receives its form from the desert it opposes”, each city receives from its counterspaces the possibilities of its project. To give a further explanation of the concept of counterspace and its project potential from outside the contemporary city, it might be useful to refer to the “Metropolis of Holland”, the projectual idea of Luigi Snozzi, the urbanist architect from Ticino who has dealt with an extremely complicated theme raising much controversy, which, nevertheless, beyond its intrinsic utopian nature, has a precise instructive value indeed with respect to the concept of counterspace, a value that is tied in some ways to the “strength of character” with which Snozzi defended his project in the face of the scepticism of those who commissioned it (Maciocco 2003). The “strength of character”, in the complex sense that Hillman attributes to this expression, also represents the capacity for expressing thought in the form of images, so that by listening we can hear, register and see the images in our mind. We will therefore begin to see again what we saw before abstractions took over our mind, and language will go back to corresponding to the world (Hillman 2000): this is the form of thought belonging to the project, where the act of thinking consists of depicting images within oneself and working intimately on them. This form of thought is the matrix of the project as interaction in that it urges interlocutors to enrich the images expressed by their own images, a process which, according to the anthropologist Keith Basso, is commonly compared with the process of adding stones to complete a wall or placing bricks on the foundations of a house (Basso 1996). This means that to start interaction images are needed that are equipped with “strength of character”, “characterised images that are in a certain sense a part of the project as a form of thought and action. A form that produces interaction which, in turn, produces knowledge: understood in this sense, the project is not resolutive, but cognitive, in that it is interactive knowledge that favours collective construction of the city. Projectual knowledge is therefore a primary form of knowledge for urban action. It is the form of knowledge that is intrinsic in Luigi Snozzi’s disciplinary position, whose criticism of projects “rich in analyses but poor in project”,28 as well as outlining a formulation radically distant from the supremacy of analytical knowledge, affects the problem of mobilisation of knowledge for urban action and, more in general, of which knowledge for action (Crosta 1998). The different forms of knowledge – expert knowledge, that derived from experience, that produced by action – can turn out to be combined in various ways and all have a value for action, but interactive knowledge is above all the knowledge for action, in that it is produced within the action itself for which it is used, due to the very fact that it is produced while acting. It is therefore innately strategic, in that it

Counterspace and Disenchantment with the Modern City 145

can be adapted to the interactive context belonging to the project for the city (Crosta 1998). As an interactive context the project needs a communicable form of thought, it needs to arouse the imagination. This is a form of action which takes place in the shape of images that links up with common sense. Unlike abstract definitions, which solidify language, conversations characterised by clear images, like the “Metro Polis” proposed by Snozzi, resemble not clear, enclosed objects, but rather “projects to be completed” (Basso 1996), an invitation to exercise the imagination, an encouragement to continue interaction open to common sense meanings, outside the institutionalised procedures which pre-establish sense, losing the chance of revealing the identity of things (Crosta 1998). The architect from Ticino has a particular capacity for getting in touch with common sense, almost a radio link activated through the project without pursuing winding analytical paths in search of preliminary participation in the project, which, precisely because it is preliminary, is not incorporated and activated in projectual action. Since without projectual interaction, common sense meanings and the relations and interactions belonging to a perspective for collective action as a part of identity are lost, a perspective that is particularly important in Dutch spatial experience, which moves from the scenario of a group of cities towards the new horizon of the Delta Metropolis. In this way we may interpret the project as a form-process that is at the bottom of Luigi Snozzi’s action, and which has a particularly significant example in the experience still underway of the small residential centre at Monte Carasso in Ticino Canton. For the reasons explained up to now, the same concept – though in an inaugural form – may be rediscovered in the Dutch Delta Metropolis project, which is causing bewilderment because of the elementary circular geometry of Dutch metropolitan space, which would not seem adequate to represent the complexity of processes and the unpredictability of the contemporary urban world. But the adoption of the correspondence between the complexity of the processes of city formation and spatial geometries, between urban dynamics and the “fluid” images that have characterised many recent urban projects or, as they are called, “spatial regulatory plans” (Burdett 2002), is a reflective sliding, an “acknowledgement” of the complexity perceived, which is not necessarily legitimised. It is not legitimate to associate with the geometric definition of urban design the capacity of resisting the unpredictability of urban and territorial dynamics: clear patterns like Cerdà’s Barcelona or Wagner’s Vienna and geometrically undefined patterns, like the surgical cuts performed by Hausmann in Paris, have similarly affected urban

146 Reinventing the City

matters of capital cities which faced the spatial impacts of the first industrial revolution without becoming discomposed (Choay 1994a). The background figure of the Delta Metropolis is the “global cityregion”, an important category of the new conceptual architecture of the urban universe (Sassen 1991, 1994b), designed by Saskia Sassen. A scenario emerges, the future phases of which will have the global cities and global city-regions as a core element of the organising structure of a global economy. These constructs show significant differences in respect of scale and competitiveness, in the sense that the global city-regions are a concept fit for demands on nature and specificity of urbanisation models. For they are strongly characterised basic infrastructures, they move towards the widespread needs of the middle class and offer both specialised and nonspecialised employment. The global cities host strategic components of the global economy, like finance and specialised services, they have principally to do with matters of power, there is a disproportionate concentration both of jobs with a very high income and those with a very low one. There are important matters of inequality between highly stocked city spaces and spaces that are severely underprivileged. The global cityregion tends more to fairness, but must be perceived by the inhabitants as a city-region. Snozzi’s proposal is an image that speaks of a city-region tending towards spatial equity, perceptible as such by the inhabitants with the cities arranged in a circle with equal starting conditions and with the metropolitan infrastructure of mobility that indicates urban quality as a phenomenon of the field and not just an attribute of the central places. It is an urban region that has character, language once again corresponds to the world and may start off a process of interaction for collective construction of a territorial city endowed with identity: almost a conversation by images, open and not closed, but unlike the abstract conversations of analytical knowledge, a conversation that expresses the need of the project and in this sense starts it off. The urban projects of the architect from Ticino have a processual character that is based on a structural image. For it is the structure of Monte Carasso that presides over urban evolution and grants sense to the elements and interventions, but also in the Dutch proposal the total structure of the Delta Metropolis is first singled out, and subsequently the sense of the elements that legitimise it. This approach which is inverted compared with the linear route centred on analytical knowledge is an acquired outcome of recent studies on the construction of knowledge for action, in the sense that when faced with any space the first problem to be posed is to single out the structural organisation and subsequently the sense of the elements that compose it. In particular the theme is explored in cognitive science by the studies of Gaetano Kanizsa

Counterspace and Disenchantment with the Modern City 147

(Kanizsa 1980), who, with the Gestaltists lays claim to the autonomous character of visual perception and the modalities of visual organisation with respect to thought processes. To perceive is always to design: the project is the constituent element of visual perception: perception without designing does not exist. In the first place, in the etymological sense: to design is always to project oneself outside, to project one’s own image outside, and then to design also means to select departing from a point of view (Bertoz 1998). This means that at the base of the physiology of action and perception there is a project, meant exactly in the sense in which we had begun to define it, namely as a capacity to select aims and objectives and reconstruct the situation departing from these: it is here that we find the determinant value of what we have called “structural organisation”. What we see is determined by how “we organise” the shape: perception is fundamentally signal organisation, not pure reception. We see the structure and interpret the elements on the basis of the structure we have activated. What guides our capacity to organise in one way rather than another is the project (Bertoz 1998). Thus it is the project that determines organisation and it is organisation that acts as the principle of selection and weeding-out of complexity. Perception is not, therefore, a representation of the world, a reproduction of its features, but an action simulated and projected on the world. Snozzi’s impatience with the preliminary forms of analytical knowledge and his preference for the modalities of structural perception characterise – though in a very different way – the events of Monte Carasso and Metro Polis. If, for example, we borrow from linguistics the concepts of denotation and connotation (Manieri Elia 2006) which define respectively the essential apparatuses and external ones of an object, we can see how Snozzi’s position has always been much more attentive to the denotative apparatuses than to connotative ones, to the deep structures of the city rather than representative apparatuses. The images with which Gabriele Basilico describes the experience of Monte Carasso, where Snozzi’s interventions do not seem to be noticeable in the inhabited parts as they are ingrained in the structure of the small centre, emblematically represent the denotative tension that animates the projectual proposals of the architect from Ticino; a projectual tension that through denotation seeks materiality, reveals hidden stories of the city, stories of men, not only of representations, stories of construction, contributing with fragments of authenticity to a recuperation process of the sense of our present connected with the image and representation. But this structural tension is also present in the Dutch proposal, in which Snozzi brings together and implements the three phases of metropolitan

148 Reinventing the City

development of the European city. The first phase is characterised by generative structures tied to spatial geometry. The circle of Metro Polis can in a certain sense be associated with the inaugural spatial images of the capital cities of the first industrial revolution, like Cerdà’s double grid in Barcelona and the radiocentric pattern of Vienna. The second phase is characterised by the irruption of the environmental dimension into the city project. Generative structures extend to the system of “environmental dominants” (Maciocco 1995a), spatial geometries are integrated by spatial places and concepts belonging to the environmental system. The Barcelona urban experiences of the 80s and 90s, with the tidying role of the coastal strip, in which the search for the natural environment of the city materialised in the new beaches of the Olympic port, are significant of this approach. In a passage from the description of Delta Metropolis, Snozzi faces the theme of the relationship between city and country, fully giving back the plain to the country. Compared with the pre-industrial European city’s belonging to the country (Choay 1994a) – described by Mumford – and vice-versa of the country to the industrial city, the post-industrial city requires biunivocity: the country belongs to the city for processes of urban and regional space organisation, but the city belongs to the country because this represents its unrenounceable environmental platform. Snozzi adopts this mutual belonging forcing the clear distinction between the two entities but also the unseparable relationship of complementarity on which the construction of the urban region is based: the space of the postindustrial metropolis is the “green heart” of the large Dutch plain, which plays the role of urban generator as counterspace of the annular metropolitan figure. The third phase, defined – perhaps boldly – as the “urban turn” (Burdett 2002), adopts a conceptual background which links the formation of the contemporary metropolis with its being set up as network of “dense strategic nodes”. It is one of the new forms of centrality that radically modify historic centralities largely incorporated in the principal cities, in the sense that the new technologies and forms of organisation have altered the terms of spatial correlation of centrality (Sassen 2002). To this new form of centrality based on dense nodes it is possible to make forms of urbanity correspond which, according to Richard Sennett (Sennett 1991), are affected in a decisive way by mixtures of situations with a high formal and functional variety. Urbanity as the outcome of the functional and iconic density of the nodes of a metropolitan network has a sociological explanation which refers to the opposing pair of concepts of accessibility and separation which characterise life in contemporary cities. Concepts that Sennett takes up again, discussing the most significant

Counterspace and Disenchantment with the Modern City 149

metaphors of modern man in the metropolitan condition: Georg Simmel’s “stranger” and Hannah Arendt’s “exile” (Bagnasco 1999). As we have emphasised in the previous pages, in accentuating the range of the separation strategy, Sennett speaks of the “modern fear of exposure” as a reaction of defence and detachment from the dangerous, chaotic, conflictive, contemporary metropolis. This fear is reflected in the way the city has taken shape and is revealed in full show nowadays in the metropolises built marginalising the differences by creating neutralising spaces that remove social contact (Bagnasco 1999). The remedy is to be found, according to Sennett, also in a different way of designing cities, which will exclude the restriction of differences, indeed will favour a blending, even radical, of them, an “urban turn” requiring innovation in form and language, formal and functional variety, to reflect the complexity of contemporary life. In the Dutch project the urban intersections of metropolitan infrastructure form dense nodes with a high iconic and functional variety, which include the strong social complexity connected with interregional migrations. Nodes with an identity role, founded on recognisability, but averse to unrealistically ambitious symbolic rhetorics. Snozzi’s conception of the project represents his anarchic soul, his impatience with procedures, his innate preference for practices. In spite of the definition of spatial outlines, his projectual approach is open to non-institutionalised practices. The distinction between analysis and project tends to disappear, whereas knowledge of reality has in the project the form of thought and action that feeds conscious interpretation of the complexity of the phenomena and actors involved, in a continuous alternation of the subject’s position with respect to reality. The ethical outlines of action come to mind of the first Regional Planners, who took the region as a reference unit for the project of an urbanity that was no longer an exclusive attribute of a central place. They nurtured their concrete utopias on forms endowed with “strength of character”, like Mumford’s “Fourth Migration” for the plan of great New York, forms that consider a territory active, as a group of different subjects and viewpoints; but also forms like Metro Polis which tend to sway the inhabitants towards discussing the project of their future, to reveal their spatial images, expectations, desires, aspirations on the prospects of their spatial experience, which cannot be exclusively confined in vitro to institutionalised procedures. In the concrete utopia of the construction of this regional city there is a Geddesian background which is discovered in the strategy of the glance: the glance from above from a small aeroplane and the wandering glance from a car over Dutch territory. It is in a certain sense the metaphor of a circular relationship between the planner and the

150 Reinventing the City

citizen (Ferraro 1998). Whereas the writing of the planner is the tale and description, the reading on the part of the citizen invites the citizen himself to walk observing in the tracks of the planner. Like in Monte Carasso, Snozzi’s projects open up with the planner’s interpretative look and conclude with the active look of the citizen.

The “Void” and the City Project Through Calvino’s reflections on Despina, the “city that receives its form from the desert it opposes”, we can single out a first family of urban situations with the character of externity, in which the “self-referential aperture” marks the possibilities of regeneration of the city. Despina’s “desert” has in this case the meaning that the “void” occupies in the city project. In Wenders’ films the “voids” of the contemporary city have a crucial role, they enable the inhabitants to see little to be able to create an image of the city for themselves. The film director explains this concept, referring to it in connection with the film The Sky above Berlin: Berlin has many empty surfaces. Houses can be seen with completely empty walls because the house next door was not rebuilt after the bombing. The disheartening side walls of these blocks are called fire-breaks and do not exist anywhere else. They are like wounds, and I like the city for its wounds, which tell me its story much better than any book or document. During the filming of The Sky above Berlin , I realised that I was always looking for these empty surfaces, this no-man’s-land, because I had the impression that this city could be represented much better by the empty zones than by the occupied ones. When there is too much to see, when an image is too full or when there are too many images, you do not see anything any more. From too much you very quickly pass to nothing, as you certainly know. And you also know another effect: when an image is bare, poor, it can prove so expressive as to entirely satisfy the observer, and thus we pass from emptiness to fullness. A cineaste is continuously grappling with these problems in preparing every shot and must take care not to leave in the picture what he intends to capture and show to the public, because everything that needs to be shown, and that the image must contain, is explained in what is left out. (Wenders 1992).

It is in some ways what happens to cities, which are “so full of every kind of thing that they have cancelled out the essential, namely they are empty. The desert, on the other hand, is so empty that it is overflowing with the essential.” (Wenders 1992). Externity is a crucial feature of the void, which can be thought of as a conceptual space that enables the city to be explained and designed. From this angle the theme of the void does not necessarily refer to a dimension separate from the urban space, but marks a willingness towards the project, towards exploration of the interwoven relations described by the topology

The “Void” and the City Project 151

that presides over the history of the settlement. A call for reflection on the sense of man’s home, as a search for the primary elements of its construction, a search for the urban essential, to be found also in contexts of visual exaltation that tend to “normalise” all points of view. This capacity to reflect on the essential in these contexts is found emblematically in the Sardinian artist Costantino Nivola. A sculptor known in the United States, where he had systematically collaborated with Le Corbusier and had actively frequented the world of American architecture, Nivola continued to look, on American soil, for “landscapes at the lowest level of chromatic parsimony” (Nivola 1993, p. 85), taking with him a specific point of view rooted in his origins: the desire to listen to silence, to orient the glance to grasp from the great landscape spaces of the island the essence and sense of his path of research. Thinking of Nivola, we recall his capacity to maintain a point of view rooted in his origins when he describes the first day of sketches in New York “starting from the ground – the first level”, which makes him feel inadequate for the purpose due to the visual exaltation produced by Eighth Avenue: “Too much to see, too much to choose from” (Nivola 1993), or when he portrays winter in the Vermont countryside, where “the snow, the trees without leaves, … reduce landscape polychromy to the lowest level of chromatic parsimony”, where it is possible to draw trees “with great attention and humility” (Nivola 1993). In these words there is an attitude belonging to an interpretation of the landscape of Sardinia, that is almost familiar. See a little to try to understand a lot, to gather the primary, founding elements of human settlement (Maciocco 1995b). As Wenders says in Berlin, it is precisely the empty spaces that enable men to create themselves an image of the city. Not just because they allow us to embrace entire areas in our glance (sometimes as far as the horizon, a thing in itself that is a pleasure in a city), but because through these gaps time can be seen which, in general terms, is the element that spells out history (Wenders 1992). The void enables things to be seen that have remained “out” of the space we are in, but that may be just as important for the story being told, like the Tago, more than the city, is the witness of Lisbon life, like the sand of Berlin – in the “emptiest square of the city”, like the cemetery of Tokyoga:29 emptiness, rest, peace. For this we need to know how to describe empty space, as it means describing peace, from today on we need to know how to sing an “epos of peace” (The Sky above Berlin). As Wenders insists, sometimes you have to leave cities, observe them from afar to understand their merits. The desert offers the best detachment for observing urban life. Like the American and Australian deserts, where every so often you bump into some remains of civilisation: a house, a street in ruins, an

152 Reinventing the City

abandoned railway line, even an abandoned petrol station or motel. In a certain sense these are opposite experiences from those we have in the city when we go into an open space. A no-man’s-land inside a metropolis has, as a prerogative, the presence of the urban landscape all around, and it shows us it in a different perspective, in another light. While the appearance of the remains of civilisation in the desert makes the landscape all the more empty (Wenders 1992). In the void there is time, history, memory, the essential. The contemporary dilation of the concept of city in the territory is the search for the void to find history, the essence, to discover a plot, a story to link up with other stories, discover relations between stories to discover the relations between men, aiming each action at opening the eyes, the senses and the mind. The void is important material for the project for the city also at the level of controllability of urban shape, a concept effectively emphasised by Koolhaas during the competition for planning the Melun-Séart ville nouvelle. Koolhaas said the Melun-Séart site is too beautiful for it to be possible to imagine a new city there with innocence and impunity. The breadth of the landscape, the beauty of the forests and woods, the serenity of the farms, have a presence that is intimidating, initially hostile to any idea of development. A second form of innocence would consist of believing, at this end of the century, that urban development and the builtup area can be designed and then controlled in a reasonable manner. The built-up, the fullness is now uncontrollable. The same cannot be said of the void; it is perhaps the last subject where certainties are still plausible (Koolhaas 1994). And, as he goes on to describe the competition project, Koolhaas shows how these concepts can be applied: The essential thing in this project is a system of empty spaces - of bands - inscribed on the land like a Chinese ideogram. We propose that the maximum energy indispensable for the Melun-Sénart development be designated for maintaining and protecting these empty spaces. Some of them are partly areas of protection of the existing landscape, localised so as to unite maximum beauty and fragments of history. Other empty spaces accompany the tracks of fast roads making them arterial urban elements. Yet others have programmatic justification: they are needed to distribute the major components of the programme on the site. Our thesis is that if this system of bands is fixed, the qualities of beauty, serenity, of access and urban facilities pursued for the city of Melun-Sénart will be guaranteed, whoever the architects in the future be. (Koolhaas 1994).

And the built-up area? What will happen to the blocks in this model city? In this proposal the bands define an archipelago of residual blocks, “inter-bands”, different in size, form, position and relations with the bands. Each of these blocks may be developed in almost total independence. They

The “Void” and the City Project 153

will be able to create an anthology of competition projects. The “archipelago” model enables their extreme individuality in the end to strengthen coherence of the system. Each island will be designed with great care, because this proposal does not mean that islands are neglected but that they are given great liberty of conception depending on their scale, giving them the chance to concentrate on their installations and their relationships with the bands and the city (Koolhaas 1994). The urban plan for Olbia (Clemente and Maciocco 1990) was already in 1989 on the same conceptual plane, which adopts the void as a guiding category for the city project; this city port of north-east Sardinia has an stop-over port and airport of national importance, a highly dynamic urban propeller with great translocal and transregional effects induced by its function as a port-of-call and the dynamics of the tourist settlements of the north-eastern coastal strip, the Costa Smeralda. But it is also a contradictory city with many problems, in search of a coherent form. To the “empty” spaces, free from buildings, correspond in this case great environmental signs of the territory of the city, which have guided settlement principles and still confirm their relevance as permanent reference marks of coherent organisation of urban space, like for example: the internal gulf, the ancient fluvial valley and the site of an environmental area that extends to the River Padrogiano basin; the “witness reliefs”, characteristic of the levels of geological surfaces that describe the natural history of the entire environmental region of Gallura; the arc of the external gulf stretched at each end to Capo Figari in the north and Tavolara in the south, which marks Olbia’s specificity and its environmental centrality; the arched range of hills of the plain, whose uniting surfaces, the pediments and the glacis, show a division of meanings of the first settlements historically stratified in the area. The plan deals with space organisation by trying to create continuity between the environmental signs that become the elements of orientation and identification of the continuous city. A system of parks underlines the free spaces between the settlement arteries linking the internal gulf with the hilly arch in the urban field of the plain, while on the external territory the system of natural and historic signs recalls space organisation to a progressive tidying-up of the casual and fragmentary forms of coastal urbanisation. At the same time the residual spaces of the continuous city, the “voids” available in zones largely obsolete, arranged along the urban stretch of the coast, along the canals and their estuary tract, internally or near the urban perimeter, are taken as authentic lines of strength of the urban form (Maciocco 1995a). In a certain sense Koolhaas’ reflections confirm the concept, which Endell expresses in his book entitled Die Schönheit der grossen Stadt,

154 Reinventing the City

when he maintains that for a project for the city two possibilities exist: either to modify the style of our cities, which would be a long-term project, or to compensate for each inadequacy with other pleasures, discover the beauties we have not yet discovered,30 for example in the empty urban spaces, in the free spaces of the city territory, promoting new fruition of what we already possess. This discovery of the “beautiful things we have not yet discovered” was one of Jean Nouvel’s guiding ideas for “Berlin Morgen”, the 1991 consultation on the Berlin of tomorrow (Nouvel 1994). With the purpose of translating the downfall of a situation long considered fatal, to express the will that such horror never again be reproduced, and to ward off the existence of “no-man’s-land sous mirador”, Nouvel proposed the creation of The Meeting Line along this wound, a line crossed by all the roads that had long been closed and by others still, “a snake of green, authentic green equipped with little optimistic, coloured lights, with the image of the overlapping in relief of a sweater and a tidying thread […]”. On Friedrichstraβe it is clearly not a matter of painstakingly filling in the free spaces obtained. “It is more useful to use and abuse all abnormalities and surprises that characterise the place” (Nouvel 1994). The abnormalities include: the free land on one side and the other, the beginnings of squares more residual than intentional, the blind, rather sad walls … The surprises include: the perspectives at the bottom of the transversal roads and the appearance between two buildings of a communications tower or a dome … Nouvel’s programme has, as one of its key-points, to make public all free land on one side and the other of the road and tidy it up in various ways so that the surface, the flat area is strongly expressed. The attention to free spaces, the placing of the voids of the city at the centre of the project for the city, expresses renewed interest for differences, for the differential quality of the territory that the free spaces emblematically represent with respect to the urban mass. This is a concept that recurs in some of Wenders’ interesting reflections. He maintains cities can open eyes, as happens in films, or close them. They can devour or nurture imagination. Tokyo, in contrast with what many maintain, is in my opinion an open city; it offers something, does not only steal. It has a strong tendency to bewilder and assail its citizens. But strangely, around each corner you can discover a green space; from the thundering jungle we move to calm, gentle, pacific zones. In Wenders opinion, Tokyo is a system of islands. Obviously these islands need to be conserved, and are gradually disappearing. All that is small disappears. In our times only what is large survives. The small, simple things disappear,

… and the City was Born of Chaos: Designing the City at its Edges 155

like small, simple images, or small, simple films. In the film industry, the disappearance of everything that is small and simple is a sad process and has us today as witnesses. For cities this loss is perhaps more evident and probably even more serious (Wenders 1992).

… and the City was Born of Chaos: Designing the City at its Edges …and the City was Born of Chaos. In this essay by Pedro Azara (Azara 2000), the city is seen as a spiritual creation, a place of conservation of life in the midst of barbarity, and thus, a place of “education” of mankind (Tjallingii 2000). At the edge of Azara’s city there is chaos, but it is indeed from here that it is possible to see the city. The edge is in this sense another form of counterspace. The importance that edge situations are taking on in the contemporary city is motivated by the fact that future urbanity cannot be constructed by simplifying processes of confinement or removal of edge areas from our urban conscience, and of the separation of situations that do not come under the canons of this “urban rationality”. As Borges writes, “it only needs one man to be irrational for others to be so, and for the universe to be so” (Borges 1974), in the sense that no-one can think of abandoning others to themselves, without abandoning himself. Due to its inherent ambiguity, “edge” is a word that lends itself to a number of interpretations, different points of view, different arguments. But at the edge it is possible to recognise above all externity, the detachment of all that can be considered refuse by the “normality” of the urban machine, which does not attribute dignity to marginality. This happens because the city is “all that is of interest” in its pervasiveness. In the contemporary city there is no longer an inside and an outside. Even urban science fiction literature has been recording this perception of space for some time. If sociological science fiction of the 40s–50s was characterised by the inside–outside spatial dichotomy, from the 80s onwards this distinction no longer appeared to work. In metropolitan postcivilisation the experience of “outside” represented by the non-urban, by nature, seems simply to disappear to leave room for urban structures which expand and swallow up all that is available of the world. The only physical experience that can be had is the experience of the city, i.e. the limits that compose it internally, the barriers. In the current imagination freedom, deviation from rules will thus no longer be a physical space, but a

156 Reinventing the City

synthetic space: virtual reality: “There’s no place there, they said to children, when cyberspace was explained.” (Gibson 1988). But, as we have already illustrated, inside the city withdraws, because the glance directed solely at the spaces indicated and tidied up by the media kills the city. This makes us understand that urbanity is not given once and for all and that what we are experiencing today is an archaeology of urbanity, which was dismissed due to the segregation phenomena that characterise our cities. It is the misfortune of the 20th Century which substituted social fragmentation with social segregation, where “settlement” does not coincide with “habitation”, where “organizing” space does not correspond to “inhabiting”, where spaces do not have social significance (Chandhoke 1998; Michelson 1998). In effect, loneliness emerges, of indifference (Chandhoke 1998; Michelson 1998), and of family disorganisation, produced by the move away from cohesion and the social contract in local communities. This is what happens, for example, to the fluctuating population of the mega-cities which results in the absence of identity and the development of a sense of anonymity. This has led to the complete disappearance of the “sense of shame” and the “regard in the eye” (Chandhoke 1998), with which the transient, physically mobile population cements the city’s impersonal nature. The fluctuating population does not take responsibility for the city and the city has even less responsibility toward them, as it now has a lower technological level than that of the citizens. These go into the cities and use their facilities and the city looks at them as good or bad payers or shrewd or gullible consumers. These worries evoke the risks ingrained in resolutive, technological approaches such as problem-solving, in dealing with the difficulties of contemporary cities (Michelson 1998), where problems are reflected and interweave in such a way as to require to a large extent the contents and capacities of penetration of the social sciences (Chandhoke 1998). For there are implications of urban development in creating wastelands (Chandhoke 1998), in that technology is needed and technology creates gaps and voids, which cannot be disguised by landscape architecture operations. A raw metaphor for this attitude was Thomas Hirschhorn’s “United Nation” installation at the Fifth Biennial of Contemporary Art in Lyons, entitled Partage d’exotisme. Hirschhorn built a hill of refuse entitled “United Nations – Miniature 2000”, created like a golf course (place frequented by statesmen in times of the most difficult decisions). In this unusual route greens were represented by war theatres spread around the globe: Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Palestine, Ruanda, Congo, Chechnya, Bosnia, etc. Each of these points was marked by abundant documentation, books

… and the City was Born of Chaos: Designing the City at its Edges 157

and specialist texts hung up, dangling at the disposal of visitors. The entire hill was covered by a number of tanks and white UN helicopters, a constant feature of all conflicts; an invasive presence that it is suspected may in the end have had the effect of exacerbating more than resolving the conflicts.31 Compared with the negative ambiguity evoked by this installation, positive ambiguity may be revealed by an unconventional glance at the city edge spaces which seem to possess the daímon of the city like a sort of internal need. The resulting physical spaces, not planned, therefore edge spaces, are places where creativity, subjectivity, the construction of new moments of communication assert themselves. But also of the search for personal memory and identity. They are the interstitial spaces where it is possible to “see things for the first time”, to fix in the memory images that, like Borges’ Aleph, have already disappeared at the moment in which they are produced. They are the spaces where the act of touching the ground is still thinkable, in contrast with a mobile, fluid cartography of the acceleration of human movements, markets and data, in a city that upsets the sense of space, where dead or isolated urban cells are immediately replaced, where the only identities to survive are money, superstition and a vague memory of spirituality. They are the last barrier to an urban image that is too strong, selfcelebratory, which tries to exorcise by cultural consumption the guilt complexes of a society that has shaped history into an activity of entertainment, an image that gets weaker to then disappear, defenceless, in the face of the sweep of visual flows in the contemporary “realm of the urban”. They therefore call us back to a radical change in the way of thinking of the contemporary urban landscape. As cantor of this natural, human epic that is the city, the landscape becomes something more than a simple backdrop of aesthetic evaluation of natural and human actions. It is itself “a sort of additional figure”, that draws its legitimacy from the story it narrates and through this story “founds a moral principle” (Wenders 1992). If this observation point is adopted, the rejected lands, the wastelands, the edge lands, make us recognise and appreciate loss. In his comment on Canto IV of the Inferno, in the Prologue to the Dante Essays, Borges notes that Dante learns from Virgil’s words that he will never go to heaven; he immediately calls him master and lord, both to demonstrate that the confession does not diminish Virgil’s worth, and because having discovered he is lost, he loves him even more (Borges 1974). The edge spaces belong in a certain sense to the limbo of our imagination, or rather we have created a place in our imagination for them, which

158 Reinventing the City

resembles a limbo. The notions of a limbo of the fathers and a limbo for the souls of children who died without being baptized belong to common theology. To host the virtuous pagans in that place was an invention of Dante’s. Dante could not, against the faith, save his heroes, he thought of them in a negative Inferno, deprived of the sight and possession of God in heaven and took pity on their destiny (Borges 1974). It is difficult, unusually arduous, to judge the glory or perdition of entire territories, desolate or lost, without being able to feel that we, ultimately, are justice. Pietas for these territories, as Dante had for pagans, represents respect for detachment, a concept that cannot be dimmed because it is a problem of the western mind and its model of development. Radically adopting this perspective, Lee Morrissey (Morrissey 2000) denies the concept of rejected, desolate, marginal space, attributing to it the sense of a mental construct, the consequence of modernity, of its unfair distortions tending to constitute antinomies between precious places and places that are losing, their value cancelled by the processes of globalisation that generate confusion, the “speed of liberation” from the body, from one’s own physicality (Pittaluga 2000). Snatched from the life and death of the city, edge areas are destined to limbo in the urban realm, too, but due to this they may constitute signs from which to depart to construct a perspective of urbanity. The cooperative task might require efforts that men find particularly difficult: collective self-discipline in a common effort (Caldwell 1990). In this picture interventions of urban transformation are not effective, which try to interpolate edge areas in the new economic topology, metabolising them and crystallising them in a virtuous cycle in which production is only apparently nurtured by retrieval and recycling. This interpolation, more mental than real, takes human thought away from the prospects of an urban life that may instead be oriented to favour a new ecology of the mind (Guattari 1982). Being at the edge of the contemporary city, selected by a sick urban machine, these contemporary situations seem like “stem cells”, precursors of new associations between urbs and civitas, which cannot take shape, but may be born of a project animated by public awareness (Décamps 2000). The edge does not have a scale, or rather cannot be confined within our concepts of scalarity. Scale divides our knowledge of the world into different disciplines and professions more decisively than any other organising principle, but often more for pragmatic reasons than profoundly theoretical ones (Batty 1999b). The edge attitude – from the small, the lesser, the undefinable scale – produces a journey towards possible worlds, where reality already given combines with its potential, aims at its second order, expresses its power – in a

… and the City was Born of Chaos: Designing the City at its Edges 159

mathematical sense, as Michael Batty (Batty 1999a) emphasises – where the usual models have expired, like the game of polarities – city/country, internal/external, etc. – which continues to freeze spatial relations, where new horizons of meaning are constructed. The well-known experience of the construction of a post-industrial landscape for IBA Emscher Park may be interpreted in this perspective (Gualini 2000), the most important result of which was to have triggered – by sense-making processes and institutional innovation – new images for a possible territory, where the possibilities seemed to have been exhausted, both in the subjects bringing common knowledge and in the institutional ones. In the same way as the retrieval of edge spaces as decayed suburbs, designed by illegal building practice, should be considered – also through legal interpretation (Zoppi 2000) – in the same direction of new sense being granted to desolate situations. The categories of city/country, urban/extraurban, nature/history, internal/ external and inclusion/exclusion can be found in the project to create an “edge ecology” (Tjallingii 2000), an ecology of urban life referring back to its deepest nature, to an epos of peace. A conception of project, far from the problem-solving paradigms where the different problems of the quality of space intertwine, so as to involve the contents and analytical capacities of the social sciences in a reciprocal relationship, with the objective of linking space, cities to everyday life, today characterised by new ways. To design at the edge is, in this sense, to take on an external attitude to designing the city, so as to construct its “becoming”, the projection in the mind of the inhabitants, not yet occupied by the “realm of the urban” (Choay 1994a). At the edge – which is therefore adopted as a metaphor for the city’s “becoming” – there are situations of exclusion with respect to the city project, nevertheless extremely fertile, like themes of public participation in the construction of urban spaces beginning with children, a category usually excluded from these processes, which might highlight the maps of fear and safety and construct a knowledge of edge spaces that is not banal and is, however, shared in its entirety by the collectivity and projected towards the future of those who will inhabit the territory (Speak 2000). “Care” – a word coming from a marginal culture as is the female one – of the territory by local communities should be considered in the same way (Poli 2000). At the edge the space of institutional innovation is developed, introduced by public participation in the choice of plan, in the developing Countries, showing marginal communities that assert themselves in the global mechanisms of financial channels, promoting a culturally “endogenous” transformation (Allegretti 2000). Like in some cities of the desert, where

160 Reinventing the City

the construction is developed of occasions and headquarters for the collective decision on the transformation of the outskirts (Abouhani 2000). In this direction edge spaces, as spaces of participation, can use the prospects for amplification of social interaction produced by the “increased reality” of public participation platforms in Internet, New Media, Democracies and Planning: Reflections, Examples and Proposals, developed for the Internet network (Cecchini et al. 2000). Edge spaces may favour the development of public awareness, to reestablish the role of public space in the contemporary society, a modality of public space in which we can “move without feeling manipulated”, a whole that we recognise and identify as “our world”, the space par excellence of the polis (Abalos 2004). Sennett has pointed out that spaces come to life again when they are used with aims that are not those for which they were conceived (Sennett 1991), even though it is important nonetheless to not interpret this statement wrongly as a renunciation of the ethics of coherence between uses and aims (Ray 2005). The resulting physical spaces, edge spaces, not planned, appear as places of assertion of creativity, subjectivity, the construction of new moments for communication. Although at this start of millennium programmes are becoming abstract in the sense that they are no longer tied to a place or a city but gravitate appropriately around the site that offers the greater number of interconnections,32 perspectives for urban evolution will in any case be intrinsically bound with the capacity to explore edge territories, too, and to peer through the spatial images of the inhabitants, at their possible worlds, their inclination to construct a new urban condition, at the same time local and supra-local, equally important for the inhabitant of that city as for the inhabitant of another city in the world.

The Territory of the City Nowadays the territory has an intrinsic externity with respect to the city. “The city is of the country” Mumford stated to underline the ancestral bond of the pre-industrial European city’s belonging to the country (Mumford 1938b). But in the contemporary city this ancestral bond has been broken: “the country is of the city”, the territory is of the city for periurbanisation processes, for setting up infrastructures, for the new technological contents required by the world of flows. But the city may also still be projected on the territory because the environmental dimension reminds us that “the city is also of the country”

The Territory of the City 161

(Mumford 1938b), in the sense that “the city is of the territory” due to the environmental interdependence that characterises its relations which are at the base of environmental quality of urban life. The territory accompanies the contemporary city, the city of flows, as if it were one of its counterspaces, to accompany this time the construction of the city of the second industrial revolution, as an antidote to the postindustrial metropolis. If we adopt this perspective, the territory carries out the function of counterspace of the city according to different modalities. One of these is linked with the hypothesis that the territory represents the potential of the low density city compared with the high-density city, a reference not theoretical but factual, because a large part of the world experiences the low density city be it voluntarily, be it for necessity. This potential is expressed by territories external to dense metropolises, the small and medium cities of low-density territories. In this case, too, to throw oneself onto such territories to maximise development of the highdensity metropolis would be a mistake, for to maintain part of this opening might have more sense in terms of capitalisation on future options at a moment in which utility logics are changing with such rapidity. It is in this perspective that the role should be considered, for example, of external territories with respect to the central-European urban nebula. External territories represent in some ways the “city of places” in the face of the “city of flows”, a different city that is wedged within the space of the metropolis, an externity that is an otherness compared to the metropolitan universe of contemporary post-cities. There is, moreover, clear underestimation of the entity of the European “wastelands” and of the energy necessary to recuperate the contaminated lands of the urban nebula.33 This pervasive “urban realm” (Choay 1994a) which has affected the central band of the European area from south to north is characterised in many parts by very low environmental quality of urban life (Maciocco 1999). Since an urban perspective founded on “recuperating” these situations appears impossible, even in the long term, in European urban areas efforts for recuperation are not aimed in all directions but deployed in a bitterly selective way in the most visible areas with modalities useful for the requirements of urban marketing.34 But outside these urban islands adorned with make-up, the city shows, however, its true face deformed by the pollution of places and ideas (La Cecla 1991).35 So for the spaces external to the European urban nebula, for the vast territories of nature and history, promising prospects may then open up for constructing a different urbanity, external to the European metropolis, in some ways its environmental counterpoint, which will mean that one cannot exist without the other.

162 Reinventing the City

We therefore need to promote awareness of the spatial concepts and places of the territory rich in nature and history, as values that we take with us in the process of construction of identity, traces that have relations, precisely, with “what we call future no less than with what we call the past” (Derrida 1998). A basis of shared sense, which remains for us as a patrimony that beyond the ongoing “we drag along with us” and which “comes to drag us along” (Piccardo 2001), a system of sense in relation to which the elements of conflict and change are to be recognised in a notion like the culture of a territory, classically a “place of invariances” (Carmagnola 2001), more tied to the statics than the dynamics of reality. It is the beginning of the construction of a new urban world that entrusts its possible perspectives to the involvement of “territories without a voice”. We are dealing with a process of deep change in aesthetic sensitivity (Shepheard 1997) which will enable us to see the world with different eyes36 and recognise in the differential quality of territories37 the positive ambiguity of marginality, the other territorial subjectivity, which recalls continuous experience of otherness in that it is a constituent of the project for the city (Shepheard 1997). This projectual perspective creates a relationship between different forms and processes that vary in a range between two extremes. On the one hand, the spaces of the metropolitan post-cities, corresponding to forms and processes in intensive urban situations, the management of which possesses the characteristics belonging to a form of action tied to the functioning of a consolidated urban machine, in which redevelopment actions that are still typical of urban marketing requirements and do not open up important perspectives – in the short and medium term – for urban refounding in the environmental sense, attempt to orient themselves in certain key directions – towards low energy consumption mobility, the fight against all forms of pollution, and towards disposal as a project of each form of deterioration to face the theme of refuse and waste in the life of men and city – which only in the long term are able to open up possibilities for the environmental quality of spatial life. Where infrastructure creation is wearily aimed at making – in the medium period – the technological content of cities once again superior to that of individuals, families and businesses. Where single cities have difficulty in dealing with renewed attention with the marking out of the dimensions of community life, with the facilities for people, with civitas, the indivisible link of which with urbs is a constituent of the actual meaning of city. On the other hand, there are the external territories, authentic counterspaces of the European city which correspond to forms and processes in situations rich in nature and history, the management of which has characteristics – of process organisation, reversibility, self-reproducibility,

The Territory of the City 163

openness to possibility – that are part of a form of action placing the environment, being strategic potential of the territory, as the central nucleus of a territorial policy opening up promising perspectives for territories external to the European urban nebula; the creation of infrastructures will be prevalently light, economies are now marginal, but will need to progressively become structural, the generative process is made up of the local capacity to internally redevelop and unfold the energy external to the metropolis in the various components of the economic, cultural and social system, trying out new citizenships, new economies, new cultures. External territories represent the rediscovery of an anchorage to the land and the attachment of the inhabitants to corporality and materiality. One of the crucial objectives of research on globalisation and digitalisation is indeed that of retrieving the fixedness and materiality underlying a large part of the global and the digital, overshadowed by the dominant conviction that all is becoming a flow (Sassen 2006b). Things and materiality are then fundamental for digitalisation and globalisation, just as external territories are important as material counterpoint of global flows and, in this sense, as counterspaces of the metropolitan post-cities. We must nevertheless acknowledge that if the contemporary city can be considered strongly characterised by immateriality, almost as though it were the “covering for a series of flows” (Kaijima and Tsukamoto 2006), the territory, in its materiality, seems subjected to processes of “ruination”. But if we examine this phenomenon in depth, we find this gives the territory itself a “denotative” essentiality, which is not just structural, but also pictorial, typological and symbolic (Manieri Elia 2006), and which establishes a difference compared with the sometimes redundant “connotations” of the city, its “representational” dimensions. In this “denotative essentiality” lies another modality of the territory as counterspace of the city. Mario Manieri Elia reminds us that in its most typical and obvious version – if not most usual, at least in the Mediterranean area – the ruin lives in the collective imagination as a familiar presence. In many cases it is part of a context within which its own meaning reverberates, making clear a connection that is historic but also structural and systemic (Manieri Elia 2006). Also in cases where it constitutes an isolated presence, its image proves to be evocative of a serene, historic relationship, strong and at the same time allusive to a detachment that has intervened in the temporal sequence. A detachment that is all but unfillable, in that it does not imply also a distance, also spatial, due to that particular familiarity that the ruin, precisely for what it is, arouses and confirms. If we accept this analogy as a metaphor of work, the territory too, just like the ruin, apart from constituting a generally

164 Reinventing the City

serene and a-conflictive presence, might, in a general sense, qualify as a transitional object, a testimony and intermediary referring back to something other than itself. A “heterotopy”, therefore, that expresses above all a “lack” that cannot be compensated, as such, precisely in that it is substantiated by a deep signifying capacity which certifies the absence of use, the living relationship with men, participation in the world and life. It is the territory itself, due to its nature, that will narrate all this; and it becomes, in short, its primary sense as well as its value, at least as “historic event”. But, as we know, there is no historic event that is not accompanied not only by an aesthetic event but also by every other sort of event; the first of which being the semantic one: attention to sense (Manieri Elia 2006). A meaning which, as has been proposed, lies in the peculiar quality of the image evoking a “lack”, soothed by the long temporal distance and charged with identity value for the essentiality of the message that has taken on particular denotative strength during the long process of confirmation of its contextual presence and the symbolic role attributed to it gradually by human society. In this anatomic evidence that the territory offers us we find a cognitive value that undoubtedly exists, but this is an aspect, the cognitive result of which proves restrictive at the outset, compared with the semantic complexity and richness of meaning that the territory offers. Cognitive attention that is only archaeological cannot but require and aim, for protective purposes, at the conservation of the territory. This, however, leaves that quality in the background which may be defined as the “genetic code” of the territory, its symbolic and collective endowment. Like Gilles Clément’s Third landscape, the reality of the territory is at a mental level. It coincides only temporarily with administrative divisions. It fits into the ethical field of the planetary citizen on a permanent basis (Clément 2005). Because of its content and the issues raised by diversity – the territory as a deposit of the diversity of a city now become generic – because of its innate externity and the need to conserve it and favour its dynamics, the territory acquires a political dimension, in the sense that maintaining its existence depends on a collective conscience, it is the shared territory of a collective conscience that adopts it as the privileged place of changes which are not predictable that is the other side of predictable urban life, controlled and fixed a priori (De Pieri 2005). Due to its nature, the territory is the place for the city without a voice which does not find space elsewhere. As the Third landscape the territory does not have a scale, it covers the series of situations able to ensure diversity is maintained.

Towards a Reinvented City 165

In this integrated cognitive picture, which confronts the territory “not intended as a mass of relics but as history that includes us” (Augé 2003) we can try to spell out some points of agreement. The territory, in its most typical statute, tends to put up resistance against the dynamics of the present. Resistance that is not, however, devoid of sense but, if anything, “too full” of meanings, which is an integral part of our present and comes into play in the processes of sense retrieval. The re-insertion of the territory in the context of urban and social life, therefore, should not cancel out its polysemous quality. The event that can reawaken it has to be complex and integrated, coherent with its developmental history (which is our past). This event is already present in nuce and it is the “city of the city of external territories”, a low-density city in the dense city surrounding us, a city perspective oriented in an environmental sense that recuperates the historical depth and the sense of its message of a “lack” and recuperates and relaunches it in current terms.

Towards a Reinvented City This dialectic between the “connotative” character of the contemporary city and the “denotative” character of the territory alludes to two conceptual worlds. The first underpins a representational the city as an “environmental image”, which has impressed on it the separability of contemplation of an urban landscape from living within it, a notion of landscape-object constructed and established by modernity, from which we feel excluded, and with which a relationship of equality is never established. The second tells of an eminently projectual conception, like the willingness to take on new urban meanings. Understood in this way, the territory is the place where ethos is recuperated, all that which has not been at the centre, which was not in the polis. In this perspective, the project for the territory may be imagined as a complex process towards understanding contemporary public space, a new concept of public space as a space for reflection, far from habitual circuits, to escape from the hegemony of communication flows which produce standardisation of spatial experiences. But what is the relationship between the project for the territory and contemporary public space? The environmental dimension comes to our aid, which solicits contemporary collective sensitivity in several directions. Here we adopt a comprehensive conception of the environment, which associates with natural processes the material evidence of the indivisible relationship between the people, activities and places of the territory.

166 Reinventing the City

The environmental dimension requests that collective sensitivity pay greater attention to reality, recalling the need for material anchorage of our actions. The real world exerts a determining influence on possible worlds, at least in the sense that it establishes their belonging to different classes of conditions, due to which some can be considered realisable, thanks to the still possible truth of their premises, while others collide with the impossibility of correcting the “already been” and thinking deeply of a situation in which an antecedent that did not happen proves true, and which, due to the unavoidable course of time, will never be able to take place. This increased attention to the real unfolds particularly in the physical environment, almost referring to the passage from the myth of the “mother city” to the myth of “mother earth”, indicating a demand for a stronger relationship with reality and a “non-banal description of the real”, which now conditions behaviours under way, seeing the particular attention urban societies give to the evaluation of any intervention of transformation of their “real” life environment. This is another important request that the environmental dimension produces for settled societies and which is transformed into collective sensitivity. The step between collective sensitivity and public sphere is short. The public sphere emerges because spatial anchorage to reality requires our values to be brought into play and be compared with those of others, a shift to the sphere of ethics and, thus, the need for social legitimisation of our behaviours. At the same time the social demand for evaluation of transformations under way reveals a public sphere that is tied to the collective conviction that there are non-negotiable values, and that the biological and cultural quality of the environment favourable for our spatial life are certainly among them. These two appeals to our collective sensitivity have in the background a so-called “summarising” conception of the environment. The complexity nowadays inherent in the project for the city is largely in its relationship with the environment, which conditions more and more the behaviour under way of inhabitants and its spatial organisation. In this scenario should be placed the tendency to give up a kind of holistic reductionism, in which “the city is all that is of interest”, to move towards a position in a certain sense characterised by the “thought of the synecdoche” (Benvenuto 1994), in which the environment may be considered a part from which to begin to summarise and reorder the whole. This trend which is expressed in the increase in the social demand for evaluation of any transformation of reality beyond the confines of the urbs, and which entails deep and wide attention to the “description of the real as a value that conditions behaviours underway” (Gambino 1994), is the equivalent of attention that is not sectorial but relational to a vast area of resources and interactions

Towards a Reinvented City 167

that recall amplification of the field of knowledges involved in the project.38 This entails a dilation of the concept of inhabiting – in the sense of “taking care” that Heidegger gives to it39 – an extended use of the city (Secchi 1994), in a certain sense an environmental project for the future of the city on the territory (Maciocco 2008). An environmental project as an adoption of a collective conscience of the spatial concepts and places of nature and history that preside over the life of the inhabitants of a territory. All this forms an apparatus rooted in geography, history and society, able to face long-term the mechanisms that urge towards a reduction in inhabiting the contemporary “city without a city”, the power of reduction of which has not, however, managed to dissolve all the diversities. The purpose of the project is to obtain a visual representation of the environmental project, where the environment may indeed be considered “as a part from which to begin to summarise and reorder everything”. A plan, where it will be necessary to take into account also what is not seen: because “the landscape is what is seen after we have stopped observing it” (Clément 1999) and because the problem constantly posed is that of a “category of life”. Perhaps, it is sensed, what is needed is “to renew the tie with the analogical process of interpretation of the universe.” 40 To find a symbol may be important also because the environmental project presupposes profound changes in the collective conscience. How can such a change be prepared? It is not enough to spread ecological scientific knowledge, not enough to discuss theoretical issues. As Clément writes – there is a need to “change the legend” (Clément 1994). “Each place on earth … accepts a legend that associates man with his territory in a lasting manner” (Clément 1999). To inhabit the planet is something that implicates the categories of the sacred and the supernatural: “instead of opposing faith in a myth with faith in a natural order, we should think of how to make them compatible.” 41 A symbolic perspective of a new public sphere is the one that may be opened up as the adoption of a collective conscience of the environmental dominants present in the life of the men inhabiting a territory, “an idea that unites spatial concepts and places rich in nature and history” (Maciocco 1995a), the beginning of a “new legend”. Here places are not necessarily meant as physical entities, but indeed, as expressed by Massimo Cacciari, as “single, particular complexes of relations” (Cacciari 1990), single, specific “cultural worlds” of the settled societies. But with respect to the selection processes inherent in the contemporary condition, some of these places, with reference to the interpretation suggested above, are – in that they are lasting – more significant of space organisation than others; they represent, exactly, the environmental dominants of human settlement (Maciocco 1991b).

168 Reinventing the City

But before expressing itself as attachment to a particular place, territoriality is, first of all, the relationship between men and – as Roncayolo observes – “derives from the diffusion of mental images, tales, more or less abstract representations […], it is mythological […] The individual, rather than perceive the territory, assimilates it and creates it through his practices and beliefs of a social nature” (Roncayolo 1980). By these practices the territory reveals itself as a new modality of contemporary public space where, as individuals, we can stay without feeling manipulated and at the same time be part of a whole. In this sense environmental dominants are to be considered authentic counterspaces of the contemporary city. The importance of the environmental component in the city project cannot be considered a novelty.42 For since the 80s it has been possible to notice an increase in the influence of the environmental dimension over the evolution of the methods and instruments of urbanistics, as can be seen from a provisional evaluation of the innovative contribution of some experiences (Palermo 1993), but it should be recognised that this influence has shown serious difficulties in changing into a unified set of fundamental concepts and operative methods. The environment still remains, in fact, new material for the contemporary city project and puts the traditional instruments of urbanistics to a hard test. In effect, the discomfort and difficulty emerge that urbanistics shows in trying to reset itself in the light of this new point of view, either by shifting to the side of material domains and the study of environmental disciplines, or by trying to recuperate the environmental dimension within the formal stereotypes of the disciplinary tradition, or, yet again, by retreating to a decisive conception of environmental evaluation techniques belonging to the disciplinary matrices of engineering and economics. Among the different positions that have emerged up to now a family of disciplinary attitudes persists which is characterised by “environmental determinism”, an approach by which the physical features of the environment determine the ways of life of the people and the environmental differences alone produce differences in spatial behaviours. A clear result of this position have been some disappointing attempts in bio-urbanistics, which fall back on unlikely disciplinary retrieval of bio-climatic architectures and pre-industrial suggestions. Other positions of disciplinary unease can be recognised in “environmental formalism”, which takes shape as a transfer of formal stereotypes of the city to the overall environment. In this logic are included: ornamental urbanistics, urbanistic make-up, and trompe-l'oeil urbanistics. Significant examples of this are the interventions which imitate “nature-houses”, projects of vegetation cosmetics in decayed areas – such as in abandoned quarries, which seem to be a theme constantly à la page – but also

Towards a Reinvented City 169

interventions characterised by “ludic historicism”, from the replicas of the historic city in the suburbs43 or urban design applications to urban dispersion. Then there is “environmental functionalism”, which has ingrained the illusion of environmental control of every intervention and, with this, the conviction that the project of the city can be constructed by pervasive, intensive application of evaluation techniques of environmental impacts, as if it were possible to contribute a coherent form of city by quantitative balances – of the “this much we conserve, this much we transform” type – which grimace at the “protective ecosystems” and “productive ecosystems” categories studied by ecologists like Leopold and Odum. Examples of this type are many and they suffer from the conception tied to “environmental control” based on an engineering and economic matrix. We may speak of “environmental functionalism”, for the exclusive emphasis on the biological, hygienic, sanitary, “health” function of the environment, which puts its cultural and symbolic role in second place, as the world of indivisible relations between people and places that preside over the spatial life of communities. Other positions strictly tied to the preceding ones are: “the obsession of physical transformation and metropolitan neopantheism”. The first collocation corresponds to the way of thinking that to grant urban sense to a place necessarily implies its physical transformation, that only by this transformation will it be made fit for life today, that to make the most of a place it is necessary to physically go through it, equip it, transform it. The other attitude represents the attempt at a reconciliation with nature, an impossible symbiosis that underpins a refusal, perhaps unaware, to compete with the problem of giving shape to the city in the “realm of the contemporary urban” (Choay 1994a). In a certain sense this condition permeates all the others, in that disciplinary discomfort emerges just when the spatial forms of the urban change and different ways of thinking of space for settlement open up. This change is characterised by the dilation – above all mental – of the urban onto the territory, causing the contemporary contradiction to emerge between the need for maintaining a relationship with places and the demand for mobility that is indifferent to it. This dilation of the urbs produces important shifts in urbanistics, pushing towards overcoming disciplinary paradigms that have the compact city at their centre, a refusal of the current assumption that it is indeed “all that is of interest”, in a bitterly selective way. It is a matter of selective attention, typical of the contemporary condition as a reaction to the deluge of visual flows that sweep along city ways of life and make the perceptive worlds of the inhabitants commonplace.

170 Reinventing the City

Selective attention in respect of city territory is a concept that has undergone significant variations in the course of time (Maciocco 1995a). If we look, for example, at a well-characterised territory such as the Italian one, using the maps of the Military Geographical Institute, we can appreciate the field of these variations through the cartographer’s sensitivity. In the historical maps of the late 1800s, for the cartographer the world was pervasive geography that looked equally attentively at the overall territory, while in the post-war and 50s series the territory was represented almost as a geometric entity, with few features: the world was the city core with its links with other cities, representing “all that is of interest”, a point of view around which the disciplinary tradition was built and has been reinforced up until recent years. Whereas in the current series attention44 has been given again to the differential features of the territory, an opening towards the city territory: the world is a set of places where value is strongly attributed, of “places that count”, places that are highly selective. This type of selectivity aimed at places that count seems to be an unusual feature of the contemporary urban condition. Artists represent it in a great variety of ways; it can be seen for example in some Situationists’ works of a psychogeographical matrix, as is the case of The Naked City by Debord and Constant’s Symboliese voorstelling van New Babylon. In the same way as the same urge towards selectivity, by condensation of the urban image in a mental map, is present in a conceptual artist like Brouwn, in an emblematic way in his work This Way Brouwn. To a similar sphere of selectivity may be referred in a certain sense even the phenomenon of buskers, the musical art of the streets, the presence of which in contemporary urban landscapes seems to want to promote the statement of an idea of space as a set of selective places for social relations and cultural growth (Ligios 1994). It is perhaps the need of urban ethics in the new forms of settlement that urges the inhabitants to relate selectively with these places, which reveal to the human condition the possibility of understanding the territory of urban life, and show constancy in filling the gaps in our spatial experience. Research on this theme promotes re-reading of the period of formation of a geography of man – which breaks away from the determinism of soil and climate “inferences” – to investigate the territory as a human condition (Dematteis 1985b). Places that reveal to the human condition the possibility of understanding the territory of urban life are significant places. They are so, however, not in that they are specific, unique and unrepeatable, but in that they bring with them in a specific, unique, unrepeatable way the meanings of other places, according to the viewpoint, the mores, the “general will”, the

Towards a Reinvented City 171

unwritten laws that support a given society, a new ethics that will recognise the inseparability of the biological and cultural dimensions of the city (Clemente and Maciocco 1990). The inseparability of the biological and the cultural dimensions is at the centre of the reflections of some scholars like Bruno Latour and Mike Davis, who deal with it from different angles. Fighting for the democracy of science, namely for science in which the different social actors really participate, Latour (1999) raised some controversy with militant ecologists who, he says, consider nature to be an intangible reality and actually prevent any possibility of agreement on themes of collective interest which concern the environment. This same idea of nature has always had political worth; it is a question of singling out the theoretical and practical nodes that are at the base of the ecological crises we are witnessing. The relationship between nature and politics is treated masterfully by Davis, who coins the expression “political ecology of famine” to describe the political value of a particular negative climatic crisis in the formation of the so-called Third World (Davis 2001). Very large areas of Asia, Africa and South America, the populations of which had relied up to then on a village economy, were involved in three successive waves of exceptional drought, the product of a modified rain cycle caused by the lack of monsoons in the years from 1876 to 1879. Over fifty million peasants died of hunger and disease. Regions once verdant changed into deserts and mortality in some parts of the world, from Ethiopia to China and Brazil, reached the peaks of a nuclear holocaust. Davis reconstructed this tragedy, which was almost ignored by official history. It is unlikely, however, that nature alone could have produced such a catastrophe without the complicity of nascent colonial imperialism, the prices policy linked with the capacity to make climate forecasts, the introduction of the Gold Standard, the monetary system based on the gold exchange and the total absence of a policy for sustaining the populations hit by famine. It was in that brief span of years that the profile of the future “Third World”, with the irremediable division of mankind into those who have everything and those who have nothing, began to be outlined in an irreversible manner. Scientism, which shields the explanation of phenomena that however have a fundamental political and cultural background, is the object of recurrent attacks by Latour. At the bottom of the French philosopher’s thought can be glimpsed the constant attempt to work on the job of sewing together, linking up, always difficult but always necessary, fields of knowledge that we often, sometimes due to ignorance, tend to separate. The case of the classical opposition nature/culture, subject/object or even scientific knowledge/humanistic knowledge, becomes, for example, less

172 Reinventing the City

and less capable of explaining the proliferation of “hybrids”. A sense of anguish ensues that contemporary, post-modern, modern or anti-modern philosophers, whatever they be, cannot manage to placate. Actually the “moderns” have never stopped creating “hybrid” objects, which draw from one or the other sphere simultaneously, and refuse to take them into consideration as such, namely as natural-cultural hybrids, “we have never been modern” (Latour 1993). It is this founding paradigm that needs to be laid open to debate again. The approach to the problem cannot but be in a political philosophy key, since nature, but more in general, the environment, as richness of nature and history, is not something that offers itself spontaneously to our glance but is something that is produced. For Latour politics, on the one hand, and the environment, on the other, do not exist. Since the term was invented, each policy has been defined in relation to the environment, and each feature of the latter, each of its prerogatives and functions have depended on the political will to limit, reform, found, simplify and illuminate public life. The “democracy of science”, of which Latour speaks, is also this. On the inseparability of science from its contextual and, more generally, cultural relations, Latour had already worked out an efficient critical analysis (Latour 1987) showing how the social context and the technical content are both essential for effective understanding of scientific activity. Since the social context is innate in science, the social context influences the approach to the problem and introduces the political dimension. Latour’s analysis carries out something near to a cataclysm in classical ecologism, as it bares the discomfort of ecology in trying to maintain the complexity of environmental events in the disciplinary sphere, but also the difficulties of urbanistics in trying to reset itself according to the new points of view, which, as we have seen, attempt to include the environmental dimension in the formal stereotypes of the disciplinary tradition (Maciocco 1995a). We have referred to the attempts and misunderstandings linked with environmental determinism, the approaches characterised by environmental formalism, ornamental urbanistics and the neo-historicist degeneration of urban design, environmental functionalism, and in the conservative background of this position, a sort of metropolitan neo-pantheism, an attitude that represents the attempt at an impossible symbiosis with nature. As we have seen all this underpins a refusal, sometimes unaware, to compete with the city, understood as polis, as a place of politics, which involves what Latour defines as a “democracy extended to things”, reaching the point of speaking of parliaments of humans and non-humans, a democracy that has some significant relations with Clément’s “planetary garden”. “I had chosen to speak of ‘ecology’ without using the word, which has been taken to the lowest level of disaffection through so many battles,

Towards a Reinvented City 173

hesitations, radicalism. ‘Garden’ … is a more suitable term.” (Clément 2004a).. Thus Clément was to bring back to mind, later on, one of the reasons that led him during the course of the first half of the 90s to coin that expression, “planetary garden”, around which almost all the works of the last ten years revolve. It is a matter of reappropriating some of the great themes of ecological thought and doing it without using worn-out words like “environment” or “sustainable”. “Behind the word environment can be seen to unfold a whole range of machines … destined to harvest knowledge and make bales of hay of it” continues the French landscaper, stigmatising the “machinist” and restrictive attitudes of technoenvironmentalism. “Imagine a cow with which someone wants to speak of ‘green space’ and you will get a good idea of my feelings on the issue.” (Clément 1999). It is a matter of reappropriating a possible political dimension for our work, a dimension long refused in favour of supremacy of solitary doubt, patient observation, verification of the hypotheses in the field: “the largest number of species in my herbarium was collected in the spring of 1968.” (Clément 2004a). If we examine the elements of inertia on the territory of the widespread city, of urban dispersion, of the outskirts and vast regions, it is possible to find these things, that live with us and to construct a “democracy extended to things”. They are those we have defined the environmental dominants of human settlement, “spatial concepts and places rich in nature and history”. To understand these concepts, explore these places, that are not only physical but cultural, requires a more aware appreciation of differences.45 This encourages us to interpret all places, understand their meanings, decode them as representative of a network configuring a “supra-local” system, enabling relations to be enjoyed with them within the situation of instability and demands of communication that are inherent in new urban landscapes, a weft of relations that grants sense to the integrity of the urban and territorial palimpsest. Each projectual experience at each operative scale, even the tiniest, may then be converted into an action making the pertinent, relevant sense of this weft of relations emerge. Every theme, each occasion can be transformed into a territorial experience, so that each intervention at any scale is a cognitive act that attempts to produce a possible world, exploring the links between the place of the intervention and its supra-local dimensions. This is the case – to return to the examples illustrated here – of the “environmental corridor” of Mesozoic limestones, a “dominant” that shows a space of possible urban solidarity between the centres of the Sardinian Gennargentu massif, joined along the artery of the limestones, the traces of which (the supramonti and “heels”) are the relevant, symbolic

174 Reinventing the City

elements, the “mother mountains” of settled societies, like the mountain of Maria Lai in Ulassai. The environment therefore offers itself as a text for rethinking the settlement project: for it favours an interpretative conception of the urban sense of spatial forms, being the overall place of co-presence, stratification and material evidence of the history of human settlement; it presses for a dialogical, multidisciplinary aperture of the project, calling up knowledges to be part of the polis that “were not at the centre”, that were considered implicit and thus neglected by the city project, but which prove essential when the dilation of the urban realm requires communication with other systems of knowledge to increase information in the shape of new results and new hypotheses. This environmental approach is realised in the space of local contexts, of which, however, any idiographic contiguity with positions typical of ethnocentrism or separate localism is denied. It is, in effect, at this scale that a concept of collective good is imaginable, as the outcome of a process that the urbanist favours by trying “to bring to the light a secret order to grant it a direction and enhance it, or to unify the scattered elements, old and new, giving a sense to them as a whole” (Lucan 1992). Only equal attention to both the values of innovation and the values of the memory of the absence will be capable of keeping alive faith in a complex, plural urban life. By understanding these forms of specific embodiment of history, we will have much greater probability of constructing an intersubjective space able to accomplish its social and political task as an affirmation of culture (Pérez-Gómez 1996a). This environmental conception of the settlement project, in which the city that opens itself to the territory, not indiscriminately but in specific ways, is a metaphor of what today is required of the project for a city to be reinvented, of a city given back to its inhabitants, a rediscovered city: an opening that must guide towards the study of the other forms of urban condition, towards different codes of time and different relationships with temporality, towards different knowledges, different common sense that expresses – also through the cartographer’s sensitivity – the hierarchy of values, and in this sense, towards ethics and the need for social legitimisation of projectual activity. This aperture entails in the first place discovering what meaning the words of our world can take on, the ordinary, everyday words, at the moment in which they need to describe new possible worlds. “This is why the Traveller travels: to put to the test an entire linguistic patrimony … the stages of possible progression towards the construction of a knowledge.”46 Taking the cue from some logical categories (Cellucci 1996), we might speak of the transition of the project from a closed system, from a

Towards a Reinvented City 175

disciplinary soliloquy, belonging to a stable, autonomous field, the repository of strong rationality, to a conception of the project as an open system, from a monological conception to a dialogical conception. To converse with others, therefore, to learn to “think differently” to regenerate techniques, and converse with men through techniques, in order to relate with common sense, which is nothing more than the personal and social story of the men who inhabit a territory.

Notes 1

With his single novel, published in 1890 in the American magazine Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, the English poet Oscar Wilde left us a long metaphorical fable with a deep significance. The story of Dorian Gray and the portrait given to him by his artist friend, Basil Hallward, who portrayed him at the height of his youth and beauty, onto which, under the arcane spell of a vow, all traces of the vices and crimes of the protagonist are transferred, is much more than one of the stages, though highly significant, of the long history of the “double in literature”, which reached its highest peak in German Romanticism. Together with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, which came out in 1886, it is one of the two exceptional points which, at a brief distance one from the other, give new content and depth to this history (Maciocco and Tagliagambe 1998). 2 George Steiner in fact observes: “These have no ‘scientific’ status. Our instruments of perception are not theories or working hypotheses in any scientific, which means falsifable, sense, but what I call ‘working metaphors.’” (Steiner G 1975, p. xvi). 3 The experience of shock that occurs in the contact between the flâneur and the crowd is among those that proved decisive for Baudelaire’s mettle, an “intimate relationship existing in Baudelaire between the image of the shock and the contact with the large city masses. It also tells us what we should understand exactly by these masses. It is not a question of any class, or of any articulated, structured crowd. It is just a question of the amorphous crowd of passers-by, of the public in the streets. This crowd, whose existence Baudelaire never forgets, was not used as a model for any of his works. But it is inscribed in his creation like a secret form… The image of the fencer is decipherable in its context: the hits he makes are destined to open him up a way through the crowd… and with the invisible crowd of words, fragments, beginnings of lines, that the poet fights with, in the abandoned avenues, his fight for the poetic prey.” (Benjamin 1995, pp. 98–99). 4 “In the type created by Glasbrenner the private appeaers as a degenerate descendant of the citoyen. Nante has no reason to be busy. He establishes himself in the street (which it is taken for granted takes him nowhere) as comfortable as the philistine within his four walls.” 5 Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann’s piece entitled My cousin corner window teaches us about the way the private looks at the crowd. Preceding Poe’s tale by fifteen years, it is perhaps one of the earliest attempts to represent the road network of a large city. (E.T.A. Hoffmann My cousin corner window, in E.T.A.

176 Reinventing the City Hoffmann The golden pot and other tales, Oxford University press, Oxford, 2002). 6 According to Francisco Varela (cf. Varela 1989, p. 77), what is postulated, namely that the mind uses and knows the world storing and manipulating symbols according to the hypothesis that symbols can be reduced to discontinuous physical entities and that the system is able to carry out operations on these entities, this unavoidable reference to mental representation, was the true “masterstroke” of the cognitivist hypothesis (quoted in Tagliagambe 1994, p. 56). 7 With respect to this position relevant expressions of the Modern Movement are also contiguously placed, in which the representational conception is present which is typical of the cognitive hypothesis. To this hypothesis refers back as classical form of analysis also that of rationalist matrix, which understands representation as an ideal construction of the observer and method as verification of logical coherence and control of their empirical significancy (cf. Palermo 1992, p.12 ). 8 Lisbon Story, directed by Wim Wenders, Road Movies Filmproduktion/Berlin, 1994. 9 As Florenskij shows in his criticism on naturalism. (Florenskij 1990). 10 P.A. Magalhães, Si tratta di una colonna sonora “O Tejo”, Letra de Pedro Ayres Magalhães, Música de José Peixoto, in Madredeus, Ainda, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack From The Film Lisbon Story written and directed by Wim Wenders. 11 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 12 The field in which this aberrant cartography unfolds is not in fact only that of the relationship with an urban space overwhelmed by social transformations which, according to Benjamin, made the flâneur “the market observer” endowed with a knowledge “near to the occult science of the economic trend”, in short the spy that “capitalism sends into the world of the consumer”. This field is no longer just that “realisation of the ancient dream of humanity, the labyrinth” to which the flâneur devotes himself without knowing it, nor that space in which “the most heterogeneous elements of the time coexist” in such a way that “when you go out of an 18th Century house to go into one of the 16th Century, you fall down a temporal slope, so well that entering into a city “you feel as though you are caught up in the fabric of a dream where the remotest past also joins up with a present event…” (Benjamin 1989). 13 Also the definitions given of psychogeography and the dérive by the founder of situationism, Guy-Ernest Debord; one would be “the study of exact laws and the precise effects of the geographic environment consciously arranged or not, which acts directly on the sentimental behaviour of individuals”, while the other would be defined “among the various situationist procedures […] a technique of hurried passage through different, varied environments”; nor would these definitions, therefore, grasp but a part of what is played in cards and planimetries (Debord 1955, reproduced in Berreby 1985, p. 288). 14 Soutif in fact notes that the planimetry of Debord’s Naked City, of Constant’s New Babylon, without mentioning Brouwn’s This Way Brouwn, Françoise Schein’s Dazibao pour la ville d'Anvers and Daniel Cordier’s Chimigramme sur

Towards a Reinvented City 177 un plan de ville, drive schematism, selectivity, condensation or uniformity to such a point that reference to a territory is in some way radically absent to the advantage of adopting the urban cartographic sign as such. Christel Hollevoet rightly emphasises that this type of “work” actually functions as an index of “ephemeral situation or immaterial concept” (Hollevoet 1992, p. 45, quoted in Soutif 1994). 15 It is the well-known definition of the linguistic current, with its starting-date made to correspond to the publication of Noam Chomsky’s famous Syntactic structures (1957). 16 “No more borders in Europe, all the doors are open and anyone can go through them as they wish… It seems like Europe has really become very small. Languages change, music, news is different, but the views speak the same language. They all tell the same stories of an old continent full of its wars and its truces. It is nice to look like this without thinking of anything, letting the events and ghosts of history come to me from one epoch to another… Hey! This is my land, my true land, my homeland!” From the initial sequences of Wim Wenders’ film Lisbon Story, 1995. 17 The Sky above Berlin, regia di Wim Wenders, Road Movies Filmproduktion/Berlin Argos Films/Paris, 1987. 18 “...call me, oh Muse, – continues Homère – the poor mortal cantor who, abandoned by the mortals, his audience, lost his voice … he who, angel of the tale, became the ignored, mocked organ-player on the threshold of no-man’s-land...” (From the film The Sky above Berlin). 19 The theme of amazement is faced by Wenders through the words of the angel Daniel in his dialogue with Marion in the final sequences of the film The Sky above Berlin: “Tonight I learnt to be amazed … There once was, there once was and therefore there will be. The image we have created will be the image that will accompany my death. In this image I will have lived … Only amazement on ourselves, the amazement of man and woman, has made a man of me… Now I know what no angel knows.” (From the film The Sky above Berlin). 20 Rai Educational, Multimedial Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, Interview with Remo Bodei, “Bloch e il principio speranza”, 30/6/1994, http://www.emsf.rai.it/interviste/interviste.asp?d=510. 21 “In these apparently forgotten places, the memory of the past seems to prevail over the present. Here only a few essential values survive, despite the total disaffection from activity of the city. These strange places exist outside the city‘s effective circuits and productive structures. From an economic point of view, the industrial areas, railway stations, ports, unsafe residential neighborhoods, and contaminated places are where the city is no longer.” (de Solà-Morales 1995, p. 120). 22 The “triple frustration” connected with acting – unpredictability of outcome, irreversibility of process and anonymity of authors – is the price man pays to be able to experience reality, and it derives in the first instance from the human condition of plurality, the preliminary requisite of that space of appearance that is the public sphere, the space of visibility in which some appear to others and they

178 Reinventing the City acknowledge each other, which basically constitutes the condition of possibility of being-together (cf. Arendt 1958). Since each one holds his own delimited position in the world, the characteristic of public space is that of uniting and separating at the same time, namely of “articulating plurality through relations that are neither vertical nor hierarchical nor of a merging type.” (cf. Forti 1996, p. 275). 23 To study further the conception of the symbol in Florenskij and his “epistemology of the symbol” see Tagliagambe 2006b. 24 Welsch, 1998. Wolfgang Welsch teaches at the University of Magdeburg and has been the most convincing and keenest advocate of the post-modern in Germany. He is the author and editor of various books, among which the recent: Aktualität des Aesthetischen, Munich, Fink Verlag, 1993; of his work an essay has been translated into Italian entitled: “La terra e l’opera d’arte”, published in 1991 by the Gallio publishing company in Ferrara. 25 “The city, Mumford affirms (Mumford 1938a) is, with language, the greatest work of art of man”. He does not hesitate, of course, to criticise the industrial city, which he sometimes calls “necropolis” or “tyrannopolis”, but his humanistic approach is related to the antique urban sociology of the Greek-Roman classics. The type of ideal city that he considers may be criticised; and, as we will see, it is certainly not the image that the majority of modern sociologists create for themselves of the city. But the image described above has its reverse side, much disputed and characterised by urban ‘pessimism.’” 26 Il Manifeste du Tiers paysage, published in the French edition in 2004, goes back over some of these positions. The expression “Third landscape” appears here for the first time (beginning on page 83) and one of the possible points of interest of the concept is in the fact that it provides Clément with more effective instruments to confront the field of observation, the city, which has always represented a difficult stumbling-block for his ideas. (cf. Clément 2004b; De Pieri 2005). 27 The idea is reinforced of environment-organism co-determination and coevolution which Oyama expresses in the following terms: “Form emerges through successive interactions. Far from being imposed on matter by some agent, it depends of reactivity of matter at many hierarchical levels, as well as the reciprocal sensitivity of those interactions.” (cf. Oyama 1985, p. 22, quoted in Tagliagambe 1994). 28 Cf. L. Snozzi, “Metro Polis”, in this instalment of Parametro. 29 Tokyo-ga, directed by Wim Wenders, Road Movies Filmproduktion/ Berlin Wim Wenders Produktion. 30 A. Endell, Die Schönheit der großen Stadt, (quoted in Wenders 1992, pp. 102–103). Each day in the metropolis we pass by hundreds, thousands of people, in silence, each a stranger to the other, like the trees in a wood. Man is just a phenomenon, a microcosm whose relations do not interest us, but whose form is accessible to us as are those of the mountains and trees. Man is an element of nature. An element just as fascinating, just as attractive as any other. […] There is nothing nicer than sitting in silence in the tram among strangers, not to spy on their conversations, but to experience their feelings, to enjoy observing them. […]

Towards a Reinvented City 179 One man is enough, a point that is moving, to upset the ordered symmetry of a street. This takes on, to a certain extent, a human dimension, asymmetrical, with the free space divided up by the movement of this body, distance and size take on a new significance. […] He who thinks of architecture, thinks of the consequences of the elements of construction, façades, columns, embellishments – and yet, all this is secondary. What counts first and foremost is not the single form, but its context, the space surrounding it, the void that extends rhythmically between the walls, and is delimited by them (Endell 1908, pp. 153 and 157). 31 Partage d’exotisme, Biennale de Lyon, Halle Tony Garnier, Lyon, 2000. Quoted in A. Detheridge, “Da maghi ad artisti nel circuito globale”, Il Sole 24 ore, August 20. 32 The case of the Euralille project is emblematic, based on the hypothesis that the “experience” of Europe will completely change with the impact of the tunnel linking Great Britain with the continent and with the extension of the French TGV network as far as London. If this hypothesis proves founded, the city of Lille, dormant gravitational centre of the London/Brussels/Paris triangle, will, as if under a spell, take on great importance as the vessel of a wide range of typically “contemporary” activities. At Lille, the new TGV line is designed on the site of the old fortifications. A place now occupied by outskirts that are continually expanding. At a stone’s throw from the historic centre a gigantic futuristic project is imagined, a hybrid, unusual condition enabling so-called peripheral activities to be placed near the heart of the city. Euralille, Lille, France, 1994, project by Rem Koolhaas, François Delhay, F.M. Delhay-Caille, Commissioned by Euralille. 33 The Plan for European Space Development, to use the French acronym Sdec, gives these numbers in a background of contradictory arguments which on the one side places the emphasis on the endless entity of the problems and on the other envisages a field of conventional activities for impossible all-out recuperation. Cf. SSSE, Plan for European Space Development (first official draft), Meeting of Ministers for territory order in member States of the European Union, Noordwijk, 9 and 10 June 1997. 34 A position in which a business strategy is applied to the city, a strategy understood as minimisation of risk, of the loss the business city might suffer with respect to the external world, a strategy that not by chance was promoted by private organisations. 35 “Guattari is right to take offence at environmentalist reductionism. To not see that pollution is a category of modernity, to not see that there is no difference, but a close relationship between pollution of ideas, excess of information and pollution of the seas, means to accept the game with the rules imposed by the great centres of the media.” (La Cecla 1991, p. 56). 36 Perhaps for this – if we think of Wenders’ research on Lisbon – in the last part of Lisbon Story, Friedrich’s cine-camera eye and Winter’s microphone return together to look and listen incessantly, almost in a “feverish vigil”, to try to “see” Lisbon, finding hope again in the commitment to uninterrupted projectuality innate in the human condition, and which means that each projectual experience, even the smallest, is converted into an action that brings to light the sense of this

180 Reinventing the City indescribable thread of relations between space and life that is the city (cf. for these reflections: Maciocco 1996). 37 Rather than abandon the local situations to their apparent irrationality with regard to the “rational” logics of globalisation, almost as if they constituted interference, a noise in objective knowledge, in the sense used by the theory of information, one might think they belong to a different logic that can be studied for itself. They will therefore be evaluated as a sort of “raw material”, a “mineral”, from which it would be possible to extract essential elements of the life of humanity, especially its life of desire and creative potential (cf. for these reflections: Guattari 1997). 38 The considerations dealt with in this paragraph on the multidisciplinary aperture of urbanistics are taken up again in G Maciocco’s essay, La città in ombra (Maciocco 1996). 39 Silvano Tagliagambe faces the theme in his essay Landscape as a regenerative structure of a fragmented territory, in G Maciocco, Landscape Project, City Project (in press). Tagliagambe refers to the famous conference entitled Building Dwelling Thinking, held on 5 August 1951 during the second Darstadt meeting on “Man and space”, in which Heidegger studies in depth the concept of “inhabiting”. Tagliagambe emphasises how Heidegger posed himself the objective of establishing not only what “to inhabit” means, but also to investigate the links between inhabiting and “to build”, meant not from the specific viewpoint of architecture and technical aspects, but as the expression of our activities within the material writings that have constituted and constitute the world of men (Heidegger 1971, pp. 98–99 quoted in Tagliagambe 2008). 40 As Filippo De Pieri notes, analysing the theoretical position of Gilles Clément in the essay Thomas et le Voyageur (Clément 1999) the information provided by the Voyager … often concerns behavioural aspects, not figures, so that the problem of a “figure of life” is constantly posed. To design what is between, not what is. How?” Towards the concluding pages, perhaps a ray of hope may be glimpsed. Some images found along the way will be of help: a miniature taken from the visions of Hildegard of Bingen … the Korean Airlines logo … the “chart of the biomes” of Troll and Ozenda … Perhaps, it is sensed, what is needed is to “renew the bond with the analogical process of reading the universe, as if today it were necessary to add elementary drawings to words, vaguely tributary of heraldry or the cabbala, something medieval at the same time highly modern.” (Clément and Blazy1995; De Pieri 2005). 41 If the problem is posed in these terms it is not a question only of “integrating the ecological paradigm, but also of living it in its sacred dimension. What is missing, in all evidence, is a myth adapted to the new state of knowledge: we know well that it cannot be Gaia, but what figure can therefore be found for this nascent eco-symbol?” (cf. Clément and Blazy 1995). 42 “Environmental planning” is a very general expression that includes different experiences and trends of research which have in common a specific consideration for environmental aspects in territorial and urban planning. One extreme corresponds to a conception of the environment based on categories of principally

Towards a Reinvented City 181 aesthetic judgement, which are tributaries also of the pre-scientific experiences of the Landscape Architects, while at the other extreme we can assign the founders of the ecological approach to environmental planning and control. Recent history shows an evolution that has a constant tension towards the drawing close of the two extremes, which is expressed, on the one hand, through the integration of environmental dimensions in landscape planning, and on the other, through a conception comprehensive of the environment, which associates to natural processes the material testimonies of the inseparabile relationship between the people, activities and places of a territory. 43 Such as, for example, in the attempts of Rob and Leon Krier and their eponyms. 44 See for example the Igm series 1992 on the scale 1:25,000 for Sardinia. 45 The “differential” quality of places is not to be seen as absolute, in that it is intrinsically tied to the locus. Places are not meant here necessarily as physical entities, but indeed as “single, specific complexes of relations” (Cacciari 1990), single, specific “notional worlds” of communities. Their differences are tied to processes of transformation and communication on a different scale, which affect the sense communities grant to places and differences. But some of these places – using the meaning as mentioned above – with respect to the selection processes of the contemporary condition, are – in that they are lasting - more significant of space organisation than others; they represent the “environmental dominants” of human settlement (Maciocco 1991b). 46 Along the line of comparison between the two protagonists, the content of the book Thomas et le Voyageur (Clément 1999) turns into a philosophical dialogue in which new characters appear, positions become more hazy, meetings or unforeseen events suggest various possibilities. A first list of words is drawn up but immediately questioned; others are added, yet others (“red”, “desert” …) will remain on paper. The final list (“horizon”, “grass”, “erosion”, “city”, “legend”, “fire”, “garden”) spells out the chapters of the book and also the stages of possible progression towards the construction of a knowledge (cf. De Pieri 2005).

References

Abalos I (2004) Metamorfosi pittoresca. Focus. 9 Mostra Internazionale di Architettura, Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, Venezia. Abalos I (2006) Punti di vista: architettura e città. In: Burdett R (ed) Città. Architettura e società. 10 Mostra biennale internazionale di architettura di Venezia, Marsilio, Venezia. Abouhani A (2000) Protest Movements in Popular Quarters in Morocco. Plurimondi, n. 3. Adlard M (1977a) Interface. Orbit, London. Adlard M (1977b) Multiface. Futura Publications, London. Adlard M (1978) Volteface. Ace Books, New York. Agamben G (1997) Homo sacer: le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue. Seuil, Paris, p. 75. Agamben G (2003) Stato di eccezione. Bollati Boringhieri, Torino. Agier M (1999a) L’Invention de la ville : banlieues, townships, invasions et favelas. Éditions des Archives contemporaines, Paris. Agier M (1999b) Lo spettro della città nuda. Mediatori culturali. Allegretti G (2000) Three Mayors of Porto Alegre Face-to-face. Plurimondi, n. 3. Lassailly-Jacob V (ed) (1998) Communautés déracinées dans les pays du Sud. Autrepart n. 5, La Tour d’Aigues, Ed. de l’aube, Paris. Andrè Y (ed) (1989) Représenter l’espace. Anthropos, Paris. Arendt H (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL. Astarita R (1994) Mégastructures italiennes. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Augé M (1992) Non-lieux. Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Seuil, Paris. Augé M (2000) Fictions fin de siècle. Fayard, Paris. Augé M (2003) Le temps en ruines. Galilée, Paris. Azara P (2000) …and the City was Born of Chaos. Plurimondi, n. 3. Bagnasco A (1999) Tracce di comunità. Il Mulino, Bologna. Balandier G (1985) Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires. FNSP, Paris. Ballard J (1975) High–Rise. Jonathan Cape, London. Ballard J (2000) Supe–Cannes. Harper Collins, London. Ballard J (2006a) Kingdom Come. Harper Collins, London. Ballard J G (2006) J. G. Ballard presenta Super-Cannes. Intervista interna Feltrinelli. http://www.feltrinelli.it/IntervistaInterna?id_int=43 Bandinu B (1980) Costa smeralda. Come nasce una favola turistica. Rizzoli, Milano.

183

184 References Banerjee T (2001) The Future of Public Space: Beyond Invented Streets and Reinvented Places. Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 67, n. 1. Banham R (1949) The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. Architecture Press, London. Baptist G (2001) Le finestre di Eugen Fink. Kainós, Rivista telematica di critica filosofica, n. 1. Baroni M R (1998) Psicologia ambientale. Il Mulino, Bologna. Basso K H (1996) Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Languages Among the Western Apaches. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, LNM. Bataille G (1970) Le labyrinthe. Œuvres complètes. Gallimard, Paris. Batty M (1999a) Contemporary Planning: The Limits of First-Order Thinking. Environment and Planning B, vol. 26, n. 5. Batty M (1999b) Small Words and Large Webs: The Power of Scale. Environment and Planning B, vol. 26, n. 6. Baudelaire C (1992) Il paesaggio, Salon del 1859. In: Baudelaire C (ed) Scritti sull’arte, Einaudi, Torino, p. 265. Baudrillard J (1970) La société de consummation. Gallimard, Paris. Baudrillard J (1999) L’Echange impossible. Édition Galilée, Paris. Baudson M (1994) La ville selon les artistes 1946–1993. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Bauman Z (1988) Freedom. Open University Press, Philadelphia, PA. Bauman Z (1993) Postmodern Ethics. Blackwell, Oxford. Bauman Z (1999) In Search of Politics. Polity Press, Cambridge. Bauman Z (2005) Fiducia e paura nella città. Bruno Mondadori, Milano. Bechtel R B, Churchman A (2002) Handbook of Environmental Psychology. Wiley, New York. Beckmann J (1998) The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Bélanger M, Gendreau A (1978) Le réaménagement du vieux Québec et l’analyse de la perception de l’environment. L’espace géographique, n. 2. Bellicini L (1988) La scomposizione e i residui. In: L’Italia da recuperare – Indagine in sedici grandi città. Credito Fondiario–Cresme, vol. I, p. 56. Benedikt M (1993) Cyberspace. Muzzio Editore, Padova. Benevolo L (1971) Storia dell’architettura moderna. Laterza, Bari. Benjamin W (1955) Schriften. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. Benjamin W (1968) “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In: Benjamin W, Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed), Schocken Books, New York, (original work Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, was published in 1936). Benjamin W (1989) Paris, Capitale du XIX siécle. In : Le Livre des passages. Le Cerf, Paris. Benvenuto E (1994) contributo al Convegno “La pianificazione integrata di territorio, ambiente e paesaggio”, Genova, Facoltà di Architettura, 14 dicembre.

References 185 Berreby G (ed) (1985), Documents relatifs à la fondation de l’Internationale situationniste. Allia, Paris. Bertoz A (1998) Il senso del movimento. Mc Graw Hill, Milano. Bignardi I (1998) Truman: sei finito sogno americano. La Repubblica, 25 September. Bloch E (1918) Geist der Utopie. Duncker & Humblot, Munich. Bloch E (1959) Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. Bloch E (1986) The Principle of Hope. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Bloch E (2000) The Spirit of Utopia. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Boella L (1986) Ernst Bloch. Trame della speranza. Jaca Book, Milano. Boeri S (2000) Junkspace, metafora odierna. Il sole 24 ore, 30 April. Böhme H (2001) Global Cities, Terrorismus. Lettre International, Heft 55/2001, S. 25–27 Bonnes M, Secchiamoli G (1992) Psicologia ambientale. Introduzione alla psicologia sociale dell’ambiente. NIS, Roma. Borges J L (1965) Musée. De la rigueur scientifique. In: Borges J L L’Auteur et autres textes, Gallimard, Paris. Borges J L (1974), Nueve ensayos dantescos, Herman Melville: Bartleby. Prologos. Obras Completas. Émecé Editores, Buenos Aires. Bourdieu P (1980) Le sens pratique. Minuit, Paris. Breakwell G M (1993) Social Representation and Social Identity. Paper on Social Representation, n. 2. Bruegmann R (2006) Punti di vista: architettura e città. In: Burdett R (ed) Città. Architettura e società. 10 Mostra Biennale Internazionale di Architettura di Venezia, Marsilio, Venezia. Brun J (1994) Il vertice e l’abisso. In: Brun J, Zahan D , Miller D L (eds) Quaderni di Eranos. Il vertice e l’abisso. Red Edizioni, Como. Bruner J S (1975) Il conoscere. Saggi per la mano sinistra. Armando, Roma. Burdett R (2002) La svolta urbana. Next. 8 Mostra Internazionale di Architettura, Venezia. Buttimer A, Seamond D (1980) The Human Experience of Space and Place. Croom Helm, London. Cacciari M (1973) Metropolis. Saggi sulla grande città di Sombart, Endell, Scheffler e Simmel. Officina, Roma. Cacciari M (1990) Ethos e metropoli. Micromega, n. 1. Caillois R (1975) Picasso le liquidateur. Le Monde, 28 November. Caillois R (1984) Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia. October n. 31. Caldeira T P R (2000) City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in San Paulo. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Caldwell L K (1990) Between Two Words: Science, the Environmental Movement, and Policy Choice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Calthorpe P, Van der Ryn S (1986) Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities Suburbs and Towns. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA.

186 References Calthorpe P, Fulton W (1993) Ecology, Community, and the American Dream; The Regional City. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Calthorpe P, Kelbaugh D (1993) The Next American Metropolis – Ecology. Community and the American Dream. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Calthorpe P, Kelbaugh D (1996) Pedestrian Pocket Book. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Calvino I (1972) Le città invisibili. Einaudi Torino. Calvino I (1988) Lezioni Americane. Garzanti, Milano. Campanella T (1995) La città del Sole. Adelphi, Milano. Carmagnola F (2001) Intervento in: Bonazzi G, Gargani A G (eds) Dal decision making al sense making. Pluriverso 2. Casalini B (2004) recensione del volume di Richard Sennett Rispetto. La dignità umana in un mondo di diseguali. Il Mulino, Bologna. Castells M (1996) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol 1: The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford. Castells M (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol 2: The Power of Identity. Blackwell, Oxford. Castells M (1998) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol 3: End of Millennium. Blackwell, Oxford. Catalogue d’Exposition (2002) Contextes. 8 Exposition Internationale d’Architecture, Biennale de Venise. Venise. Cecchini A, Rizzi P, Vania A (2000) Internet, New Media, Democracies and Planning: Reflections, Examples and Proposals. Plurimondi, n. 3 Cellucci C (1996) L’approccio logico alla pianificazione: sistemi chiusi e sistemi aperti. In. G Maciocco (ed) La città in ombra. FrancoAngeli, Milano Chabard P (2002) Context Follows Fiction. In: Catalogue d’Exposition Contextes, 8 Exposition Internationale d’Architecture, Biennale de Venise. Venise. Chandhoke S K (1998) Humanizing Urban Development. Ekistics, vol. 65: 388–390, p. 122. Chaslin F (2003) Architettura della tabula rasa, due conversazioni con Rem Koolhass. Mondadori Electa, Milano. Cherchi P (2001a) Paul Klee come problema. In: Cherchi P (ed) Il recupero del significato. Zonza, Cagliari. Cherchi P (2001b) Picasso o dell’Aufklärung. In: Cherchi P (ed) Il recupero del significato. Zonza, Cagliari. Chevalier J A, Gheerbrant A (1986) Dizionario dei simboli. vol. II, Rizzoli, Milano. Choay F (1965) La cité. Utopies et réalités. Seuil, Paris. Choay F (1980) La règle et le modèle. Seuil, Paris. Choay F (1994a) Le Règne de l’urbain et la mort de la ville. In: Dethier J, Guiheux, A. (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Choay F (1994b) Six thèses en guise de contribution a une réflexion sur les échelles d’aménagement et le destin des villes. In : Berque A (ed) La maîtrise de la ville : urbanité française, urbanité niponne. Éditions de l’EHESS, Paris, pp. 221–227.

References 187 Chung C J, Inaba J, Koolhaas R, Tsung Leong S (2001) Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping. Taschen, Cologne. Clément G (1994) Le jardin en mouvement. Sens & Tonka, Paris. Clément G, Blazy M (1995) Contributions à l’étude du jardin planétaire. École Régionale des Beaux-Arts, Valence. Clément G (1997) Les libres jardins de Gilles Clément. Éditions du Chêne, Paris. Clément G (1999) Thomas et le Voyageur. Albin Michel, Paris. Clément G (2002) Eloges des vagabondes. Herbes,arbres et fleurs à la conquête du monde. Nil, Paris. Clément G (2004a) La sagesse du jardinier. L’Oeil Neuf, Paris. Clément G (2004b) Manifeste du Tiers paysage. Éditions Sujet/Objet, Paris Clément G (2005) (Filippo de Pieri ed) Manifesto del terzo paesaggio. Quodlibet, Macerata. Clemente F (ed) (1974) I contenuti formativi della città ambientale. Pacini, Pisa. Clemente F (ed) (1969) Università e Territorio. Steb, Bologna. Clemente F (ed) (1973) La regione culturale. Etas Kompass, Milano. Clemente F et al. (1980) Rapporto sullo schema di assetto del territorio regionale. Pizzi, Milano. Clemente F, Maciocco G (1990) L’organizzazione della risorsa territorio. In: Clemente F, Maciocco G (eds) I luoghi della città. Tema, Cagliari. Colli G (1975) La nascita della filosofia. Adelphi, Milano. Consorzio Costa Smeralda (1987) La storia dei venticinque anni della Costa Smeralda. Persone, episodi, immagini. Supplemento a Costa Smeralda Magazine, anno XIII, n. 2, Milano. Corner J (1999) Recovering Landscape. Architectural Press, New York. Costa X (1996) Ciudad distraída, ciudad informe. In: de Solà-Morales I et al. (eds) Presente y futuros. Arquitectura en las ciudades Presente y Futuros. Actar, Barcelona. Crosta P L (1998) Politiche. Quale conoscenza per l’azione territoriale. FrancoAngeli, Milano. D’Elia A. (1994) La ville selon les artistes, 1919–1945. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. d’Eramo M (2004) Il maiale e il grattacielo. Chicago: una storia del nostro futuro. Feltrinelli, Universale economica, Milano. Dahrendorf R (2005) Il potere di chi predica l’odio. La Repubblica, August 26. Davis M (1990) City of Quartz. Verso, London. Davis M (1994) L’ecologia della paura. Decoder n. 9. Davis M (1998) Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Henry Holt, New York. Davis M (2000) Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City. Verso, London. Davis M (2001) Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso, London. Davis M (2002) Dead Cities: And Other Tales. New Press, New York. Davis M (2004) Cronache dall’impero. Manifestolibri, Roma. de Azua F (2003) La necessidad y el deseo. Sileno, nn. 14–15.

188 References De Carlo (1962) Relazione di sintesi. Isles. Seminario “La nuova dimensione della città, la città regione” Milano. de Certeau M (1984) The Practice of Everday Life. California University Press, Berkeley, CA. de Certeau M (1990) L’invention du quotidien. 1. Arts du faire, Gallimard, Paris. De Pieri F (2005) Gilles Clément in movimento. In: Clément G (eds) (Filippo de Pieri ed), Manifesto del terzo paesaggio. Quodlibet, Macerata. (Original work Manifeste du Tiers paysage was published in 2004). De Seta C (1989) Il Medioevo dentro la nuova Spalato. In: Le città verso il duemila, Corriere della sera, 20 November. De Seta C, Le Goff J (1989) La città e le mura. Laterza, Bari. de Solà-Morales I (1994) La réparation des villes. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. de Solà-Morales I (1995) Terrain Vague. In: Davidson C (ed) Anyplace. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. de Solà-Morales I (2004) Eclecticismo y vanguardia y otros escritos. Gustavo Gili, Barcelona. Debord G E (1955) Introduction à une critique de la gèographie urbaine. Les lèvres nues, n.9, septembre, reproduit. In: Berreby G (ed) (1985) Documents relatifs à la fondation de l’Internationale situationniste. Allia, Paris, p. 288. Debord G E (1956) Theorié de la dérive. Les Livres neus, n. 9, Bruxelles. Décamps H (2000) Demanding More of Landscape Research (and Researchers). Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 47, nn. 3–4. Dematteis G (1985a) Controurbanizzazione e strutture urbane reticolari. In: Bianchi G, Magnaghi I (eds) Sviluppo multiregionale: teorie, metodi, problemi. FrancoAngeli, Milano. Dematteis G (1985b) Le metafore della terra, la geografia umana tra mito e scienza. Feltrinelli, Milano. Dematteis G (1988) La scomposizione metropolitana. In: Mazza L (ed) Le città del mondo e il futuro delle metropoli. Partecipazioni internazionali. Electa, Milano. Dematteis G (1990) Modelli urbani a rete. Considerazioni preliminari. In: Curti F, Drappi L (eds) Gerarchie e reti di città. FrancoAngeli, Milano. Dethier J, Alain G (eds) (1994) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Derrida J (1998) Addio a Emmanuel Lévinas. Jaca Book, Milano. Di Mèo G (1996) Les territoires du quotidien. L’Harmattan, Paris. Di Mèo G (1998) Géographie sociale et territoires. Flammarion, Paris. di Nallo E (ed) (2005) Il significato sociale del consumo. Laterza, Bari-Roma. Dominguez R (2000) Post_Media_Wastelands [[or Revolt of the Remains]]. Plurimondi, n. 3, pp. 214–223. Downs R M (1981) Cognitive Mapping, a Thematic Analysis. In: Cox K R, Colledge R G (eds) Behavioural Problems in Geography Revisited. Meuthen, London. Downs R M, Stea D (1973) Image and Environment. Arnold, London.

References 189 Doxiadis C A, Papaioannou J G (1974) Ecumenopolis: The Inevitabile City of the Future. Athens Publishing Center, Athens. Drainville A C, Sassen S (2004) Contesting Globalization: Space and Place in the World Economy. Routledge, London and New York. Duany A, Plater-Zyberk E, Speck J (2001) Suburban Nation. North Point Press, New York. Duncan J (1987) Review of Cognitive Mapping. Urban Geography, n. 8. Duncan J, Ley D (eds) (1993) Place/Representation/Culture. Routledge, London and New York. Durkheim E (1991) De la division du travail social. Presses universitaires de France, Paris. Eisenmann P (1984) The End of Classical. Perspecta, n. 21. Elias N, Scotson L J (2004) Strategie dell’esclusione. Il Mulino, Bologna. Ellin N (ed) (1997) Architecture of Fear. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Endell A (1908) Die Schönheit der grossen stadt. Strecker & Schroder, Stuttgart. Fainstein S (1997) Justice, Politics and the Creation of Urban Space. In: Merrifield A, Swyngedouw E (eds), The Urbanization of Injustice. New York University Press, New York. Ferraro G (1998) Rieducazione alla speranza. Jaca Book, Milano. Fink E (1979) (Schütz E, Schwarz F A eds) Grundphänomene des menschlichen Daseins. Alber, München. Florenskij P (1990) (Misler N ed) La prospettiva rovesciata e altri scritti. Gangemi, Roma. Formaggio D (1976) Arte come idea e come esperienza. Mondadori, Milano. Forti S (1996) Vita della mente e tempo della polis. Hannah Arendt tra filosofia e politica. FrancoAngeli, Milano. Foucault M (1976) Sorvegliare e punire-Nascita della prigione. Einaudi Tascabili, Torino. Foucault M (2001) Spazi altri. Mimesis, Milano. Frémont A (1976) La région, espace vécu. PUF, Paris. Fuchs G, Moltmann B (1994) Wirtschaft und Kultur in der globalen Stadt. In: Meurer B (ed) Die Zukunft des Raums. Campus, Frankfurt. Fuhrer U (1990) Bridging the Ecological-Psychological Gap. Behavioural Settings as Interfaces. Environment and Behaviour, n. 22. Fulcanelli (1973–1996) Le dimore filosofali. vol. II, Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma. Fusaro D (ed) (2005) Ernst Bloch e Karl Löwith interpreti di Marx. Il Prato, Padova. Gambino R (1994) Nuove forme della domanda sociale di piano e nuovi orientamenti delle discipline urbanistiche. In: Palermo PC (ed) Le metamorfosi degli analisti. Grafo, Brescia. Gibelli M C (1990) Riequilibrio interno vs. riconcentrazione nelle politiche urbanistiche per le grandi città: alcuni casi di studio. In Curti F, Drappi L (eds) Gerarchie e reti di città: tendenze e politiche. FrancoAngeli, Milano. Gibson W (1984) Neuromancer. Gollancz, London. Gibson W (1986) Count Zero. Gollancz, London.

190 References Gibson W (1988) Mona Lisa Overdrive. Gollancz, London. Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge. Gifford R (1987) Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice. Allen & Bacon, Newton, MA. Giussani B (2005) Camminando sotto i “Cancelli”. http://www.giussani.com/articles_politics/art_05_02_26_christo-gates.html Glaeser E, Kolko J, Saiz A (2001) Consumer City. Journal of Economic Geography, vol. 1, n. 1. Golledge R G (1993) Geographical Perspectives on Spatial Cognition. In: Gärling T, Golledge R G (eds) Behavior and Environment: Psychological and Geographical Approaches. Elsevier, The Netherlands. Golledge R G, Gale N, Richardson G D (1987) Cognitive Maps of Cities II: Studies of Selected Population. National Geographical Journal of India, n. 33. Goodman N (1972) Problems and Projects. Hackett, Indianapolis, IN. Gottmann J (1991) Dopo megalopoli la città globale: una introduzione. In: Gottmann J, Muscarà C (eds) La città prossima ventura. Laterza, Roma-Bari. Gregotti V (1993) Teatranti della cultura. Casabella, n. 606, November. Grumbach A (1994) Roma interrotta. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Gualini E (2000) The IBA Emscher Park and the Invention of a Post Industrial Landscape: Reflections on Institutional Innovation and Sensemaking. Plurimondi, n. 3. Guattari F (1982) Le tre ecologie. Sonda, Milano. Guattari F (1997) Piano sul pianeta, Ombre corte Edizioni, Verona Guénon R (1975) Simboli della scienza sacra. Adelphi, Milano. Hawthorne C (2005) Nella corsa alla ricostruzione, una famiglia litigiosa (original work In the rush to rebuild, a house divided). In: http://www.eddyburg.it/article/articleview/5588/1/198/ Heidegger M (1971) Building, Dwelling, Thinking. Poetry, Language, Thought. Harper Colophon Books, New York. Hillman J (2000) The Force of Character. Ballantine Books, London. Hillman J (2001) La vana fuga dagli Dei. Adelphi, Milano. Hillman J (2002) Politica della bellezza. Moretti & Vitali, Bergamo. Holan C J (1986) Enviromental Psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, n. 1. Hollevoet C (1992) Wandering in the City. Flânerie to dérive and after: the Cognitive Mapping of Urban Space. In: The Power of City. The City of Power. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Holmes B (2002) Unleashing the Collective Phantom. (Resistance to Networked Individualism). Mute Magazine. http://www.metamute.org/en/Unleashingthe-Collective-Phantom-Resistance-to-Networked-Individualism. Howard E (1898) Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform. Swam Sonnenshein, London. Indovina F, Fregolent A, Savino M (eds) (2005) L’ esplosione della città. Compositori, Bologna. Ittelson A (1973) Environment and Cognition. Seminar, New York.

References 191 Jacobson J M (1998) Staging difference. Aestheticization and the politics of difference in contemporary cities. In: Fincher R, Jacobs J M (eds) Cities of difference, Guilford, New York. Jameson F (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, London. Jost F (2003) Realtà/Finzione. Il Castoro, Milano. Kaijima M, Tsukamoto Y, (2006) (Atelier Bow-Wow), “Tokio”. In: Burdett R (ed) Città. Architettura e società. 10. Mostra Biennale Internazionale di Architettura di Venezia, Marsilio, Venezia. Kanizsa G (1980) La grammatica del vedere. Il Mulino, Bologna. Kerény K (1951) The Gods of the Greeks. Thames and Hudson, London. Kerény K (1959) The Heroes of the Greeks. Thames and Hudson London. Kitchin R M, Blades M, Golledge R G (1997) Relations Between Psychology and Geography. Environmental and Behavior, vol. 29, n. 4. Koolhaas R (1994) Melun-Sénart. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Koolhaas R (1996) La ville generique. Architecture d’aujourd’hui, n. 304. Koolhaas R (2000) Junkspace. In : OMA@work, A+U Publishing, Tokyo. Koolhaas R, Zengelis E (1973) Exodus o i Prigionieri volontari dell’architettura/or the voluntary prisoners of architecture. Casabella, n. 378. Koolhaas R, Mau B (1995) S, M, L, XL, Taschen Verlag, Köln. Kotkin J (2006) Punti di vista: architettura e città. In: Burdett R (ed) Città. Architettura e società. 10 Mostra Biennale Internazionale di Architettura di Venezia, Marsilio, Venezia. Kristeva J (1968) Probleme de la structuration du texte. In: Foucault M, Barthes R, Derrida R (eds) Theorie d’ensemble. Seuil, Paris. Kundera M (1995) La lentezza. Adelphi, Milano. La Cecla F (1991) Le tre ecologie più una: la pornoecologia. In: Guattari F (ed) Le tre ecologie. Sonda, Torino. La Cecla F (2000) Rugs and Compasses. Plurimondi, n. 3. Lardon S, Maurel P, Piveteau V (eds) (2001) Représentations spatiales et développement territorial. Editions Hermès, Paris. Lardon S, Debarbieux B (ed) (2003), Les figures du projet territorial. Éditions de l’Aube, Paris. Latour B (1987) Science in Action. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Latour B (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Latour B (1999) Politiques de la nature. La Décuverte, Paris. Le Corbusier (1933) La ville radieuse. Vincent Fréal, Paris. Lefebvre H (1971) Everyday Life in the Modern World. Harper & Row, New York. Lefebvre H (1972) Le droit à la ville. Anthropos, Paris. Lefebvre H (1991) The Production of Space. Blackwell, Oxford. Lefebvre H (2003) The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

192 References Léveillé A, Descombes G (1991) De Morschach à Brunen, Voie suisse, l’itineraire genevois. Office du Livre, Fribourg. Lewontin R (1983) The Organism as Subject and Object of Evolution. In: Scientia, 188, pp. 65–82. Ligios A (1994) I suoni nella città moderna. Convegno di studi “La città tra modernità e contemporaneità”, Oristano 22–23 aprile. Lindner R (1994) Stranger than Fiction: Die Entdeckung der Stadtkultur. In: Brander B, Luger K, Mörth I (eds), Kulturlebnis Stadt. Theoretische und praktische Aspekte der Stadtkultur. Picus, Wien. Low S (2003a) Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America. Routledge, London and New York. Low S (2003b) The Edge and the Center, Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear. In: Low S (ed) The Anthology of Space and Place : Locating Culture. Blackwell, UK. Low S, Smith N (2006) The Politics of Public Space. Routledge, London and New York. Lucan J (1992) Contestualismo e universalità. Lotus n. 74. Lugli G (1983) Economia spaziale del commercio e politica urbanistica. Commercio, n. 13. Luhmann N (1990) Sistemi sociali. Fondamenti di una teoria generale. Il Mulino, Bologna. Lynch K (1960) The Image of the City. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Lyon D (2002) La società sorvegliata. Feltrinelli, Milano. Maciocco G (ed) (1991a) La pianificazione ambientale del paesaggio. FrancoAngeli, Milano. Maciocco G (1991b) Le dimensioni ambientali della pianificazione urbana. In: Maciocco G (ed) Le dimensioni ambientali della pianificazione urbana. FrancoAngeli, Milano. Maciocco (ed) (1994) La città, la mente, il piano. FrancoAngeli, Milano. Maciocco G (1995a) Dominanti ambientali e progetto dello spazio urbano. Urbanistica, n. 104. Maciocco G (1995b) Ritorno a Ithaca. In: Huber A (ed) Territorio, sito, architettura. Lybra immagine, Milano. Maciocco G (1996) La città in ombra. In: Maciocco G, La città in ombra. FrancoAngeli, Milano. Maciocco G (1998) (ed) I luoghi dell’acqua e della terra / Les lieux de l’eau et de la terre. Lybra Immagine, Milano. Maciocco G (1999) Il progetto ambientale dei territori esterni: una prospettiva per la pianificazione provinciale. Urbanistica 112. Maciocco G (2000) Wastelands. Plurimondi, n. 3. Maciocco G (2003) Prendere coscienza della metropoli. Parametro 248. Maciocco G (2008) The territorial future of the city, Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg, New York. Maciocco G, Tagliagambe S (1998) La città possibile. Dedalo, Bari. Magnaghi A (2000) Il progetto locale. Bollati Boringhieri, Torino.

References 193 Magnaghi A (2005) The Urban Village: A Charter for Democracy and Local Selfsustainable Development. Zed Books, London. Magris C (1999) Utopia e disincanto. Garzanti, Milano. Mandich G (2000) Space Under Strain. Plurimondi, n. 3. Manieri Elia M (2006) Il plurivalente senso del rudere. In: Billeci B, Gizzi S, Scudino S (eds) Il rudere tra conservazione e reintegrazione. Gangemi, Roma. Martin H (1980) Dérive in Cartes et figures de la terre. Centre Pompidou, Paris. Maspero F (1990) Les passagers du Roissy-Express (photographies d’Anaik Frantz). Seuil, Paris. Maturana H (1988) Tutto ciò che è detto è detto da un osservatore. In: Thompson W J (ed) Ecologia e autonomia. La nuova biologia: implicazioni epistemologiche e politiche. Feltrinelli, Milano. Maturana F J, Varela H R (1987) Scienza e tecnologia della cognizione. Hopefulmonster, Firenze. McClung W A (1983) The Architecture of Paradise. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Menna F (2006) Tela celeste, nastro celeste. In: Grilletti Migliavacca A (ed) Ulassai, da Legarsi alla montagna alla Stazione dell’Arte. Arte Duchamp, Cagliari. Merrifield A (1994) Public Space, Integration and Exclusion in Urban Life. City vol. 5–6. Merrifield A, Swyngedouw E (1997) The Urbanization of Injustice. New York University Press, New York. Merten R K (1957) Social Theory and Social Structure. Free Press, Glencoe. Michelson W (1998) Planning and the Sustainability of Everyday Life in Megacities. Ekistics, vol. 65, n. 388–390. Migliaccio C (1996) Musica e utopia. La filosofia della musica di Ernst Bloch. Guerini e ass., Milano. Miles M (1997) Art, Space and the City. Routledge, London and New York. Morin E (1991) La Mèthode IV. Les idèes. Leur habitat, leur vie, leurs moeurs, leur organisation. Seuil, Paris. Morrissey L (2000) Wasting the Land: Homelessness, Modernity and America. Plurimondi, n. 3. Mossa V (1973) La casa smeraldina. Almanacco di Sardegna, Editrice Dessì, Sassari. Mumford L (1922) The Story of Utopias. Boni & Liveright, New York (reprinted in 1962 The Virgin Press, Compass Books, New York). Mumford L (1938a) The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Brace and World, New York. Mumford L (1938b) The Culture of Cities. Secker and Warburg, London. Musil R (1954) The Man Without Qualities. Pan Books, London (original work Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften was published in 1930–1932). Nicolin P (1994) Six interviews d’architectes. Le Moniteur Architecture, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Nicolin P, Repishti F (2003) Dizionario dei nuovi paesaggisti. Skira, Milano.

194 References Nivola C (1993) Ho bussato alle porte di questa città meravigliosa. Stampa Pisano, Cagliari. Norberg-Schulz C (1979) Genius Loci. Electa Mondadori, Milano. Nouvel J (1994) Berlin. The Meeting Line. In: Dethier J, Guiheux, A. (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Olivetti A (1960) La città dell’uomo. Edizioni di Comunità, Torino. Oyama S (1985) The Ontogeny on Information. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Palermo P C (1992) Interpretazioni dell’analisi urbanistica. FrancoAngeli, Milano. Palermo P C (1993) Rilevanza e limiti di alcune attuali interpretazioni urbanistiche dei temi paesaggistico-ambientali. Relazione al Convegno Internazionale “Parchi e paesaggi”, Bergamo, 4–6 Giugno. Pareyson L (1988) Estetica. Teoria della formatività. Bompiani, Milano. Park R E (1994) The City. Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL. Pérez-Gómez A (1994) Chora: the Space of Architectural Representation. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Pérez-Gómez A (1996a) Espacios Intermedios. In: de Solà-Morales I et al. (eds) Presente y futuros. Arquitectura en la ciudades. Presente y Futuros. Actar, Barcelona, 1996. Pérez-Gómez A (1966b) La notion de contexte en architecture. Le sens du lieu. Ousia, Bruxelles. Pessoa F (1982) Livro do desassossego por Bernardo Soares. Atica, Lisboa. Piccardo C (2001). In: Bonazzi G, Gargani A G (eds) Dal decision making al sense making. Pluriverso 2. Pittaluga P (2000) Waste Lands, Waste Bodies and “Speed of Liberation”. Plurimondi, n. 3. Pittaluga P (2008) Images of Local Societies and Projects for Space. In: Maciocco G (ed) The Territorial Future of the City. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York. Poli D (2000) Taking Care. Plurimondi, n. 3. Portoghesi P (1975) Le inibizioni dell’architettura moderna. Laterza, Bari. Proshansky H M (1987) The Field of Environmental Psychology: Securing its Future. In: Stokols D, Altman I (eds), Handbook of Environmental Psychology, Wiley, New York. Proshansky H M, Fabian A, Kaminoff R (1983) Place Identity, Physical World, Socialization of the Self. Journal on Environmental Psychology, n. 3. Raffestin C (1986) Ecogénèse territoriale et territorialitè. In : Aurica F, Brunet R (eds) Espaces, jeux et enjeux. Fayard, Paris. Ray N (ed) (2005) Architecture and its Ethical Dilemmas. Routledge, London and New York. Restany P (1994) La ville réduite à ses peaux et déchets. Textes choisis par S. Duplaix. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Riesman D (1950) The Lonely Crowd. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

References 195 Ritzer G (2000) El incanto de un mundo desencantado. Ariel Sociedad Económica, Barcelona. Romains J (1908) La Vie unanime, poésie. Abbaye, Paris. Roncayolo M (1980) “Territorio”. Enciclopedia Einaudi, Einaudi, Torino, p. 225. Rossi A (1966) L’architettura della città. Marsilio, Padova. Rouillard D (1994) Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Exodus ou les prisionners volontaires de l’architecture, 1972. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, pp 436–7. Rowe C, Koetter F (1978) Collage City. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Rykwert J (1980) The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Sachs I (1988) Vulnerability of Giant Cities and the Life Lottery. In: Dogan M, Kasarda J D C The Metropolis Era, vol. I, A World of Giant Cities. Sage, Newbury Park, CA. Sagalyn L B (2002) Times Square Roulette. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Salerno R A (2003) Landscapes of Abandonment: Capitalism, Modernity and Estrangement. State University of New York Press, New York. Sassen S (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Sassen S (1994a) Metropole: Grenzen eines Begriffes. In: Fuchs G, Moltmann B, Prigge W (eds), Mythos Metropole. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt. Sassen S (1994b) Cities in a World Economy. Pine Forge Press, Thousand Oaks, CA. Sassen S (1996) Losing Control?: Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization. Columbia University Press, New York. Sassen S (1999) Migranten, Siedler, Flüchtlinge. Von der Massenauswanderung zur Festung Europa. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt. Sassen S (1998) Globalization and its Discontents. The New Press, New York, Sassen S (2002) Global Networks-Linked Cities. Routledge, London and New York. Sassen S (2004) Il ruolo dell’Europa potrebbe essere cruciale. Liberazione 8 September. Sassen S (2006a) Authority, Rights. From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Sassen S (2006b) Perché le città sono importanti. In : Burdett R (ed) Città. Architettura e società. 10 Mostra Biennale Internazionale di Architettura di Venezia, Marsilio, Venezia. Sauvy A (1975) El fin de los ricos. Dopesa, Barcelona. Scott A J, Soja E W (eds) (1996) The City. Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. University of California Press, Los Angeles, CA. Secchi B (1994) Atlanti e morfologie insediative. Seminario nazionale “Programma Itaten. Indagini sulle Trasformazioni degli Assetti del Territorio Nazionale”, Bologna, 28 giugno. Sennett R (1970) The Uses of Disorder. Knopf, New York. Sennett R (1991) The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. Faber and Faber, London. Sennett R (1998) The Corrosion of Character. Norton Books, London, 1998.

196 References Sennett R (2003) Respect in a World of Inequality. Norton & Company, London and New York. Sernini M (1987) Il confine inesistente della città - Un caso di saggezza del legislatore. Archivio di Studi Urbani e Regionali, n. 30. Sernini M (1989) La città smorta e il tenente Colombo. Archivio di Studi Urbani e Regionali, n. 35. Shepheard P (1997) The Cultivated Wilderness. Or, What is Landscape?. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Sieverts T (2002) Cities Without Cities: an Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt. Routledge, London and New York. Simmel G (1961) The Metropolis and the Mental Life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. (original work Die Grosstädte und Geistesleben was published in 1903). Siza A (1994) Domaine de Malagueira, Evora. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et Architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Soja E W (1986) Taking Los Angeles apart: some fragments of a critical human geography. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Soja E (1988) Postmodern Geographies, Verso, London. Soja E W (1989) Postmodern Geography; the Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, London. Soja, E W ( 1996) Thirdspace Journey to Los Angeles and other real-andimagined places. Blackwell, Oxford. Soria y Mata A (1882) La ciudad lineal. El Progreso, 10 April. Sorkin M (1992) Variations on aTheme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. Hill and Wang, New York. Soutif D (1994) Topes et Tropes. Le Plan de Ville et la Référence. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Speak S E (2000) Small Voices/Big Lessons: Children’s Involvement in the Urban Regeneration of Marginalised Places. Plurimondi, n. 3. Steiner F (1994) Sprawl Can Be Good. Planning, n. 60. Steiner F (1995) Dal Cadillac desert al Saturn desert, ovvero, possiamo pianificare un buono sprawl? Territorio, n. 18. Steiner G (1975) After Babel, Oxford Univeristy Press, Oxford. Stokols D, Altman I (eds) (1987) Handbook of Environmental Psychology. Wiley, New York. Tabucchi A (1986) Bernardo Soares, uomo inquieto e insonne. Prefazione a Fernando Pessoa F Il libro dell’inquietudine. Feltrinelli, Milano. Tabucchi A (1994) Sostiene Pereira. Feltrinelli, Milano. Tagliagambe S (1994) La crisi delle teorie tradizionali di rappresentazione della conoscenza. In: Maciocco G (ed) La città, la mente, il piano. FrancoAngeli, Milano. Tagliagambe S (2000) Desolate Lands, Desolate Minds: The Therapeutic Function of the Project. Plurimondi, n. 3.

References 197 Tagliagambe S (2006a) La politica alta cammina su un intreccio di fili colorati. In: Migliavacca Grilletti A G (ed) Ulassai, da Legarsi alla montagna alla Stazione dell’Arte. Arte Duchamp, Cagliari. Tagliagambe S (2006b) Come leggere Florenskij. Bompiani, Milano. Tagliagambe S (2008) Landscape as a Regenerative Structure of a Fragmented Territory. In: Maciocco G (ed) Urban Landscape Perspectives. SpringerVerlag Berlin, Heidelberg, New York. Taut B (1920) Die Auflösung der Städte. Volkwaang, Hagen. Thorndyke P W (1983) Spatial Cognition and Reasoning. In: Harvey J (ed) Cognition, Social Behavior and the Environment. Herlbaum, Hillsdale, NY. Tjallingii S P (2000) Ecology on the Edge: Landscape and Ecology Between Town ad Country. Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 48, nn. 3–4, 1 May. Ursprung P (2004) Architecture under Pressure: l’eredità di Earth Art. Focus. 9 Mostra Internazionale di Architettura, Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, Venezia. Vacca R (1974) La morte di megalopoli. Mondadori, Milano. Varela F (1987) Scienza e tecnologia della cognizione. Hopeful Monster, Firenze. Varela F (1989) Connaitre les sciences cognitives. Tendences et perspectives. Seuil, Paris. Varela F, Thompson E, Rosh E (1991) The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience. The MIT press, MA. Vayssiére B (1994) Mégastructures. In: Dethier J, Alain G (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Vecchi B (2004) Le ‘Città morte’ di Mike Davis, tra fantascienza, filosofia e ecologia sociale. Il Manifesto, 5 October. Vela J (1992) Towards an Articulations of Social Identity and Social Representation. Proceeding of I International Conference on Social Representations, Ravello. Venturi R, Izenour S, Scott Brown D (1972) Learning from Las Vegas. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Villani T (2000) Heterotopies and Metropolitan Orders. Plurimondi, n. 3. Virilio P (1989) La Machine de Vision. Galilée, Paris. Virilio P (1991) The Overexposed City. In: The Lost Dimension. Semiotext, Nueva York, 1991. Virilio P (2004) Ville Panique. Ailleurs commende ici. Editions Galilée, Paris. Vitruve Les dix livres d’architecture, corrigés et traduits en 1684 par Claude Perrault. Pierre Mardaga Editeur, Paris. Von Glasersfeld E (1992) Linguaggio e comunicazione nel costruttivismo radicale. Clup, Milano. Vos W, Meekes H (1999) Trends in European Cultural Landscape Development: Perspectives for a Sustainable Future. Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 46, nos. 1–3, 15 December. Warren S (1994) Disneyfication of the Metropolis: Popular Resistance in Seattle. Journal of Urban Affairs, vol. 16. Webber M (1996) L’urbain sans lieu ni bornes, La Tour d’Aigues. Éditions de l’aube, Paris.

198 References Welsch W (1998) Un’estetica oltre l’estetica. Incontro di studio: Riconfigurare l’estetica? Verso la definizione di un nuovo quadro d’ insieme, Università di Siena, Arezzo, 19–20 giugno. “Pionta” – Viale Cittadini, 18, Aula Guido d’Arezzo. Wenders W (1992) The Act of Seeing. Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt. Williamson T, Alperovitz G, Imbroscio D L (2002) Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era. Routledge, London and New York. Winograd T, Flores F (1987) Calcolatori e conoscenza. Mondadori, Milano. Wittgenstein L (1958) Philosophical Investigations. Anscombe E, Rhees R (eds), Blackwell, Oxford, 1958. Originally published as Philosophische Untersuchungen. 1953. Worpole K, Greenhalgh L (1996) The Freedom of the City. Demos, London. Wrede S, Adams W H (eds) (1991) Denatured Visions, Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Young I (2000) Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford University Press, New York. Zampieri S (1990) Utopia, conversazione infinita. L’Indice, a. VII, n. 3, March. Ziparo A (2001–2002) Reti di luoghi antiglobalizzazione: le matrici strutturaliste del progetto locale. Ora locale, indice n. 27, dicembre 2001–febbraio 2002. Zoppi C (2000) A Two-Stage Hedonic Model. Plurimondi, n. 3.

Index

A-contextual, 13 Aesthetic sensitivity, 162 Aesthetisation, 88 Africa, 171 Agglomeration economies, 68 of highly-specialised services, 70 Aggregation of specialised service, 69 Agorà, 7, 51, 136 Aisthesis, 105, 109 Alfama, 121 Americanism, 51, 76 Ancien régime, 90 Ancient centres, 23 Anomia, 43 Anthropic and natural patrimony, 93 Anthropology, 125 Antiurban hypothesis, 29 Apartment-men, 108 Aporia of the set-up model, 93 Apotheosis of modernisation, 41 Archaeological park, 64 Archaeology of urbanity, 156 Archaic landscapes, 57 Archetypal events, 46 Architectonic simulations, 55 Architectural complexes, 77 cult, 28 methods, 10 modernism, 14 reality, 13 simulation, 62 Archizoom, 71 Art of observing, 101 Asia, 171

Atlanta, 112 Autopoietic, 76 Autopoietic capacity, 113, 119 Avignon-Clouet, 16 Ban-lieu, 79, 81, 83, 84 Barcelona, 14, 25, 26, 141 Bare city, 81, 82 Bare life, 82 Baudelairian flâneur, 26, 99 Berlin, 71, 122 Berne, 115 Besòs, 141 Bigness, 13 Bio-climatic architectures, 168 Biopolitical paradigm, 83 Border areas, 137 Bosnia, 156 Boundaries, 18, 45, 61, 62 Brasilia, 23 Brazil, 171 Brazzaville, 81 British Museum, 71 Brussels, 115 Bureaucratic structures, 92 Business park, 70 Buskers, 170 Cameroons, 82 Canavese League of Councils, 32 Canberra, 112 Cantor, 103 Capital cities, 148 Cartographer’s sensitivity, 170, 174 Central city, 45 control, 68 199

200 Index nucleus of a territorial policy, 163 places, 60, 146 space, 7 Central Park, 131 Chandigarn, 23 Chaos, 85 Chechnya, 156 Chernobyl, 127 Chicago, 91 Chicago School of Sociology, 75 China, 171 Cities enclose, 134 Citizen/non-citizen, 60 City adrift, 1, 7, 41 anaesthetised, 112 belongs to the country, 148 centre, 61 without city, 99, 124, 167 as a collective, 141 is the community, 106 construction, 29, 109 is of the country, 160 culture, 133 deconstruction, 25 of the desert, 73 disciplines, 139 edges, 78 of flows, 137, 142, 161 of immigrants, 77 is all that is of interest, 166 is life, 106 network, 35, 36 of places, 138, 142, 161 port, 153 project, 27, 64, 118, 135, 139, 142, 148, 150, 153, 159, 168, 174, 180 regeneration, 80 as self-organised fact, 141 as a significant environment, 71 as a space of communication, 97 as space of the public sphere, 97 spaces, 146 of stone, 7

territory, 25, 154, 170 is of the territory, 161 of tomorrow, 84 transformation, 72 of the 20th Century, 53 City’s no-man’s-land, 79 CityWalk, 63 Ciudad Lineal, 22 Civitas, 58, 89, 105, 158, 162 Classical city, 54, 77 concept of the city, 18 ecologism, 172 reason, 15 Classicism, 5 Clear and open identity, 93 Coastal strip, 148 Coevolutive approach, 16 perspective, 15 Cognitive conception of the project, 107 mapping, 11 maps, 11 picture, 165 process, 137, 142 science, 104, 146 Collage city, 52, 123 Collective action, 145 awareness, 33 conscience, 164, 167 construction of a territorial city, 144, 146 fruition, 109 ideal, 138 imagination, 163 memory, 130 sensitivity, 166 services, 30 space, 113 values, 104, 108 Collserola, 141 Colombia, 78 Combas, 128

Index 201 Common humanity, 86 knowledge, 159 places, 106 sense, 111, 145, 174 Communications, 121 Community, 29, 30, 32, 33, 52, 61, 70, 71, 75, 92, 106, 108, 126, 130, 163 planning, 30 processes, 33 Compact city, 169 model of the city, 34 Complex city, 89 Complexity, 86, 145, 149, 172 Comprehensive regional plan, 30 Concept of city, 152 of city-place, 10 of collective good, 110, 174 of context, 10, 12, 15 of denotation and connotation, 147 of ethics, 18 of intermediate space, 83, 84, 136–138, 141 of place, 10, 12 project, 159 of regional balance, 31 space, 122 of tradition, 138 Conceptual architecture, 146 artist, 59, 115, 128, 170 plane, 153 space, 1, 150 Conflictive, 85 Connotative character, 165 Conscience of a city, 137 Consequence of modernity, 158 Conservative utopia, 3, 22–24, 27, 60 vision, 55 Construction of the city, 30 of the identity, 12

Consumerism, 42, 43, 51, 84, 105, 106 Contaminated lands, 161 Contemporary, 85, 102 amnesia, 105 apocalypse, 42 architecture, 44 city, 8, 46, 50, 138, 156 contradiction, 169 life, 86 man, 59, 101 metropolis, 85, 137 modalities of urban development, 35 post-cities, 53, 161 public space, 98, 133, 135, 136, 138, 141, 142, 165, 168 spatial condition, 123 urban condition, 104, 170 urban dimension, 44 urban landscape, 157, 170 urban theatre, 35 Context, 24 as fiction, 47 Contextual approach, 14 architecture, 10 Contextualisation, 12 Continuous city, 153 Copenhagen, 14 Copy of the copy of cities, 54 Cosmopolitan, 97 Costa Smeralda, 46, 47 Counterspace, 131, 138–140, 144, 148, 155, 161, 163, 168 Country is of the city, 160 Crete, 48 Crisis of the context of proximity, 9 of ethics, 21 of the ethics of proximity, 97 in the space of proximity, 97 Critical belonging, 110 Criticism of naturalism, 103 of the modern city, 71

202 Index Crowded environment, 138 Cult entertainment, 64 Cultural consumerism, 105–107 pluralism, 80 self-preservation, 52 Culturalist positions, 25 Culture of pleasure, 70 of a territory, 162 of urban knowledge, 103 Cyber cities, 77 Cyber-Fascism, 75 Cyberpunk, 27 Cyberspace, 8, 62, 78, 156 Dammerstock, 117 Dearticulation of the traditional city, 50 Decline of modernity, 80 Deconstructionist positions, 104 Deconstruction of the European city, 22 Deindustrialisation, 78 Delfi, 50 Delta Metropolis, 145, 146 Demographic density, 34 increase, 51 pressure, 100 Denotative character, 165 Dense metropolises, 134, 161 Dependency, 90 Deregionalisation, 51 Dérive, 11, 51, 115 Description of the real, 166 Design, 15, 18, 32, 63, 91, 118, 145 Desolate space, 158 Despina, 143 Destiny of the city, 72 of moral reason, 19, 20 Destruction of local cultures and economies, 93 Deterritorialisation, 93 Dialogical aperture of the project, 174

Differential quality, 53 quality of the city, 50 quality of territories, 154, 162 Dilation, 17, 18, 35, 152, 167, 169 of spaces, 51, 52 of the urban condition, 18 of the urban realm, 174 of the urbs, 169 Disappearance of urbanity, 23 Discomposed city, 7, 97 Discovery of urban ecology, 52 Disembedding, 19 Disneyland, 62 Disseminated urban form, 34 Dissociated world, 80 Dissolution of the city, 64 Distance communications, 34 Distribution of activities, 68 Disurbanists, 23 Diversity of the environment, 31 Dorian Gray metamorphosis, 56 metaphor, 98 syndrome, 56, 98 Dormitory city, 127 Dorset, 27 Douala, 82 Double spatial grid, 27 Downtown, 73 Dual centre-suburbs city, 78 Dynamic traditionality, 120 Earth Art, 129 Ecological determinants, 75 Ecological scientific knowledge, 167 Ecologists, 92 Ecology of urban life, 159 Economic globalisation, 87 Economy of poverty, 80 of scale, 36 Eco-social plan, 94 Eden-Olympia, 70 Edge, 82, 83, 141, 155, 157, 158–160

Index 203 Edge spaces, 157, 159, 160 Elitist segregation, 72, 99 Emigrants, 83 Empty spaces, 151–153 Enclave, 48, 63, 69, 80, 91 End of the city, 81 of urbanism, 29 Endogenous transformation, 159 Entertainment, 51, 52, 63, 64, 105, 157 urbanistic, 63 Environment, 93 Environmental component, 168 conception of the settlement project, 174 control, 169 counterpoint, 161 determinism, 168, 172 dimension, 48, 148, 166 disasters, 73 dominants, 17, 33, 148, 167, 168 formalism, 172 functionalism, 169, 172 interdependence, 161 policies, 21 processes, 21, 48 project, 17, 33, 167 quality, 36, 161, 162 signs, 153 system, 33 Ephemeral, 45, 97 Epistemology of effective action, 128 Espace vécu, 11 Ethical intentionality, 33 solution, 19 Ethics, 93, 108, 174 of proximity, 18, 97 Ethiopia, 171 Ethnic quarters of migration, 80 segregation, 80 Ethnocentrism, 174 European city, 23, 100, 123

European “wastelands”, 161 Evolution of the city, 108 Exclusion, 83 Exile, 86 Existing city, 13, 25, 44 Exodus, 71 Experience expert knowledge, 144 of memory, 138 of the city, 8, 50, 51, 105, 155 Explosion of the city, 1, 7 External city, 123 dimension, 143 environment, 133 territories, 161, 163, 165 Externity, 99, 105, 134, 140, 150, 160, 164 Extraterritorial features, 48 Factors of localisation, 36 Favelas, 79 Feel at home, 132 Fiction, 14, 59 Financial power, 87 Flâneur, 26, 50, 51, 62, 99, 101, 113, 115 Flat Man, 79, 108 Florida, 61 Fordism, 52, 76 Form process, 145 of segregation, 82 of urbanity, 148 Fortified quarters of the professionals, 73 Fortified spaces, 84 Fortresses, 78 Fourth Migration, 30 Fractal city, 52 Fragmentary glance, 128 Fragmentation of the city, 80 Frankfurt, 79 Fuck context, 13 Functional city, 23 Functionalism, 4, 41, 51, 71

204 Index Future of the city, 25, 32, 119, 167 urbanity, 155 Futurists, 3 Gallura, 153 Garden city, 13, 23, 30 Gated quarters, 72 The Gates, 131 Generating structures, 26 Generative engine of urbanisation, 41 structure, 141, 148 Generic city, 1, 41, 81, 97 Genesis of urban behaviours, 22 Genius loci, 12 Gentrification, 55, 72 Geographical dispersion, 68 form of the map, 116 Geographic environment, 11 Geography, 11, 20, 29, 35, 60, 71, 76, 77, 79, 97, 102, 127, 167, 170 of city centralities, 60 of poverty, 79 German Elendsviertel, 79 Gestaltists, 147 Gestalt theory, 12 Ghetto, 81, 84 Ghettoisation processes, 90 Global capitalism, 86 city, 67, 70, 74, 77, 87, 146 city-region, 67, 146 economy, 67, 74 environment, 19 flows, 89 identity of cities, 72 infrastructures, 88 interchange, 7 market, 68 networks, 69 science, 19 Globalisation, 35, 87 of activities, 134

processes, 67 of the local, 79 Gold Standard, 171 Grand Prix de Rome, 15 Greek polis, 85 theatre, 141 Grid, 27, 77, 79, 128, 141, 148 Hetero-directed man, 2 by the market, 126 by mass organisation, 140 Heterogeneous individuals, 85 Heterotope, 80, 164 Hierarchy of values, 174 High density city, 161 density metropolis, 161 level professionals, 69 profit specialised service companies, 69 Historic centre, 26, 61 city, 23, 43, 81, 106, 122 patrimony, 27 quarter, 55, 62 and social antecedents, 120 History as fiction, 64 of urban forms, 24 Hollywood, 63 Homère, 122 Homo absconditus, 5 Hong Kong, 79 Horizon of modernity, 55, 60 House, 19, 46, 49, 58, 83, 106, 110, 114, 128, 130, 144, 151, 168 Housing and Regional Planning Report, 31 Human condition, 84 dignity, 90 dimensions for the city, 128 ecology, 75

Index 205 perception, 12 resources, 83 settlement, 22 society, 93 territoriality, 109 Hyper market, 55, 62 mobile, 68 protection, 81 reality, 62 IBA Emscher Park, 159 Iconic density, 148 Ideal city, 80 Identity, 18, 33, 157 of man, 12 of place, 12 Illuminist architecture, 9 Image of labyrinth, 47 of the city, 51 Incapacity to ‘live’ the city, 112 to ‘represent’ the city, 58 to ‘see’ the city, 58 Inclusion, 2, 18, 20, 83, 159 Independence, 90 Individual ideal, 138 Individual’s identity, 91 Industrial city, 34, 53, 138 metropolis, 26, 53 revolution, 22, 138 Inequality, 85, 146 Information era, 74 technology, 57 Infosphere, 74 Infrastructure, 67, 78, 87, 88, 146, 149, 160, 162, 163 Inhabitants, 42 Inhabited territory, 123 Inheritance of the modern movement, 28 Inseparability of the biological and the cultural dimensions, 171

Interactive knowledge, 144 Intercity geography, 35 Interconnections, 160 Intermediate space, 83, 84, 136–138, 141 Interregional migrations, 149 Interstitial spaces, 88, 137, 157 Intertextuality, 15 Introspective spaces, 138 Islands of perfect efficiency, 111 Italian megastructures, 25 Jet Society, 46 Junkspace, 43 Karlsruhe, 117 Kingdom of the urban, 35 Knowledge for action, 144, 146 Korea, 78 Labyrinth, 48 as absence of centre, 49 as an archetype, 50 as defence, 49 as enclave, 48 as enclosure, 48 as a form unfinished mandala, 49 as game, 47 image, 46 as a primeval phenomenon, 50 as prison, 48, 50 as screen, 46 as a spiral, 49 Landscape, 11, 15, 19, 50, 102, 107, 138, 139, 141 architecture, 156 artists, 103 as desert, 57 development, 57 as historic museum, 57 as industry, 57 object, 165 as ruin, 57 as supermarket, 57 Las Vegas, 72 Lebanon, 156

206 Index Leonidov, 71 Liminal space, 136 Limits of rationality, 19 of urban development, 28 Linear city, 22, 71 Liquefaction of the city, 1, 22 Liquidateur, 3 Liquidatory utopia, 3, 4, 22, 23, 27, 33, 36, 43, 53, 60 Lisbon, 105 Llobregat, 141 Local capacity, 163 communities, 156, 159 contexts, 110, 174 economy, 21 identity, 61 landscape, 19 organisational scale, 27 scale, 97, 110 sentiment, 19 Logic of mobility, 51 Los Angeles, 62 Loss of centre, 50 the city, 54, 97, 98 place, 50 Low-density city, 30, 161, 165 territories, 134, 161 Ludic historicism, 24, 169 Luxury ghettoes, 81, 82 Macrospace of the city, 80 Maddalena archipelago, 109 Maeander, 49 Manhattan, 77, 79 Marginal areas, 137 communities, 159 culture, 159 economies, 21 humanity, 27 space, 158 Market city, 141

Marketing control, 68 Mass consumerism, 42 consumption, 54, 112 Medieval city, 61 commune, 85 society, 61 Mega-cities, 78, 156 Megalopolis, 27, 36, 76 Megastructures, 24 Melun-Séart, 152 Memory, 122, 139, 157 Mental construct, 158 images, 168 map, 82, 170 nomadism, 20 Metamorphosis of the city, 18 Metaphor, 142 of the artifice and enclosure, 48 of the modern citizen, 86 of space, 85 Metropolis, 26, 30, 31, 53, 69, 72–74, 85, 87, 120, 134, 135, 139, 149, 161 form, 74 of illusions, 72 Metropolitan areas, 35, 60 centres, 31 city, 104 condition, 85 conviviality, 123 explosion, 31 ideal, 71 infrastructure, 146, 149 neo-pantheism, 172 network, 148 planning, 31 post-cities, 162 society, 31 space, 145 universe, 161 Mexico, 112 Microgeography, 141

Index 207 Microscale, 106 Microspace of quarters, 80 Middle Ages, 2 Militarisation of the territory, 75 Mimetic urban forms, 112 Minimal social life, 84 Mnemonic city, 62 Mobilisation of knowledge, 144 Mobility, 7, 8, 18, 35, 45, 51, 74, 83, 105, 108, 111, 121, 123, 146, 162, 169 Model of a complete city, 23 of urbanity, 22 Modern architecture, 43 city, 23, 41, 50, 139 condition, 44 fear of exposure, 85 individualism, 135 rationalism, 71 urban space, 45 Modernists, 14 Modernity categories, 84 Modern Movement, 9 Monte Carasso, 145, 147 Monte Moro, 48 Monumentalised classic public spaces, 88 public spaces, 138 Monumental spaces, 133 Moral dimension, 19 function, 27, 112 problems, 20 reason, 20, 97 Mores, 170 Morphism, 98 Morphogenesis of urban space, 22 Multicultural migration, 79 society, 92 Multidisciplinary aperture of the project, 174 Multifunctional landscapes, 57

Mutation, 139 Myth, 43, 46 of the green, 48 Mythical notion of nature, 138 realities, 46 Narrative fiction, 72 National/global dichotomy, 87 Natural environment, 141, 148 landscapes, 57 places, 141 Nature, 172 conservation, 57 neighbourhood, 79, 82 Neo-community utopia, 92 Neo-historicist suggestions, 24 Neoindustrial technopolises, 78 Neo-traditionalist, 28 Network, 20, 69, 74, 76, 78, 100, 123, 148, 160, 173 of cities, 35, 36 city, 34, 35 of global cities, 35 metaphor, 35 of places, 89, 92, 93, 134 New ecology of the mind, 158 fetish, 54 modalities of spatial life, 21 organisation of Earth space, 78 suburbanism, 29 urban elites, 1, 98 New Opera House, 15 New Urbanism, 27, 28 New York, 74, 130 Nietzschean suggestions, 137 Nodes, 70, 71 No-man’s-land, 137 Non citizens, 98, 135 city, 8, 25, 46, 81, 98 negotiable values, 166 places, 80, 83, 129 resolute plan, 33

208 Index urban, 8, 155 urban environment, 31 North American city, 75 Nostalgic architectonic forms, 28 Notional worlds, 55 Object inhabitants, 127 Objective knowledge, 125 Occupation of space, 83, 84 Official city, 81 Olbia, 153 Old city, 58, 73, 114 Oligarchy, 69 Open system, 175 Operational closure, 143 Orange Country, 78 Organic metaphors, 112 Ornamental urbanistics, 172 Orwellian-style, 75 Orwellian universe, 72 Oslo, 15 Outer space, 79 Overexposed city, 46 Palestine, 156 Parallel Quarters, 71 Paris, 14, 25 Parisian ban-lieues, 83 Park, 43, 49, 64, 70, 141 city, 45 Partage d’exotisme, 156 Percements, 14, 26 Perception, 8, 12, 37, 56, 102, 113, 123, 137, 143, 147, 155, 175 of the space, 11 Perceptive worlds, 55, 56 Péripheriques, 17 Peripherisation of the city, 29 Periurbanisation processes, 160 Permeable city, 88 Perspective of urbanity, 158 Perspectives for the city, 128 Pervasive geography, 170 shopping, 2, 41 Phrygian fields, 49

Physical environment, 12, 33, 166 relationship, 20, 97 space, 8, 106, 130, 132, 155 Physiognomy of the city, 52 Physiology of action, 147 of perception, 147 Pietas, 158 Place of co-presence, 174 identity, 13 of invariances, 162 rich in nature and history, 110 Planetary gardener, 19 Planning, 46 good sprawl, 30 process, 30, 124 Plurality, 74, 136, 178 Pluri-city, 36 Pluricultural urban dimension, 80 Pluriethnic, 78 Poetically inhabits man, 62 Poetry of insomnia, 108 Polis, 85, 86, 172 Political action, 87 Polycentric development of cities, 73 model, 30 Polycentrism of metropolises, 73 Possible city, 103 Post city, 43, 112 mass media science fiction, 20 modern city, 25 modernist architects, 24 modern landscapes, 56 modern universes, 57 Post-industrial culture, 138 landscape, 159 metropolis, 148 Poundbury, 27 Pre-industrial city, 24, 26, 100 European city, 148

Index 209 Pre-urbanists, 32 Privatisation of access, 49 of public spaces, 72 Problem-solving, 156, 159 Process of civitas, 131 of conception and production of space, 17 of construction of identity, 162 of deconstruction of the European city, 25 of disgregation of the European city, 24 of integration, 59 of interaction, 146 of interpretation, 167 organisation, 162 of“ ruination”, 163 of simplification, 138 of social cohesion, 131 of transformation, 124 of urbanisation, 31 Processual character, 146 Production of segregation, 78 Project, 2, 15, 16, 23, 33, 46, 67, 144, 167 for space, 16, 44, 46, 115, 135, 141 of the city, 102, 169 for the city, 20, 25, 49, 103, 108, 111, 126, 128, 132, 135, 143, 145, 152, 154, 162, 166 of the future, 149 for the global society, 23 Projectual action, 145 activity, 174 conception, 165 experience, 109 interaction, 145 perspective, 162 process, 142 Projectuality, 103, 108, 109, 124, 125, 179 Proletariat, 69 Prospects of territories, 20

Protective conservation, 21 ecosystems, 169 Proteiform development of the city, 73 Protestant Reform, 2 Proximity, 1, 20, 36, 39, 97, 106 Pseudotechnical utopias, 24 Psychogeographic theory, 11 Psychotope, 69 Public dimension, 89, 135 life, 85 park, 49, 138 space, 2, 48, 88, 138 sphere, 85, 136, 166, 167 Quartz city, 74 Quintessence of modernity, 51 Radburn, 30 Radical architecture, 72 constructivism, 124, 142 Italian criticism, 71 modernity, 19, 21 Radiocentric, 26, 148 model, 27 scheme, 14, 27 Ramifications of the city, 128 Reality and possibility, 125 Real virtuality, 112 Re-appropriation practices, 19 Recent urbanisation, 81 Recreation centres, 111 residence, 57 Recumbent city, 7 Rediscover the city, 99 Rediscovery, 52, 163 of nature in the city, 52 of regionality, 52 Reductionism, 93 Reflective planning, 21 sliding, 4, 44

210 Index Reflexive nature of modernity, 19 Regeneration project, 143 Region, 9, 31, 32, 67, 146, 148, 149, 153 Regionalism, 22 Reinterpret the context, 17 Reinvent the city, 99 Rejected space, 158 Relationship between population and places, 36 Renaissance architecture, 9 Representation of context, 17 of reality, 59 of the city, 53 Representational conception of a world, 104 conception of reality, 103, 105 conception of the city, 165 dimensions, 163 position of the project, 104 theory of the mind, 104 Residential buildings, 79 Residual spaces, 137, 153 Resistant solutions, 84 utopia, 4, 5 Reterritorialisation processes, 93 Reversibility, 162 Rhetoric of walking, 116 Right to the city, 89 Ring, 14, 26 Roma Interrotta, 14, 24 Romantic enchantment, 138 Rome, 14 Ruanda, 156 Rural quality, 24 Safeguarding antiquity, 61 Saint-Sauveur, 19 Salvador de Bahia, 133 San Francisco, 45 San Paolo, 79 Sardinia, 46, 109, 130 Sardinian Gennargentu massif, 173 Saturnal planning, 30 Scalarity, 158

Scale, 13, 22, 25–27, 36, 43, 67, 79, 83, 100, 110, 134, 146, 153, 158, 164, 173, 174 Scales of urbanity, 36 Science fiction, 8, 20, 27, 42, 69, 72, 74, 75, 155 Seahaven, 61 Second version of the city, 60 See the city, 58, 103, 105, 155 Segregated city, 64, 69, 73, 97 Segregation, 79, 84 phenomena, 156 Selective polarisation, 35 Selectivity, 59, 170, 177 Self directed Renaissance man, 2 limiting ethic, 20 organisation, 32, 33, 143 referential aperture, 143, 150 reproducibility, 162 sufficiency, 90 Sense making processes, 159 of place, 105 of possibility, 124 of reality, 124 Sensitive knowledge, 113 Sensory cognition, 105, 109 experience, 112 Separation strategy, 85, 149 Service class, 69, 70 Settled community, 33 Settlement, 85 nuclei, 48 Shared social instruments, 91 values, 133 Shopping, 2, 41–45, 54, 57, 98 centre, 42, 112 city, 44, 45 economy, 42 islands, 112 malls, 54, 111 society, 57, 98 Siberian natural gas-field, 78

Index 211 Sierra Leone, 156 Simulacrum, 54 of a city, 55, 64 city, 59, 60, 62, 112, 135 like panoramas, 55 Simulated architecture, 64 city, 138 Singapore, 112 Site selection, 130 specificity, 130 Situationism, 11, 51 Situations of exclusion, 159 Skacok, 136 Slum, 63, 79 Small and medium cities, 30, 36, 134, 161 Social apocalypses, 73 character, 1 class, 54, 84 cohesion, 132 complexity, 149 contact, 135, 149 decay, 93 demand for evaluation, 166 dimension of fruition, 109 disease, 42 divisions, 69 dynamics, 90 formations, 74 fragmentation, 156 imagination, 55, 62 inequality, 72 interaction, 98, 160 learning, 103 legitimisation, 108, 128, 166, 174 mediations, 80 order, 69 paths, 81 practices, 80 project, 2 psychology, 11 relationships, 74 relations of proximity, 26

respect, 91 responsibility, 108 scale, 83 sciences, 156 segregation, 78, 81, 156 spaces, 1, 78, 98 stratifications, 77 theory, 75 tie of proximity, 84 Sociality change, 2 Society, 97 Socio economic multidimensionality, 80 geographical theories, 31 physical environment, 12 spatial form, 80 Sociological science fiction, 8 urbanistic dream, 61 Sonora region, 30 Sorgane, 25 Soul of the city, 108 Sounds of the city, 105 South Africa, 78 South America, 171 Space, 64, 100, 132 accessible, 135 of the “consumercity”, 140 of contact, 18, 30 of flows, 131 of identification, 135 organisation, 33 of relations, 130 of representation, 136 of representation of power, 135 of visibility, 136 Spatial agglomeration, 1, 98 anchorage, 166 archetype, 46 aspirations, 149 behaviours, 168 concepts, 17, 102 correlation of centrality, 148 desires, 149 equity, 146

212 Index expectations, 149 experience, 45, 149, 170 experience of the city, 51 forms, 122, 174 geometry, 148 images, 148, 149 impacts, 22 model, 26 organisation, 27, 97, 166 places, 123, 148 proximity, 9, 21, 97, 106 referent, 116 schemes, 134 segregation, 98 separation, 51 and social segregation, 72, 77 and temporal distance moral thought, 20 Spatio-temporal differences, 123 Spectacular scenes, 55 Sphere of ethics, 128, 166 Spirit of the place, 12 Sprawl, 1, 7, 8, 9, 18, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 72, 73, 97, 99, 124 Stahlex, 42 Standardisation, 111, 165 of life, 1 of urban space, 41 Stellen, 26 Sticky webs, 87 Strategic nodes, 148 place, 87 potential of the territory, 163 site, 89 Strategist’s glance, 127 Strategy, 4, 34, 35, 52, 85, 99, 101, 109, 126, 140, 149 of the glance, 104, 149 of looking, 101, 105, 107 Street politics, 89 Strength of character, 144 Structural perception, 147 Structure of possibilities, 124 Subjectivity, 157 of individuals, 89

Suburbs, 52, 79, 122 Super-American city, 53, 76, 80 Supra-local dimensions, 173 Supramonti, 173 Surrounding environment, 72 Survival strategies, 84 Sustainable, 48, 93, 173 Symbol, 104, 133, 167 of the conviviality, 106 Symbolic, 10, 24, 54, 77, 83, 104, 106, 132, 133, 135, 149, 163, 164, 167, 169, 173 dimensions, 110 signification, 110 space, 135 strategies, 83 world, 54 Synthetic space, 8, 156 System of solidarity, 80 Tactile knowledge, 109 Tago, 110 Tavolara, 153 Tcity trilogy, 42 Teheran, 112 Telecommunications networks, 36 Tele-topic, 56 Temporality, 51, 122, 174 Temporary social practices, 88 Tension between centre and suburbs, 77 Terrain vague, 88, 129, 139 Territorial behaviours, 97 city, 33, 146 conception of the city, 123 conviviality, 22 dynamics, 145 ecogenesis, 12 experience, 173 future of the city, 32 future of urban form, 25 identity, 48 marketing, 20 planning, 20, 32, 97 signs, 12

Index 213 Territorialisation capacities, 93 Territorialist project, 93 Territoriality, 7, 109, 168 Territory, 48, 97, 109, 161 active, 149 of the city, 110, 153, 160 as a deposit of the diversity of a city, 164 as enclave, 48 external to dense metropolises, 134, 161 as a“ free good”, 109 as a human condition, 170 is the place where ethos is recuperated, 165 represents the potential of the low density city, 161 rich in nature and history, 162 of urban life, 170 without a voice, 162 Thailand, 78 Theatre of relations, 106 Thematic urbanisations, 54 Thematisation, 44, 45, 134 Theme park, 45, 47, 54, 55, 62, 64, 134 Theorié de la dérive, 51 Theory of autopoietic systems, 142, 143 of intertextuality, 15 of social representations, 11 Third landscape, 139, 164 Third World, 76, 171 Thought of the synecdoche, 166 Threshold space, 136 Ticino Canton, 145 Tokyo, 79, 112 Tokyo-ga, 151 Top cities, 35 competition, 105 Topographical differentiation, 52 plan, 46 Topoi, 115 Tourist, 46, 47, 48, 49, 62, 63, 77, 105 development, 48 settlements, 49, 153

Townships, 81 Traces, 162 of the city of places, 138 Traditional city, 7, 8, 50, 62, 100 Transformation of reality, 166 True city, 62 Ulassai, 130 Uncertain city, 80, 81, 84 Under-used spaces, 89, 134 Undifferentiated urbanistics, 71 Unequal city, 71 Unequals, 85, 91 Unexpected revenge of functionalism, 53 Unité d’Habitation, 25 Unity of local policies, 32 Universalism, 86 Universal mobility, 7 Unpredictability, 145 Urban agglomeration, 68 areas, 28, 29, 60, 78, 161 art, 127 autopoiesis, 117, 118, 143 change, 70, 86, 169 chaos, 108 complexity, 23 concentration, 22, 31 condition, 88, 122, 160 congestion, 36 conscience, 155 construction, 108 conviviality, 81, 105, 106 cosmetics, 111 culture, 52 cyberspace, 62 design, 145, 169 development, 34, 156 diffusion, 29 dispersion, 122–123, 173 dynamics, 145 economies, 21 elites, 1, 67, 98, 99 environment, 27, 31, 114, 139 epic of places, 102

214 Index ethics, 22, 97, 170 experiences, 134, 148 fabric, 74, 100 flows, 138 form, 24, 153 functions, 123 geography, 35, 77 highways, 82 history, 119 image, 59, 101, 102, 157, 170 islands, 161 landscape, 11, 165, 170, 173 life, 42, 110, 139 liquefaction, 7 machine, 155, 158, 162 marketing, 162 models, 28, 34 network, 35 nuclei, 27 path, 101 perspectives, 141 plan, 59, 116, 153 politics, 89 projects, 17, 20, 67, 145, 146 quality, 27, 52, 134, 146 rationality, 155 re-aestheticisation, 52 redevelopment, 72, 74 region, 146 renewal, 24 renovation, 43 re-use, 43 revolution, 73 risk, 35 science fiction, 8, 69, 155 segregation, 1, 64, 72 services, 69 shape, 152 simulator, 63 societies, 166 space, 46, 55, 150, 153 spatial experience, 51 strategy, 34, 35, 140 structure, 36, 58, 85 surroundings, 139

system, 88, 115 theme park, 55 universe, 67, 133, 146 utopias, 126, 140 visions, 126, 128 Urbanisation models, 146 Urbanism, 13, 29 Urbanistic action, 33 architecture, 80 discipline, 71 fiction, 64 make-up, 111, 168 policies, 32, 82 projects, 73 Urbanists, 5, 93 Urbanity, 20, 22, 23, 25, 36, 92, 100, 106, 121, 148, 149, 155, 156, 158, 161 Urbs, 89, 105, 158, 166 Uri, 141 Utopia, 2, 4, 25, 71, 125 Utopian, 27, 32, 72, 110, 119, 125, 126, 140 city, 80 ideal, 126 nature, 144 plea, 1 Vast territories of nature and history, 161 Video-tourists, 105 Vienna, 14, 25, 100 Village, 83, 130, 171 Ville Machine, 23 Ville Radieuse, 13, 23 Virtual city, 7 reality, 8, 74, 156 Visible and the invisible, 137 Vision of a city, 127 Visual perception, 147 Vitality, 128 of the immigrant generations, 79

Index 215 Walled cities, 61 Wastelands, 78, 157, 161 Water extraction, 57 Welfare state reform, 90 Western civilisation, 93 Widespread, 28, 30, 34, 51, 62, 74, 146, 173 city region, 31

metropolis, 73 networks, 87 urbanisation, 30 Winnicott’s psychology, 91 Working class, 91 Worldscape of flows, 76 Zone of ambiguity, 84

Name Index

Adams, Thomas, 31 Addams, Jane, 91 Adlard, Mark, 42 Agier, Michael, 80–84 Altmeppen, Heiner, 127 Arendt, Hannah, 85, 86, 178 Argan, Giulio Carlo, 14, 24 Aristotle, 86 Arnaud, Maryvonne, 127 Augé, Marc, 80 Aymonino, Carlo, 9 Azara, Pedro, 155

Bruegmann, Robert, 34 Bruner, Jerome S., 143 Bublex, Alain, 128 Burgess, Ernest W., 75 Cabrini, Francesca Saveria, 91 Cacciari, Massimo, 18, 123, 167 Caillois, Roger, 3, 45 Calthorpe, Peter, 27, 28 Calvino, Italo, 58, 143 Campanella, Tommaso, 3 Castells, Manuel, 74 Cerdà, Ildefons, 25, 26 Chabard, Pierre, 9, 12–15 Cherchi, Placido, 3 Choay, Françoise, 13, 14, 22–26 Chomsky, Noam, 116 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 130 CIAM, 13 Cimabue, 142 Clément, Gilles, 19, 57, 139, 164 Clemente, Fernando, 33, 153 Combas, Robert, 128 Constant, 59, 170 Costa, Xavier, 7, 8, 23 Couëlle, Jacques, 47 Cragg, Tony, 127

Bagnasco, Arnaldo, 19 Balandier, Georges, 81 Ballard, Mark, 42, 69, 70 Bandinu, Bachisio, 46, 47 Banham, Reyner, 18, 25 Barthes, Roland, 15 Basilico, Gabriele, 147 Basso, Keith, 144 Bataille, Georges, 45 Batty, Michael, 159 Baudelaire, Charles, 50, 99, 103, 121, 175 Baudrillard, Jean, 54, 56, 98 Baudson, Michel, 127 Bauman, Zygmunt, 2, 19, 20, 84 Beethoven, Ludwig Van, 140 Benedikt, Michael, 74 Benevolo, Leonardo, 117 Benjamin, Walter, 53, 120 Bloch, Ernst, 2, 4, 5, 125, 126, 140 Bloomberg, Michael R., 130 Borges, Jorge Luis, 59, 157 Brancusi, Constantin, 77 Brouwn, Stanley, 59

Dahrendorf, Ralf, 84, 92 Dante, 61, 158 Davis, Mike, 28, 62, 72, 171 De Azua, Felix, 53–55, 60, 64, 98, 112, 135 Debord, Guy, 51, 59, 170 De Carlo, Giancarlo, 32 De Certeau, Michel, 114 DECOI, 16 217

218 Name Index Dedalus, 47 Dematteis, Giuseppe, 36 Derrida, Jacques, 138, 162 Descombes, Georges, 141 De Solà-Morales, Ignasi, 9, 23, 88, 111, 129, 137 Dominguez, Ricardo, 20 Dorian Gray, 56, 98 Downing, Andrew Jackson, 30 Downs, Michael, 127 Doxiadis, Konstantinos, 36 Dubesset & Lyon, 17 Dubuffet, Jean, 128 DZO, 16 Endell, August, 64, 153 Epimenide, 50 Estes, Richard, 127 Fellini, Federico, 15 Fink, Eugen, 137 Fitzgerald and Sanborn, 128 Fiuza Faustino, Didier, 16 Florenskij, Pavel, 104, 133 Foucault, Michel, 75, 80 Friedman, Yona, 24 Gautrand, Manuelle, 16 Geddes, Patrick, 31 Gibson, William, 27, 62, 75 Giddens, Antony, 19 Gilbert & George, 79, 128 Giotto, 61, 142 Giovannoni, Gustavo, 27 Goodman, Nelson, 59, 116 Gottmann, Jean, 35, 36 Grassi, Giorgio, 9 Greenway, Peter, 58 Gregotti, Vittorio, 9, 25 Gropius, Walter, 117 Grumbach, Antoine, 24 Hall, Peter, 30 Hausmann, George Eugéne, 14, 25

Heidegger, Martin, 12, 62, 109, 132, 167 Hénard, Eugène, 25 Hillman, James, 46, 50, 144 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 156 Hoffmann, Theodor Amadeus, 101 Homère, 122 Howard, Ebenezer, 13, 23 Huebler, Douglas, 59 Husserl, Edmund, 137 Icarus, 48 Jacob & Macfarlane, 17 Jaussely, Léon, 25 Jefferson, Thomas, 31 Jerde, Jon, 63 Kandinski, Wassiliy, 5 Kanizsa, Gaetano, 147 Karavan, Dani, 128 Kasimir, Marin, 128 Klee, Paul, 5, 117 Koolhaas, Rem, 2, 13, 41, 71, 152 Kotkin, Joel, 29, 45 Kreienbuhl, Jurg, 127 Krier, Leon, 27 Kristeva, Julia, 15 Kundera, Milan, 120, 122 La Cecla, Franco, 18 Lai, Maria, 130, 132, 140, 174 Latour, Bruno, 171, 172 Le Corbusier, 13, 23, 25, 111, 151 Lefebvre, Henry, 133 Leopold, Aldo, 169 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 127 Lukács, György, 140 Lynch, Kevin, 10 Magnaghi, Alberto, 92 Mahler, Gustav, 140 Malle, Louis, 15 Mandich, Giuliana, 18, 56 Maneri Elia, Mario, 147, 163, 164

Name Index 219 Mason, Raymond, 127 Matisse, Henri, 1 Maymont, Paul, 24 Migliaccio, Carlo, 140 Minos, 48 Monet, Claude, 101 Morin, Edgar, 10 Moss, Eric Owen, 28 Mumford, Lewis, 4, 29, 148, 161 Musil, Robert, 51–53, 76, 80, 124

Ricci, Leonardo, 25 Richter, Gerhard, 127 Riesman, David, 1, 2 RMDM, 15 Romains, Jules, 99 Roncayolo, Marcel, 168 Rossi, Aldo, 9 Rovira y Trias, Antonio, 26, 27 RPAA, 30 Rykwert, Joseph, 45

Nadar, Felix, 53 Nash, John, 71 Navarro, Miquel, 128 Niemeyer, Oscar Ribeiro, 23 Nivola, Costantino, 151 Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 12 Nouvel, Jean, 154

Sabatier, Roland, 128 Sassen, Saskia, 35, 51, 67, 68, 70, 77, 84, 86–89 Schöffer, Nicolas, 24 Schuiten, François, 128 Sennett, Richard, 84–86, 89–92, 135, 148, 149, 160 Sernini, Michele, 60 Shakespeare, William, 119 Siza, Alvaro, 123 Smithson, Robert, 129 Snozzi, Luigi, 144, 145, 148 Soares, Bernardo, 105 Soja, Edward V., 78 Soria y Mata, Arturo, 22 Starr, Kevin, 45 Stein, Clarence, 30 Steiner, Frederick, 30, 118 Stübben, Joseph, 25 Superstudio Continuous Movement, 71

Odum, Eugene, 169 Odysseus, 46 Olivetti, Adriano, 32 Ovid, 48 PAC (Autonomous Cultural Platform), 16 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto, 15, 135, 141, 174 Perrault, Claude, 7 Pessoa, Fernando, 107, 109 Picasso, Pablo, 3, 5 Pittaluga, Paola, 10–12, 158 Poe, Edgar Allan, 99 Poirier, Anne, 128 Poirier, Patrick, 128 Proshansky, Harold, 12 Prost, Henri, 25

Tagliagambe, Silvano, 10, 18, 59, 130, 142 Thomas, 19 Traveller, 19 Tsung Leong, Sze, 41

Quaroni, Ludovico, 25 UNRRA, 33 Rabascall, Joan, 127 Rasmussen, Steen Eiler, 14 Regional Planning, 30 Regional Plan of New York and its Environs, 31 Restany, Pierre, 111

Valery, Paul, 120 Vanarsky, Jack, 127 Van Thieghem, David, 128 Varela, Francisco, 141, 142 Vietti, Luigi, 46

220 Name Index Villani, Tiziana, 56 Virgil, 157 Virilio, Paul, 46, 56 Vitruvius, 7 Vostell, Wolf, 127 Wagner, Otto, 14, 25, 26 Wagner, Richard, 140 Webendorfer, Ingrid, 127

Weinstein, Art, 41 Weir, Peter, 61 Welsch, Wolfang, 137 Wenders, Wim, 64, 101, 109, 137, 140, 150, 157 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 58, 114 Wölfli, Adolf, 115 Wright, Henry, 30, 31