Giovanni Maciocco – författare

This book explores new forms and modalities of relations between people and space that increasingly affect the life of the city. The investigation takes as its starting point the idea that in contemporary societies the loss of our relationship with place is a symptom of a breakdown in the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. This in turn has caused a crisis not only in taste, but also in our sense of beauty, our aesthetic instinct, and our moral values. It has also led to the loss of our engagement with the landscape, which is essential for cities to function.

The authors argue that new, fertile forms of interaction between people and space are now happening in what they call the ‘intermediate space’, at the border of “urban normality” and those parts of a city where citizens experiment with unconventional social practices. This new interaction engenders a collective conscience, giving a new and productive vigor to the actions of individuals and also their relations with their environment.

These new relations emerge only after we abandon what is called the “therapeutic illusion of space”, which still exists today, and which binds in a deterministic manner the quality of civitas, the associative life of people in the city, to the quality of urban space. Projects for the city should, instead, have as their keystone the notion of social action as a return to a critical perspective, to a courageous acceptance of social responsibility, at the same time as seeking the generative structures of urban life in which civitas and urbs again acknowledge each other.

The Reinvented City reflects on externity, the principal feature of a reinvented city. Three fundamental trends of the city are investigated, "discomposed", "generic" and "segregated" phenomena with the loss of the city as a space of social interaction and communication. The interpretative categories of externity are the intermediate spaces, the counterspaces, the void, the edge, the territory and the environment, places on which to base the future city project. Important questions are posed: What is the true public sphere in contemporary societies? What is the contemporary public space corresponding to it? In what way can the city project construct contemporary public space?

Urban Landscape Perspectives explores how landscape terminology can be usefully brought into the urban debate. Articles in this book include theoretical reflections on the landscape as an eminently project-like figure. It argues for attention to be drawn to the landscape as the origin of the sense of man’s home and of the reasons for the city, as well as to the search for the primary elements of city construction, of its public sphere. This role can only be developed with project-oriented intentions reconstructing the bond between city and landscape. We therefore associate the project of the landscape with theproject of the city.

The title of this book comes to our aid in that it enables us to limit the field of possible definitions to the sphere of relations existing between the landscape project and the city project. When we state the two terms city and landscape separately, we are implicitly acknowledging a detachment between two entities that tradition has considered inseparable.

Other theoretical reflections, applications and best practices explore the involvement of the territory in the organisation of both urban life and landscape; how changes within the city have opened up traditional concepts of centrality towards new forms of centrality, as well as towards more environmental interpretations of centrality. The articles in this volume are by scholars with backgrounds in philosophy, architecture, urban and landscape planning, who have a particular interest in and experience of the city project at various operative scales.

The volume brings together contributions by both leading scholars and young academics with a particular experience in the urban potential of the territory in situations not necessarily linked to the dense metropolis, its compact form or to city sprawl. What brings these scholars together is their common reflection on this central theme, though from varied disciplinary and experimental backgrounds. Leading academics like A. Mela (Prof. of Territory and Environment Sociology, University of Turin), S. Tagliagambe (Prof. of Philosophy and Science, University of Sassari), G. Maciocco (Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Alghero, Italy) and P. Pittaluga have accumulated long-time experience in developing environmental approaches within Philosophy, Sciences, Environmental Planning and Art. Researchers like I. Doucet, N. Janssens and K. Boon in their turn bring in approaches related to specific European contexts.

Departing from a survey on the post-modern landscapes of tourism, this book explores the transformations the city has undergone and the way it has become a simulacrum offered to tourists, spectacularised with the aim of increasing its capacity for attraction. The experiences dealt with in the papers of authors belonging to different disciplinary fields, emphasise the city’s tendencies to create “stage-set contexts” of the private type, be it historic quarters, theme parks or hypermarkets. Issues like aestheticisation, thematisation and genericity are dealt with, conceptual categories that highlight the weak resistance cities put up against the rules of the leisure industry and, more generally speaking, the consumer economy.

The book inquires into the capacity of the urban and territorial project to construct a perspective for a public dimension of space. This is linked with ethical action of the project involving an active relationship with places and a capacity to understand the dynamics of different urban populations. In this sense capacity for innovation and creativity can contribute to transforming “islands” of leisure into places of the city and consumers into citizens.