Sensitive Bodies in the Cityscape

Abstract

Cities evolve to just possible, always uncertain urban futures, achieving complexity so this complexity becomes itself the best tool to face uncertainty. The main operation in urban systems evolution is difference, the establishment of traces indicating differences, differences themselves consisting of increasingly more complex systems of rules, like a game board. Differences operate both in space and time, conforming to a cultural landscape, a cityscape. It is in this context where the authors present the concept of sensitive bodies. Urban spaces highly internalise processes due to a collective memory of past events, whose complexity can be read through both a hermeneutical approach to form and a sensitive approach to topology, the underlying system of rules that can be read just by playing the game, using techniques borrowed out of performing arts, making bodies interact with living bodies whose behaviour is just the main component of the cityscape.