Abstract
Nowadays the city of the anonymity prevails over the city of sharing. We move in more and more dilated spaces and we expand our territories, but we consume the community life in impersonal places that, too often, are only for casual encounters. For this reason it becomes more and more crucial to design spaces with wide recognition, characterized by an “accumulation of belongings” that makes them feel like familiar to everyone: the city, avoiding the risk of self-celebration, can find the opportunity to become a representation of a collective imagination in the sum of individual stories. The challenge is to experience the city as a sequence of “interiors” that people can intensely inhabit and not just use, in which people can leave traces, share memories, and imprint daily gestures. Places that satisfy emotional as well as functional needs, bringing into play the symbolic and intangible components, maybe imperceptible, but which are so decisive in determining the identity structure of a city. It is the relational dimension that acquires also an aesthetic code. This chapter explores a relational approach for resilient and experiential cities.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Identity: Layering and intertwining of individual memories that create places recognizable from a wider community.
Relation: Induced or accidental relationship involving two or more people at the same time in the functional symbolic and emotional sphere.
Imaginary: Set of individual and collective visions that live of imagination but are able to outline an evolving reality.
Spectacularization: Staging of behaviours and processes of use of the space in order to aestheticize its use.
Situation: Contextual and objective condition that surrounds and determines the behaviour of a person or a community in a given place.
Narration: Sum of implicit and explicit content of a place suggesting to the user a variety of subjective experiences.
Fragilism: Ability to enhance concepts seemingly negligible and residual to promote a new awareness of the unexpected, the provisional, the unknown and the unseen.
Everyday: Set of actions, gestures, events that take place in the daily life and can be taken as a scenography as well as script of the project.
In-Lusion: Design strategy that aims to create involvement through recreational and interactive processes both perceptual and physical between people and between people, and space.