Riabitare il mondo

The crisis of a fully mapped and digitized world is changing the way we “plunge onto Earth” every day. Acceleration and dislocation have made time the measure of all things, diminishing our expectations regarding the possibilities of participating in the making of places.
The once-necessary habits of orientation now seem lost. But if our starting point is a sense of being overwhelmed by what we, as human beings, have brought into the world, “things” nevertheless stubbornly continue to activate a forgotten wisdom and new ways of reading and interpreting the city. The city to come is hidden within the city that has already been produced and built: it is up to us to discover it. Reappropriation also takes place here: through things and the way they still manage to amaze us. The book consists of two introductory essays and ten texts by scholars from various disciplines (philosophy, sociology, urban planning, art, physics, agricultural economics), who were key participants in the seminars “Otherness, World, Crisis” (March–June 2019, Department of Architecture, Roma Tre University), where discussions focused on the opportunities and fissures opened up by the current urban condition. What is proposed here is a journey of disorientation and rediscovery: accepting an initial sense of unease, after all, is the approach of those capable of re-inhabiting the world. One text after another, addressing complex themes in a concise and direct manner, the threads between individual becoming and collective becoming are rewoven: the possibility of participating in public life, the training of the gaze, the perception of oneself and others, and the geographical and psychogeographical representations that allow us to reposition ourselves in the world and to conceive of our own transformation alongside the movement to reimagine places.