Learning from the city

LEARNING FROM THE CITY In a context where people cross the borders to other territories shaping the current epochal migration, the contemporary city highlights some ethical, but also very practical issues: how to house so many “excluded”? How can we live side by side - even more if the space is “public” - within not always compatible cultures, interests, needs? Considering the need for a rethinking of the future settlement dynamics, a possible response can be traced within the nature of human behaviour, unable to establish relationships except through the personal processes of knowledge. We cannot force the conditions of the intersubjectivity without favouring the subjective mechanisms of space appropriation, directly dependent on the ability to act. Space is thus understood as a “place calling for action” or “space for potential action” where it is not only the background of the actions of the subjects to be involved, but where the whole is part of a process in which each element influences each other according to a subjective development of the perception and of the action. Space suggests behaviours, but these are read by the subjects only according to their personal plan of action toward the space itself. This condition leads to the awareness that there are two orders of “project for the space”. The first one is the project of the designer, the other owns to the subjects who deal with the space during the time. In this sense, it is necessary to develop a design process aware that the space is “further designable entity”. The cooperative condition of the projects acquires becoming meaning thanks to the action of the subjects. Spatial experience emerges from a process of knowledge. In this context, the project becomes a guide to the active sharing within the construction of one’s own world. Space, however, provides affordances - opportunities for action - which the person sees as subjective opportunities because, although the space is shared, the experience is personal. Sharing is a possible, hopeful but not indispensable fact. It is a consequence of the encounter not just between groups of people, but between not necessarily-shared personal action plans. Thus, the need to provide opportunities for action and subjective representation in the world though the project , emerges. Those are the places conceived as real activators of sociality and where it is easy to learn to learn.