Cities and territories of democracy. A reflection on urban policies and practices from the bottom up, on legacy and the evolution of urbanism

Abstract

The connection between the forms of power exercise and those of space must be under continuous observation. In a co-evolutionary ecosystem, where local societies transform (and transform themselves with) the environments in which they live, a perturbation in the ways of living and producing eventually also perturbs forms of governance, and vice versa. In this process of becoming and con-being, the condition for safeguarding democracy is the protection of what we define here as democratic cities and territories, of which we have collectively attempted to circumscribe the meaning, character and limits. Whether they are real or utopian expressions, an observation or a desire; whether there are models for implementing them; whether there are parameters that identify their democratic nature; whether an aesthetic characterises them: we attempt to answer these questions in this issue of the journal ‘in_bo’. In the first section of this issue, the analysis of the condition of permeability of democratic institutions by mercantile powers provided the means to understand whether planning is still able to produce imaginaries, elaborate models, support - symbolically and practically - the elaboration of ‘landscapes of rootedness’. Urbanism once again becomes the promoter of projects with a broad social and environmental spectrum when it is supported by a nomos derived from collective discernment. The second section of the booklet is dedicated to this complex topic, bringing together examples of micro-political alternatives to the capitalist development model and anthropocentric conception. The third section welcomes a reflection that calls into question the legacy and vocabulary of town planning, as well as its renewal. Numerous thematic threads bind the contributions: whether the urban planning toolbox knows how to absorb the acceleration of the changes taking place, whether it knows how to orientate its evolution, whether it has coined a language capable of representing the fluidity of the present time; whether the hybridisation between plan technique and digital technique generates virtuous progress.