Città instabili

CHANGEABLE CITIES Marinella Arena Huxley suggests to accept the idea that the complexity of the city can not be known by a rational approach. Someone could wonder: how to adapt the representation of the city to continuous changing of scenarios that compel it to a permanent dimension of instability? Foucault suggests two terms: disappearance and acceleration. The structure of large cities is in constant progress; important elements of the urban scene disappear to make room for new architectures, generating always different approaches to space. Foer, in “Everything Is Illuminated”, tackles the story of the disappearance of a small town by a new and poetic approach: an Ukrainian woman, survived to a Nazi massacre, keeps in her restricted shelter memories of her people. Everything is packaged in boxes bearing the oddest indications: each object emerges from the flood of memories as an archaeological find. The disappearance of village triggers the mechanism of memory in a kaleidoscopic game which is probably the basis for all contemporary representation of the city. The other term that Foucault uses to describe the city is acceleration. The city is crossed by streams that, actually, constitute the vital part. Studying the flows allows, in fact, the supercoding of all events that make the city a "body without organs". To reiterate the metaphor of the contemporary city we can therefore choose to represent that constant instability given by the relationship between the topological space and space of relationship, between material and immaterial places, including the disappearance and memory, between acceleration and flow. The representation focuses on flows which cross the architectural space and alter the texture, perception, and the drawing. In the real city the perception of architecture is commingled with elements which, although mobile, are a constant. In order to try to understand how our perception of architecture is partial, I tried to fragment time in order to deprive architecture of all the flags that characterize it as the house of man.

Il testo riflette sulla rappresentazione della città contemporanea: un luogo definito più dalla complessità delle relazioni che dai manufatti. E'giusto raccontare la città attraverso le forme convenzionali della rappresentazione, enucleando dal caos solo alcuni aspetti materiali, o è più coerente rappresentarla nel suo insieme inserendo quello che normalmente viene omesso: la costante instabilità? Il testo, Città instabili prova, con alcune suggestioni, a rispondere a questa domanda.