Taste of chance, a gamble with political and cultural: we start from here, to reopen an argument over Bologna. We are not insensitive to the political chronicle the town. We fought against the "Cofferati model, we have now on our skin. We did not accept the displacement and the misery of the rhetoric we have reported the safety and legality, without delay, opting on the side of those who were affected. We will continue to do so. But we want to go further. For this bet: bet on the fact that these rhetorical cover the void, that those who promoted it is destined to be overwhelmed, Bologna who lives in a crisis where none of the political forces in the city seems to offer a solution.
is the crisis that followed the slow consumption of a city project built during the long decades of war in the name of a specific reform.
The '77 had announced the eighties and nineties have brought to full maturity. Guazzaloca Cofferati and were only two facets of this crisis, able to wink at certain interests of the shop otherwise qualified but not to propose a different image of the urban and metropolitan.
In the vacuum of space project have come to regain even the Catholic hierarchy, promoting a cultural restoration that has made all the more dark and decadent atmosphere of crisis that the city is living.
A different image of the urban and metropolitan said. From
time, we insist that the metropolis is the ground on which play the decisive conflict of this, and in the coming weeks we will propose a meeting in Bologna seminar on that hypothesis.
But what is now the metropolis? It is the specific form, to put it simply, through which a particular area opens to the world, not least the cultural and economic. But at the same time the metropolis is reality and virtuality, actuality and power. For a territory to become the metropolis, the openness to the world must live in cooperation and in the social imaginary, behavior, in the needs and desires which they invest.
Knowledge and skills ingrained over time, networks and resources and intangible assets, a huge accumulation of cultural capital and social and economic areas are among the elements of virtuality without which one can not imagine becoming a metropolis of the territory. The production of form metropolis - and the enormous added value in economic terms it is accompanied by - is the result of a translation into the overall design of these elements of virtuality. We know the reality of the contemporary metropolis at the global level, despite the extraordinary variety of forms in which it occurs: where it is fully deployed, we define at the intersection of the misery of the slums and the shimmer of the business centers where you tie the threads of control on the world economy.
And we know how much violence is at work in the devices of exploitation and domination that innervate the specific translation project from which comes this urban reality, at once icon and decisive moment of articulation of global capital. Where the shape of cities is given, however, a new reality of class struggle emerges, potentially investing Each of the domination and exploitation going through it and asking how fundamental task in a different policy - a different ownership - of the common ground that the city still is.
We are not in New York or Shanghai, but it's worth asking:
Bologna is a city? We try to answer in a provocative way: it is not in reality, it is in power. The elements of virtuality that we spoke of are given in the Bologna area: the cognitive work in training and format that revolves around the university on the one hand, the migrant labor that sustains the productivity of industry and services on the other they are excellent examples . In terms of lifestyle, an artistic and cultural production that also runs through self-managed social spaces and places of the "movement" Bologna is actually conceived and practiced as a metropolis. Considered through the prism of this image and this life, stand out even more misery of the public rhetoric and empty project institutions. Job security and control are not certain prerogatives of Bologna, but here are made even more unbearable by the disproportion between the wealth of the city and the grayness of everyday life. Let us try to play up front: we try to take the city of Bologna become as ground motion. Exercise, without losing the thread of the struggles and conflicts throughout the city, a new form of urban imagination and mapping.
We design, invent our city aware that other designs, hostile to us, are in the field, but at the same time seizing the opportunity provided by the absence of strong hypothesis capable of synthesizing them into a single figure. We can only partially from some analysis of the land on which the virtuality of becoming the metropolis of Bologna is expressed. But this is just the beginning: even better, is only a draft method that we hope will be collected and appropriated by a multitude of players who share not only the refusal of the misery of the present but also the desire to appropriate the future.