FROM AN IMPOSED CITY TO A SHARED ONE: THE NEW CULTURAL DIMENSION OF URBAN SUSTAINABILITY

The city prevails as an essential element of our period: a territorial synthesis of progress and, at the same time, an open field of contradictions typical of development and modernism – a unique example of territorial and symbolic identification and at the same time a place where changes have took place and contributed to endanger the recognition and partly its own role. The city is the result of a double course. On one side we have the industrial course fed by the internal economies and agglomeration ones, which is unfolded as a standardized and consumers society, in it is becoming, together with a serious environmental impact. On the other side we have the post-industrial course based on a services society, a less energivorous society but at the same time, a real space-consuming one. The latter has increased some worse effects that can be summed up in the following items: - Cities sprawled on the territory and fed both by the communication revolution and by the micro-electronic technology. At a minor geographic meaning of the physical distance corresponds a more and more increasing demographic and productive mobility which aims to enlarge the built space (suburban belts, peri-urban areas) without respecting any urbanistic law and environmental principles; - Sharp market segmentation which, if, on one hand, it revitalized some local territorial systems, thanks to a more and more qualified demand, on the other hand, it creates technological unemployment which, as a consequence, creates urban conflicts and the demand for social reforms; - Economic productive wave of the migratory transition which delays to organised the urban space again according to social relationships and environmental quality; - Division among cities and ideas, information and knowledge, “enjoyed” and shared city by its inhabitants.