Editorial: World Citizens
Federico De Giuli
The topic of Cluster’s fifth edition is: City; its functions, its specializations, in general its territorial organization, and the social, economic and cultural factors that determine cities’ growth or downfall.
The globalized economy and technological innovation have transformed the way we think about cities and how we react to them.
Traditional planning, founded on growth control and reduction, was essentially based on quantitative criteria and zoning finalized by programming the distribution of public services in different designated areas. Today market economy encourages administrators to compete in order to attract more valuable functions and fruitful investments using what look like marketing tools as opposed to planning ones.
The quality of a city is defined by the quality of its functions, which in turn are evermore specialized, responsive to sophisticated politics, and capable of connecting to the many complex networks.
From the “citizenship” point of view of, the dematerialization of the “city effect” caused by technological innovation, and the even vaster phenomenon of globalization has stretched the city dweller’s status beyond city limits to, potentially, anywhere in the world.
The “mega city” that we live in doesn’t exist as a single reality, but is stratified over many layers. The “city user” that moves around for business or pleasure between the financial and commercial districts of New York, Shanghai or Frankfurt, the tourist that flies from the Tropics to the Caribbean, or to the exclusive inner cities crosses the routes of a growing number of migrants, who are moving in search of a better quality of life unheard of until only a few years ago.
The articles in the main section of this edition explore very different and distant aspects between them: the spontaneous cities, for example favelas, shanty towns and squatter cities, (contributions by Benjamin Solomon, Robert Neuwirth), cities developed along the lines of accurate design and defined planning, those that lose their inhabitants, such as the Shrinking Cities described by Philip Oswalt and those that, as the Creativity Group Europe (Richard Florida, Giovanni Padula and Irene Tinagli) suggest, use creativity and technology, talent and even tolerance, in order to relaunch themselves.
An essay by Saskia Sassen entitled The City in a Global Digital Age offers an in-depth analyses into questions about cities in a global digital age in which the author distinguishes between the topographic representation of key aspects of the city and interpretation of these same aspects in terms of spatialized economic, political and cultural dynamics.
Cinema, videogames and artistic expression dismantle the rational idea of urban design offering their representations, some of which never seen before, of urban complexity.
This issue sees the opening of two new regular columns dedicated to economics, with contributions by Mario Calderini, Dario Moncalvo and Salvatore Rizzello, and one on Utopia, with writings by Marc Augé and Yehuda Emmanuel Safran.
