Città e organismi territoriali. Verso un approccio olistico alle crisi dell’Antropocene

From the second half of the nineteenth century, urban planning was understood, according to a top-down approach managed by government systems, as a cure for the city affected by the disease, injustice, and violence. This approach, aimed at regulating the behaviour of producers in cities and territories, aims at favouring the strongest economic and social actors to the detriment of the weakest social tissues. Today, the various factors of economic and social crisis, which act on a global scale, have made the picture of inequalities even more complicated and uncertain than in the past. Consequently, the technocratic responses provided by central governments are no longer enough and indeed sometimes create problems of segregation and isolation. Fortunately, in some cases, active citizenship, by expressing new social demands without waiting for the help of the competent authorities, has begun to experience some changes at the local and territorial levels. These positive trends are interpreted here as the signal of a phase of the resilience of citizens who, with their own strength and some external help, regain full possession of the cities and territories. These phenomena of resistance and profound change in the cities also signal the urgency of a disciplinary change that the social sector seems to ask of specialists and of the dimension of political action. The perception of the future of cities appears to be dominated by these new behaviours that lead the city community no longer to wait for the care of central governments but to find their own care, through the reuse of urban spaces.