Etica ed estetica dell’abitare. Paesaggio globale e territori urbani

The city, which is the outcome of history, culture and civilization, at first sight reveals itself to us like an exaltation of the act of building in a game of forms and volumes, or like a glorification of architecture; subsequently it is perceived also as a sign of the community and of the belonging that the forms reflect. What we see, while rethinking its meaning, from ancient times to modernity, is a complex human making, the extraordinary design of collective and individual action, the effect of an art of the extended space. It interacts with what is called the art of landscape, because it proposes elements of care, of imagination and of planning, the signs of creativity and the creations of necessity. Like an activity where the man is the creator of plantations, we can say indeed that there is an art of the city as a product of communities and the individuals, of architects and artists, of planners and simple workers, of citizens and their political representatives: it is the outcome of an ideal and civil effort, but also of a concrete, multifaceted manifestation of the techniques in the space, something which is also shaped, time after time, by that given social group or by ideologies.