Ecological city between future and memory: a great opportunity to rethink the world

Abstract

The current social, environmental and territorial crisis, can be a turning point - one among the meanings of the originary Greek word κρίσις - of the development model based on the industrial paradigm (Kuhn, 1962) whose limits were declared in the homonymous The Limits of Growth commissioned by the Club of Rome at Boston MIT researchers (Meadows and al.) and published in 1972. This paper suggests to replace the industrial model of “making the city” - indifferent to local conditions thanks to the supremacy given to the technological “solutions” (Del Nord, 1991) - with the ecological approach that starts from the local conditions such as indications of plan/project/construction for the transformation of the anthropocosmo, i.e. the relationship connecting shells, networks and behaviours. That is to relate the λόγος, discourse, analyses, with the οίκος, the environment (www.ekistics.org): finally the purpose of Smart City. It requires to build inclusive Communities, socially and materially sustainable, having the saving of land use as precondition. This should mean for most countries now more then emerging - BRIC and everyone else in the strong economic growth - try to avoid the mistakes made by the nations, usually known as Western ones: i.e. devastation of the territory, social harms, and attention to the spatial redevelopment, and to the functional and social ones. For both there is the central question of the relationship with history, the signs of it, ie the memory as essential component of the meaning of things.