Cities and Territories of Democracy
Cities and Territories of Democracy
edited by Ilaria Agostini, Luigi Bartolomei and Elena Franco
Intro
There is a connection between territory and politics, space and democracy. Democracy (etymologically: government by the people) is rooted in the Greek term polis. The word politics derives from it and it expresses the art of government. If the city is the founding place of politics, as the territory over which it exercises its jurisdiction, democracy is then a placed form of government, that is shaped by the relationships between settled populations and their habitats.
However, there is the need to verify the link between the shape of power and the shape of cities. Does a democratic order imply a democratic city? The question brings us to reflect on the effectiveness of a democratic action when facing the deformations that affect the model of aggregate dwelling – the city – which is still exposed to polarizations, inequalities, and disparity. A global “coevolutionary” ecosystem, where local societies transform the environment they live in (and are reciprocally transformed by them), results in a disturbance in living terms that in turn, also generates a disturbance in government forms.. Within this process of symbiotic metamorphosis, one of the conditions for protecting democracy itself is to conceptually protect what we would call the democratic city, without the possibility to fully understand and define its meaning, characteristics and limits. One cannot but wonder if, where, how and when this democratic city became a fact, whether it is a real or a utopian expression, an observation or a desire; whether certain parameters can identify it, and if it is possible to outline a distinctive aesthetic.
Whatever the poietic connections between spatiality and political order might be, the latter has the tools to lead the development of the former. Urban planning, a technical discipline (with a strong political vocation), intervenes between space and its government by defusing the tension concerning the "production of space" and preparing those scenarios whose realization is supported by the nomos, product of a collective discernment. Urban planning has so far tried to accomplish its social mandate. Where this task has not been fulfilled, the market shapes the territory.
Studying the hegemonic break-in of economic forces is therefore essential in order to define the relationship between urbanism, architecture, and democracy. The analysis of the permeability of democratic institutions by economic forces (and thus non-democratic) provides the means to understand whether planning is capable today of producing ambitions, developing models, supporting – symbolically and practically – landscapes that generate a sense of rooting which would be capable of encouraging territorial co-responsibility. Can planning still find guidelines for fairer and less hierarchical cities (including ecologically), where "existential suburbs" can finally dissolve? Is it possible to imagine a city in which the results of bottom-up decision-making effectively bring the common space into line? Can citizens effectively experience co-ownership, participation and co-responsibility and can the hybridization with digital technology generate positive progress?
The transition of values of our time is, in this sense, to be taken into account. The ideological and spiritual collapse, the dusk of the welfare system and the exercise of emancipative social rights, leaves room for the demand for rights to personal freedom, which is the result both of a general process of individualization and of a civil mutation geared towards inclusion of diversity, the weakest, and the marginalized. In this context, we believe that the current state of scientific reflection
_on the management of urban decision-making processes, including those from all social strata
_on how living environments are generated and regenerated by adhering to new behaviors, the renewed use and role of public space, and also the new functional mixité of private space
should be highlighted.
Does town planning precede, accompany or follow the political decision process? It is urgent to examine whether the urban development tool – that is also weakened in its effectiveness by economic, operational and political conditions in which public administrations operate – can absorb the acceleration of the changes in place, if it can guide their evolution and if it has finally developed a language capable of representing the fluidity of present time. Whether the discipline is reduced to norm and techniques, or whether it also has competency to foresee the future and also to envision a future, is a question that involves university research and education.
Finally, the territory is impacted by increasingly rapid changes induced both by new ways of working, production and global distribution of wealth, and by massive visual, infrastructure and logistical impact. The issue goes beyond the boundaries of cities, it breaks down the suburbs and it affects rural areas, that is the territory which gives energetical and biological support to the city and that, as Carlo Cattaneo wrote, sometimes regenerated it. The relationship between democracy and environment, in terms of "self-sustainability", i.e. the production/reproduction of local resources, and the link between politics and visions, in terms of their ability to identify ways of "reterritorialization", are among the questions we seek to answer.
Examples of possible better worlds do exist. Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the many difficulties it has created across the world, also brought about various practices of mutualism and urban solidarity. "Self - government of territory" actions are sporadically present: from neoagricultural communities to new forms of cohabitation, from cooperative societies to the pooling of services and territorial resources. A multi-faceted self-determination that introduces the question: whether, and how, these glimmers of buena vida are able to move from witness and refuge practices to the recomposition of the “city of happiness”. The social issue, which was wiped out during the There Is No Alternative years , is once again on the agenda, no longer separated from other issues, such as the return of statehood and that of the environment.
in_bo 13, no. 17 will draw attention to the relationship between politics and territory, between democracy and the changes in living environments. In particular, we wish to debate on the role of urban planning and to verify its current capacity: _to produce shared practices for space transformation; _to give voice to social marginalization; _to implement sound management of territorial resources; _to innovate and speak a contemporary language that understands the great transitions that are taking place. With this call in_bo is looking for interdisciplinary contributions, which can be presented in textual form (papers section) or illustrated (visual section). All selected text contributions will be subject to double-blind peer review.
Themes
_The democratic city: utopia and reality
Neoliberal thinking and practices have undermined the concept of territorial democracy. On a global level, the hierarchical megapolitan model represents the new evolutionary stage of cities, with the risk of urbanization at the expense of inland areas, whose resources and inhabitants have been plundered. A model that seems to accelerate territorial schizophrenia, centralize power, produce increasingly technocratic forms of governance, and determine the anthropological, functional, political vacuum in internal areas. The disappearance of the city – public, inter-class, open – following ineffective territorial planning, heralds the privatization of politics. The commercialization of historic centers, the removal of representative public spaces from collective use, the eradication of poverty which is encouraged by the rhetoric of decorum and control. In the open territory, the effects are no less profound: agro-industrial pollution, land consumption outside of any housing and production needs, desertification of inland areas, and urban congestion.
Methodological models and assumptions have been studied and launched for a long time to remedy these effects: from the 15-minute city to the resilient city, from the polycentric urban bioregion to urban agricultural parks, from pact forms to hypertechnological smart cities. Studies that start from afar, but that the pandemic has exacerbated, producing novel biomimetic perspectives and sympoetic postures.
In this scenario, what is the role of urbanism? What is the relationship between utopian scenarios, new management models and concrete planning practices?
_Heterotopies, resistance, political practices
Neoliberalism has again called into question territorial democratic foundations, representation, and the deliberative power often submitted to economic pressure by corporations of a non-democratic nature. The ‘“genetic mutation’” of urban planning is the result of the dismantling of participation agreements in planning procedures and processes. One has the impression of an erosion of progressive discipline, of legislative measures and of administrative practices, capable of reducing social disparities and curbing the speculative trends of land and property. After having abandoned its social mandate, urban planning has taken on a new instrument that is more sensitive to the market economy and it has brought its objectives and methods into line with it: trading, securitization of state assets, business driven territorial governance, extreme regulatory sectoralization, etc.
What happens in political and administrative practice is countered by a long-standing tradition of hypotheses regarding democratic forms that react and compare themselves with territorial hierarchization, urban gigantism, and technocracy applied to global conurbations. From "village autonomy" practiced by Gandhi to "direct democracy" theorized by Murray Bookchin and applied in the forms of Rojava self-government. Today, the "democracy of the places” has a burning physiognomy: municipal networks, neighborhood or regional cooperation pacts; measly forms of self-organization, situated experiments that lean on solidarity mutualism, asset sharing, cooperation and association. These are bottom - up planning experiences, social consolidation and democratic autonomy; sometimes extra-institutional, autonomous and self-organized, yet always of great rising value. Their institutionalization is complex and can prove to be debilitating.
This section will focus on experience, study cases , reflection and critical analysis of ongoing phenomena and the effectiveness of urban policies.
_The discipline of urban planning, transfer of knowledge and education
The derangement that is taking place in the territory's government is evidence in the profound crisis of land planning. It is evident both at an operational level, in the ineffectiveness of most democratic practices in the transformation of space (still confirming the current status of the Sherry Arnestein approach) and at a cultural level, where an attractive yet insubstantial lexicon is often useless in representing and responding to changes in dwelling habits and ineffective in handling down specific skills.
Green, smart, resilience, participation are likely to be empty labels that are attractive yet characterized by an all-embracing meaning, and thus incapable of supporting real innovation in planning practices. New words don't necessarily match a new phrase, nor a new syntax. The disconnection between words and things, between the phenomena experienced in cities and the vocabulary used in the regulatory system and in cultural debate (the first being incapable of adjusting to current conditions, , and the second far too vague ), is an effective obstacle in the exercise of shared and participatory management of public affairs and, in particular, of land use. There is an urgent need for experience and workshops to rebuild a shared vocabulary and spaces and time-frames in ordinary educational pathways to train in care, co-responsibility and participation in public-affairs management projects beginning with: the shared space of the city. This call for papers is particularly interested in the paths that form for shared management of territory in schools of every order and grade.
In universities, in particular, where urban planning becomes a subject of education, what is actually being taught? Rules and techniques or the vision of land and cities that those rules and techniques permit to build? We hope that this call will also generate a debate on the way in which teaching is conducted.
Info
Authors are invited to send an abstract in Italian or English (3000–4000 characters including spaces) via email to in_bo@unibo.it by 15th October 2021.
Abstracts must be drafted following the guidelines of the journal, which can be found on the website in-bo.unibo.it/about.
To participate with a graphic proposal in the Visual section, send a graphic, illustration, photographic project (or other, provided in 2D) to in_bo@unibo.it by 15th October 2021, attaching a short abstract (1000 characters, including spaces).
A short bio (max 350 characters including spaces) and the affiliations of the authors must be included in the same email in a separate .doc file.
If the abstract is accepted, the final essay must be uploaded to the in_bo online platform at in_bo.unibo.it , in Italian or English (abstract in both languages) and with an overall length of 20,000 and 50,000 characters including spaces. Papers will undergo a double-blind peer-review process.
Graphic proposals will be required in high definition. Papers and graphics must be original and unpublished.
Deadlines
October 15th, 2021 | Deadline of the call for abstracts
October 30th, 2021 | Notification for acceptance
April 30th, 2022 | Deadline for the submission of the full paper
July 2022 | Notification of acceptance of full papers
November 2022 | Publication
