The city of the XXI century: from welfare state to welfare society

Abstract

The modern town-planning aimed at maximum level of well-being for individuals and communities, modelling on “real needs of people”: in the old urban systems manuals appears a “Plan of services” as an appendix to the master plan, which includes services distributed on the surrounding areas, a sort of “social master plan” to avoid neighbourhoods separated by segments of population or classes. In the contemporary city globalization, new forms of marginalization and exclusion, the advent of the so-called “new economy”, the re-definition of the production base and the labour market are expression of a social complexity that can be defined trough transactions and symbolic exchanges, rather than trough processes of industrialization and modernization towards which the historic city, adopted into modern, was oriented. All of this questions are the expression of that complex of matters which are currently described as “the new welfare”, opposed to the one essentially based on education, on health, on the pension system and on social assistances.