Storie di uomini, racconti di spazio

Even today you can hear news about men who cross the Mediterranean Sea, about a flood of desperate castaways trying to reach the shores, just like a gruesome appointment with Death, like a sad funeral litany evolving under the amazed eyes of the West. Meanwhile a new world is silently being born, shaping with apparent di- sorder a new geopolitical order, between the nationalistic exaltation of walls that reaffirm the impassability of borders and a diffused hospitality that invokes the disintegration of them, showing the unstoppable and strong strength of solidarity among populations, a remained hope in the future. A sort of recomposition of the places of the world and the languages of people, an updating of the geography of nations and urban topologies by the movement of people. Everything competes to construct a memory of the present, in an elaboration of a sense too difficult to practice, disturbed by cultural crisis and implosions of the capitalism. Political contradictions in the background indicate that the way is insecure toward a comple- ted European identity, showing the weakness of a society crossed by global financial intere- sts. Also the architectural research has to examine the dramatic and complex conditions of our times, the sense of the architectural space and cities, proxemic relationships and those that interest the widest landscape, the suburbs or structures full of history. Carrying on the experiment, in the Laboratories of Architectural Planning and in the Laboratories of Degree, with great emotional incentive and with the desire to offer a useful worth to the theme, the didactics of the project has been enriched with important ethical and social contents. ‘Abitare’ ( live/inhabit) has been explored in social and urban aspects, in the relapses in terms of space and form, result of the dynamics of the XXI century’s migration. Hospitality certainly constitutes one of the fundamental values of architecture, nowadays get a different meaning, that in itself raises the question of the pacific cohabitation among people and changing in social and physical relationships. These questions, though they have dramatic aspects waiting for clear and urgent answers, concern the destiny and the transformation of the urban space in the next decades.