The city and the eclipse of experience. Notes for a critical history of territorial planning

Abstract

The “liquid” condition of the contemporary city, where we face an eclipse of individual and collective experience and a loss of social references, is only the last stage of a historical process of dispossession of the multitude’s autonomous way of life, operated by means of a permanent revolution of the social space-time. In this process, territorial and urban planning have played a key role. The present article analyzes the reasons and dimensions of this dynamics in a theoretical perspective, identifies its historical evolution through a series of cases and, finally, sketches the conflicting scenario for an autonomous reappropriation of social space-time and territory by the postfordist multitude.