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ENGLISH VERSIONS SCIENZE DEL TERRITORIO. ISSN 2284-242X. no. 3 REBUILDING THE CITY, pp. 356-358. © 2015 Firenze University Press Editorial Editorial. Territorial forms and dimensions of a new urbanity demand - Full English version1 Alberto Magnaghi In the face of a global process of urbanisation which appears hardly containable or revers- ible (MAGNAGHI 2013, 48-51), we experience today a general fall of the urban in which the “mort de la ville” foreshadowed in 1994 by Françoise Choay seems to come true. Such a “kingdom of the post-urban” (and the post-rural) arose with the breakdown of the co-evolu- tion relationships among human settlement, nature and work that, for better or worse, char- acterised the previous civilisations. The one-way path of de-territorialisation, started with the enclosure of commons, goes in hand with the gradual commodification of common goods, be they natural (the Earth first of all, and then water, air, natural energy sources, glaciers, for- ests and so on) or territorial (the city and its historical infrastructure, agro-forestry systems, landscapes, water works, factories, power plants, down to the electronic networks). Within this double loop, de-territorialisation and commodification of common goods, a path is being accomplished, leading to a condition of global urbanisation (but not of urbanity) as the exclusive destiny of humanity on the planet on the one hand, on the other, ‘extra muros’, to the abandonment and reversion to a wild state of so many open areas, made unsuitable for human life by degradation, desertification, chemicalization, floods and other not entire- ly ‘natural’ disasters related to the commercial use of environmental assets. If this global urbanisation is no longer the ‘promised land’ of the cities, whose air used to ‘make you free’, we need to find the forms of a counter-exodus - a movement which, regaining rules for the self-government of commons, is able to reverse the trends to- wards the forced urbanisation pointing back again to the urban as quality: increasing the resistance (already in progress) of peripheral and marginal areas to their final colonisation and encouraging their repopulation with new farmers allied with aware citizens, to build a new, urban and rural civilisation. This counter-exodus is a “comeback to territories” as common goods (MAGNAGHI 2012) - to the earth, the urbanity of the city, the mountains, the local socio-economic systems, just to follow the thematic agenda of the first issues of this journal - to dig up places and find the human measure of inhabiting the planet. Which means rebuilding synergistic relationships between human settlements and the environment; helping the growth of “place consciousness” (MAGNAGHI 2010) or the ability of active citizenship to develop, starting from specific controversies (often closed, defensive, fragmented), knowledge and relational, open forms of the care for places, in primis for the reproductive factors of life; fostering new, sober and convivial styles of living and producing; enhancing the current forms of social mobilisation, civic networks and self-management of territorial and environmental commons, in order to produce lasting wealth in every place of the world through an ecological and territorialist conversion of economy and building solidarity networks pointed at a “bottom-up globalisation” (AA.VV. 2002). Of course, this implies that the life project, or rather, the local projects for future of human communities are repositioned on the legs of the regained sovereignty of the inhabitants of a place on their patrimonial assets: natural, as said above, and especially territorial, the latter rethought and restored as historical products of the human action of domestica- tion and fertilisation of nature. Among them, the city is a key construct, that we need to rebuild to be able to reintegrate it as an organic polarity in the new territorial ecosystem. 1 Translation from Italian by Angelo M. Cirasino. 356 In the kingdom of the post-urban, dominated by individualism, by the transformation of Editorial dwellers into consumers and of public spaces into private commodified precincts, we witness today fragments of a reconstruction of shared forms of living, of self-management experiences, of plural public spaces. This tenacious community tension runs transversely across abandoned suburbs, urban spread districts, interstitial spaces, periurban agricultural area, fringe territories as well as neighbourhoods of the compact city, large metropolitan areas as small inland towns; it is a movement of reconstruction of the public city that emerges in many social behaviour: social and creative reuse of appliances of malls (AQUILA 2006) and the purchase or the collective use of urban areas in old towns (see REYES in this issue) in order to mimic urbanity; the many experiences of self-management of common properties or brownfield (Teatro Valle, Officine Zero, Nuovo Cinema Palazzo in Rome, Project Rebeldia in Pisa, etc.; see also BELINGARDI in this issue) that, from employment, propose re-sig- nification of urban places that suggest new relationships between living and producing; the growth of community living practices as urban villages, co-housing, communal hous- es with ecological, fair, frugal principles, with self-management of services, vegetable gardens, etc. (Geneva, Lyon, Berlin, Milan; see also BIANCHETTI and MUSOLINO in this issue); activ- ities of direct care and ‘bottom-up’ re-appropriation of territories and landscapes (v. the Network of Tuscan committees for the defence of territories or the case mentioned in VAN- NI ET AL. 2013), in which a project (bio)regional project for future is built up as a mosaic from local disputes usually placed at the confluence between urban and rural; forms of local self-organisation of the food system (GAS, urban gardens with direct sales, local markets, rural districts, urban and periurban agricultural parks: Milan, Rome, Detroit…) sometimes intertwined with new forms of local development through an expansion into real plan- ning acts (BUTELLI in this issue); local food systems, through the reactivation of traditional supply chains of excellence, are often the basis for new and complex urban agro-tertiary economies related to environmental and landscape enhancement (CORTI ET AL. 2015); experiences of re-organisation of community economies that rebuild the urbanity role of small towns and villages (see the SDT Observatory SDT sheets on the City of Castel del Giudice, the Paraloup township, the City of Mezzago, <http://bit.ly/1E5JK5G>); practices of self-organisation of the care for cultural heritage (such as those described in NANNIPIE- RI 2013) or, finally, re-appropriation and community management of green spaces and farmland in urban and periurban areas, rethinking the relationship between town and country by promoting a synergistic rebalancing which alludes to new models of self-sustainable local development (Mondeggi Bene Comune, see. POLI 2014), also in connection with redevelopment projects of urban public spaces (PIVA in this issue). In the twine of these experiences the demand of urbanity extends, in new and unex- pected forms, from the old towns to the fluvial surroundings, where the river contracts turn into socio-institutional agreements for the community redevelopment of entire urban areas; from the metropolitan suburbs to repopulation experiences of hilly and mountainous areas, where new farmers and new mountain dwellers “by choice” (CANALE, CERIANI 2013; DEMATTEIS 2011) reconnect with the city via proximity production networks and communication and innovation cultures. To such insurgent and widespread signs of a new urban civilisation, rather than to the bogged visions of the archistars or the instrumental ones of corporations, we need to link the project for rebuilding the city; averting it from alleged forms of ‘smartness’ (VANOLO in this issue) that risk to technolog- ically increase the city fragmentation, to access a broader idea of the urban connect- ing living, production and consumption in the shared care for the life environment. This means giving back the urban question a territorial dimension, in order to re- think it, within a trans-scalar and trans-disciplinary perspective, as a part of a broader movement actually capable of opening a new territorialisation cycle for the planet. 357 Editorial The conceptual and operational tool I propose to start this “comeback to territories” is the urban bioregion, territorialist declination of the historically consolidated con- cept of bioregion: a way to redesign, in countertendency, the virtuous relationships among human settlement, environment and history which, exactly like in building a house, can identify, reconnect and (re)put in place the ‘building elements’ (MAGNAGHI 2014) of a territorial project apt to produce self-sustainable human settlements. Two necessary warnings. First, the dimensional exuberance of the spatial relationships in the contemporary urbanisation and the dominant role electronic hyperspace plays in it, which place the phenomenon clearly outside the scope of the old conceptual disciplinary apparatus, frustrate from the beginning any attempt to ‘mitigate’ it, perhaps by inserting here and there cycle lanes and urban parks to compensate the loss of ‘territorial biocapacity’: “rebuilding the city” is only partly a matter of environmental balance, it is above all a problem of re-appropriation by the inhabitants of the powers of determination on their life environ-

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