For a safe, friendly, open, free and liberating city

Abstract

The city, born to face individual fears, has become privileged seat of collective fears, losing those distinguishing features which drove the philosophical thinking of the flourishing industrial civilization to elaborate the following definition: “City air makes you free”.

The freedom offered by the city has always been limited and above all conditioned; the measures set up to guarantee freedom have promoted the erection of material barriers (city walls, moats, fortresses, castles, barracks, residential walls/railings, etc.) and immaterial barriers (armies, vigilance institutions, protection regulations and an increasing hail of constraints), which have imprisoned the human being for protection and safety’s sake, have fed his “fears” and interdicted him the access to happiness; happiness that only the euthopic thinking has tried to keep alive through the optimism of willingness and the cultivation of trust. Following the wish by Giovanni Persico (whom this number of TRIA is dedicated to), such message should be understood by all the people operating within culture, urban design, planning and management, hoping that the city to be built can actually supply/dispense that air making its inhabitants “free”.