La Città Altra: Storia e immagine della diversità urbana : Luoghi e paesaggi dei privilegi e del benessere, dell'isolamento, del disagio, della multiculturalità

Abstract

This volume proposes a rich body of contributions on the 'Other City', a theme so far little beaten but worthy of all our attention, which is imposed on the scene of international, modern and contemporary historiography, for its undeniable topicality. Throughout history, the city has always had to deal with social 'otherness', that is, with class privileges and, consequently, with the discrimination and marginalization of minorities, the less well off, foreigners, in short with the diversity of status, culture, religion. Thus the urban fabric has ended up structuring itself also as a function of those inequalities, as well as of strategic places for the exercise of power, of political, military or social control, of spaces for imprisonment, for health isolation or for the 'temporary' remedy for disasters. From the first portraits of cities elaborated and diffused on the principle of the fifteenth century for the purpose of political exaltation or for religious propaganda and for devotional purposes, which often, through increasingly refined graphic techniques, distort or even deny the true urban image, one arrives, at dawn of contemporary history, to the new meaning given by scientific topography and new methods of representation, aimed at revealing the structure and urban landscape in their objectivity, often raw and unexpected for those who, before then, had known the city through the filter of the 'regime' iconography. The representation of the urban image still shows the contradictions of a community that sometimes includes, and even exalts, diversity.