Verso il centro : la città globale

The author visualizes the question of the city and its peculiar way of structuring itself, symbolically and materially, on a global level. In this horizon, as a reaction to globalizing processes, the contribution shows the strong tendencies of the contemporary towards the formation of 'urban nodes' in communication with each other but disconnected from the physical territories to which they belong. Likewise, according to the author, the metropolitan spaces appear to be anything but smooth and egalitarian, being rather crossed by profound socio-economic segregations. The author also highlights the notion of 'center' and its anthropological presuppositions in the era of privatization and consumption and hopes that we can start building a new urban public space based on the encounter between free differences. [Publisher's text].