Every crisis it’s a needed moment to pass trough the past into the future: it is the present time.
The meaning of crisis is often used in a negative way, but the term itself doesn’t necessary involved a worsening: it indicates the passage toward something different. As any other phase of tension toward the change, the ‘crisis’ state is characterized by instability, therefore by conflict, insecurity, quarrel and violence.
Today the political, economical and social structures are dangerously swinging. The crisis’ state it’s universal. On one side the ecological drama is making people doubting about the real possibilities to proceed along the path of a development model based on an unlimited growth (of GDP, consumption, production, capital); on the other side the global system of finance and its institutions prompt a world spread reconsideration around the real capacities of democratic power in the control of the present time processes. Everyday the role of the State it’s undermined by decisions taken in privileged circles, dominated by the logics of monetary utilitarianism and of commercial opportunism: these logics are reflected in life, bodies and in the physical space of cities and territories.
The referential models, political, economical or financial, are clearly inadequate: there’s a widespread need of new paradigms and new languages. The thinking about knowledge is a key factor in the models of nowadays production and power. So this thinking represents one of the cardinal points from which start again.
In this context the importance that the control of knowledge transmission assume, in the maintenance of the status quo and in the management of socio-spatial “surveillance”, it’s a key point. This control transform the thought itself in an element that is prone to those devices that structures itself meticulously, that inhibits its free circulation and that devalues its social and cultural functions, whereas culture it is intended as a free and critic knowledge: the only one that can deeply analyze and comprehend and, why not, subvert the dominant schemes.
The various reforms in school’s and university’s world, along with the permanent education delivered buy enterprises, have worked together to define and implement the phenomenon known as “long life learning”.
This process of educational inflation, that push away everybody from the job’s world, it encourages a widespread shakiness and exploiting condition that does not form people in a critical knowledge and in creativity. Today the research is indissolubly tied to private financing and so to those production and accumulation processes that aim to favour the development of a few part of specific disciples. In this context the research itself and humanistic sciences are strongly disadvantaged, because by using the crisis as a justification the State, the one who’s supposed to guarantee the necessary resources to them development, heavily cut the founds that are on assignment to these.
The ultra-specialization of disciples and research has caused the loss of the primary objective of knowledge: the evolution of the human being as such. The classical rationalism has ended up by reduce the evolution’s steps of human mind to a fistful of numbers: every material and immaterial good are numerically quantified. The centrality of money in the management of everyday life reduces more than ever all the individual’s expectation to the question: “How much?”. The goal of quality has been shipwrecked inside a tempest of self-referential numbers.
Today an urgency of a transversal approach that cross all the fields of knowledge is sensed by many people.
Is no more possible to temporize any further in marking distinction of genders between the ambits of thought: it’s necessary to go beyond the ultra-specialistic division between the various disciples in order to try to recompose an homogeneous reasoning, that would be able to give back sense to the human behaviour. At the same time it’s necessary to guarantee the access to knowledge and the inclusive involvement of any citizen as a trans-national being, no more tide to the concept of “nation”, but to the one of “Multitude”.
In a world made of people that celebrate everyday an uninterrupted movement, in a world characterized by global commodification, in a world where States prove to be unable to guarantee the basic rights even to their own majority populations, “sovereignty” is reduced to a no more sustainable slogan.
As a matter of fact Multitude is the concept that describes a plurality that exist as such on the public scene, in the collective action, in the care of common affairs, without falling necessarily in a “One”, in an unsustainable unity. Multitude is the existential and political form of the many as many, the lots as lots, the multitudes as multitudes. Multitude is heterogeneity.
As such it shows itself Inside the city not in an univocal way, but rather by generating those that is defined as the “city of differences”, that’s composed by nationalities, origins, subjectivities, religions, languages, economies and consumption’s typologies, cultures, ages, genders, sexual preferences, etceteras.
So in the socio-spatial texture of metropolis the control of life’s conditions becomes a political affair, where the authority rules and manages the disciples of bodies by structuring populations with many devices: barriers, gates, video surveillance, and prohibitions of any kind. Everywhere these obstacles limit the generation of “spontaneous” public spaces and in the same time they deny the basis of conviviality and freedom while supporting the expansion of fear.
So in those spaces characterized by great conflict, expanding micro-communities and moving multitudes are offering resistance to the geography of power. By leaking in “hidden immensities” they try to give birth to unregulated flexible processes that inclined to transform the space of mobility and of circulation in a space of life and of affirmation of new subjectivities, rights and citizenships.
Thus cities and territories are the theatres of crisis and multitudes are the actresses of urban and global rebirth, the one that shows itself in the defence, in the liberation and in the common fruition of space and rights.
Nowadays the “insurgent practices” – each form of bottom up resistance that operates by detract space to power and to the commercialization and financialization of territories – are considered as temporary system errors that have to be repressed, while they should be supported by social and urban welfare and by public policies able to transform them in new models of social and territorial self-organization.
Is it possible to sustain an urban and cultural rebirth inside the existing institutions and hierarchies or is needed a new constituent process?