The City Around: For an Urban Space at a Walking Pace

Contemporary society and consequently urban life—that is considered one of its most representative manifestations—have often been interpreted through space–time categories: liquidity, simultaneity and acceleration (Bauman 2000; Finchelstein 2011) are considered typical paradigms of our cities. Only apparently in opposition to these readings, today’s planners are inviting us to think about urban change starting from the recovery of a proximity and slowness dimension, rediscovering and enhancing neighbourhoods as a privileged sphere of experimentation. A place for promoting a new sociality, an occasion for a group representation and for meeting with the different, to be rethought in a primarily pedestrian dimension, it proves the ideal territory to be redeveloped through economic, reversible, often graphic and small-scale interventions, but with a profound impact on everyday urban living. Therefore, the proximity area is where the challenge of the “city around” is played, where people are placed at the centre of the political and design choices and their symbolic-identity needs stand before the stylistic-compositional ones: “speaking today of a project of the city therefore implies a change of perspective in relation to the traditional urban planning, encoded in the last century, as it becomes necessary to take account of the physical, social and cultural factors, but also of the psychological and individual ones, in which the identity of the community can be reflected and self-replicated” (Di Prete 2016, 159). The chapter will try to explore the potential and design implications of this interpretation, to understand how to promote the construction of a city of proximity, to be enjoyed at a walking pace.