Designing the proximity: Temporary exhibition of a research project's constellation

Could reframing new contemporary constellations based on new declinations of proximity be possible? City is a multifaceted entity and a dense structure at the same time, including tangled nets of dynamic and self-organizing systems at different administrative, political, and technological scales, for the creation of more sustainable futures. While we are experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic in the world, we ask ourselves about many aspects of our lives, and above all we ask ourselves if some behaviors and habits will remain the same as in the past or if they will undergo transformations. The objective is also to establish a renewed relationship between citizens and the temporal dynamics of their cities, facilitating their reconnection with the spaces in closest proximity to them. In this panorama, the principal aim is to imagine future scenarios for our cities, for a different use of public spaces, more inclusive, which responds to the needs and desires of different urban populations: children, elderly, animals, non-human agents, etc. For this reason, this chapter explores the subject of proximity designing through an exhibition of 30 projects by the students from the School of Design at Politecnico di Milano, who offer different declinations of the term divided in 15 keywords.