La città multietnica e multiculturale come spazio di vita sostenibile The multiethnic and multicultural city as a sustainable living space

The multiethnic and multicultural city, location par excellence of exchange and coexistence, draws nourishment from the practices of its inhabitants. Paradoxically, however, it is nurtured too by the conflicts and contrasts between the physical structure of the city and people’s different modes of behaviour, above all the new and emerging ones, seizing the opportunity to set in motion fertile processes of reinvention of the use and form of space. The possibility of today’s city becoming truly sustainable, will stem from a capacity to exploit its current propensity to have a multiple and composite character, in which all the parts, however different from one another, are placed on a single perspective plane: an immense drift of different questions and things, of forms and usages, of places and settings, of languages, images, scenes, do-it-yourself organisations of space, of humanity and technology, from the smartphone to the car. An inhabited whole, a world of a freedom that is at once exhilarating and devastating. But those described are the same characteristics of the multiethnic and multicultural city from which a different idea of quality and sustainability of the inhabited spaces of our lives is born. New types of spaces, perhaps not yet fully comprehensible or universally accepted, but certainly with a markedly dynamic and operative capacity where practices of use trace its form and boundaries.