A tour in the city of Florence “built” by the inhabitants
The body has its own reasons in different life seasons determining the way to inhabit and build new and old spaces of the city, beyond traditional uses and behaviours, sometimes recovering old functions, inventing new and unsuspected ones.
Spaces and times of everyday life, bricolage in the use of the city, the silent and unconscious countergeography that becomes visible in the building of alternative maps: tenacious re-conquest of the right to non standardization and to non-use according with already foreseen ways, of spaces to that designed.
The countergeography of bodies is located in the residual spaces of cities, places paradoxically produced by the effort to rationally organize the urban territory.
Indifference of urban bureaucracies is frequently the origin of practices that create the spaces we are talking about, but is also the necessary condition for their survival.
Urban bureaucracy structurally refuses the creativity of everyday life.
This ‘non organisation’ of residual spaces should be considered a richness with dignity in city planning
In practice it should be protected: forgetting it.
The spaces for possible innovations through life practices are located in the friction zones of rational functions of the city…
… only their existence allow the expression of the creative practices of body contergeography:
UrbanFurniture – MicroActivities – MeetingPlaces – (improper) Uses of public spaces – SpontaneousArchitectures
These are some of the possible spaces invented by everyday life.
Movable, sometimes ephemeral, connected to time and the seasons, invent a web of alternative places and “services” that the official city tolerates, ignores, assaults.
But this is a fundamental geography because in multiplicity we can find the positive energy of the city.