The Good City
“And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel’s swaying or the junk’s rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox.”
Umberto Curi, Foreign
“La memoria storica vive se passa come un ricordo che transita dall’uno verso l’altro, e lo riguarda. Se non si incorpora nell’esperienza di chi riceve, in un modo o nell’altro, ogni informazione rischia di essere uguale ad un silenzio”
Paolo Jedlowski, Memoria, esperienza e modernità
“La politica non è l’esercizio del potere. La politica deve essere de nita di per sé, come un modo di agire speci co messo in atto da un soggetto proprio e derivante da una razionalità propria. è la relazione politica che permette di pensare il soggetto politico e non l’inverso.”
Jacques Rancière, Ai bordi del politico
Introduction (di Agostino Zanotti)
The BUDDcamp has arrived at its third edition. This event represents an ideal occasion for us to re ect on and review what we have accomplished in the last three years.
The various ideas inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in particular the chapter of the city of Euphemia, build a leitmotif that runs throughout our work. I think it is important to highlight some passages of it (see above) to understand one of the grounds of this activity: the city as a place where memories are shared.
The different places that were the sites of engagement during the last years have been passed through by people, asylum-seekers or people under international protection, who stayed or left, leaving some memory of them behind or not.
As the association LDA we tried to provide an opportunity for the students to observe the main objective of our activity: a project approach aimed at engendering the inclusion of refugees and asylum seekers, which has, however, not yet reached the point at which their acts (of inclusion), in a public and thus political space, are able to defend their right to escape.
Citizen and foreigner, dwelling and movement, private and common interests, local and global: the city is a place under the in uence of opposing forces, and therefore marked by con ict. The city is the place where inhabitants manage their memories and nourish their destinations (Anna Lazarini); in this perspective, immigrants become frontier citizens, living the condition of neither being here (living) nor there (coming), thus experiencing double absence (Abdelmalek Sayad).
The relation between citizenship and movements of migration should be supported by a new pact of coexistence among citizens: an agreement that can form and support each person’s well-being and that can relate identity to differences, bringing back value in terms of social connection.
In the last three years of the BUDDcamp we tried to intertwine the three terms ‘city planning’, ‘politics’ and ‘ethics’ in one perspective aiming at investigating the concept of the fair city, as Camillo Boano pertinently pointed out during the conference “ Immigrants and Politics” on the 2nd of February 2013. Therefore, it is possible to affirm that the relection on the topic of a fair city is the focus of the social commitment of LDA Zavidovici and its activities. Social and urban justice, and social and political responsibility form the gaze, the lens, through which LDA’s projects of the last years should be looked at.