IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

The image and configuration of the modern city are an expression of contemporary society and the degree of control in the neoliberal age of what it is abandoning or allowing. A city, like any community where people live in a wide variety, is a way of life with a local story and it includes simultaneously two opposites, the first conflictual social systems and the second the need for a great deal of social consensus, time to evolve and opportunities for growth and development, partly intentional, but largely free from outside pressures and dictates. The city is an irreducible synthesis that combines the existential aspect of its systems and the situations and spaces of uncertainty and contradictions whether in the cultural aspect or the physical aspect. The main question of the essay will deal with the gap between planning control in infrastructure or in time and the Laissez Faire that sometimes blocks and sometimes allows; otherness and conflict as a preliminary concept of freedom and existence- between revolution and evolution. our main premise is that a city is not the creation of a single individual, or the creation of supreme inspiration or momentary brilliance of order, but rather a complex and conflictual attitude between the individual and its social systems. The contradictory relationship reflects the civic sense in urban space. A plethora of desires, some of which are realized and some that remain unanswered.