La ciudad como nueva cuestíon social. Heterotopías en la epoca global

The text is referred to a study conducted in ten important suburban areas in the biggest italian cities. The research's aim was to observe the transformation of the urban horizon, its re-organisation of the traditional co-ordinates of space and time and their consequences on social life. The study shows how the classical model - center of the town/suburban areas - is no longer valid. First, because of a heterotopical fragmentation which is a transverse phenomenon. Some parts of the city are showing new combinations of functions and populations: these are simply juxtaposed, with neither contacts nor communications. Secondly, because suburbs depend less than before on centers: while some places/populations are loosing functions, suffering economic changes and weakening of sociability, others places/populations are wider connected elsewhere. The metaphor of archipelago offers a more precise picture of the reality. Marginalisation processes are to be found all over in the city. Old suburbs and new critical areas can be mentioned as sensitive areas, far beyond their geographical position on the city map. In these contexts the consequences of globalisation are more visible and virulent, showing some convergence into a similar model featured by the same critical relations between globality/locality and inside/outside, institutional withdrawal, fragmentation and place banalisation, imagined dislocation of consumption and media, anthropological suffering and collapse of sociability.