Digital and Physical Margins: Pre-Visions for New Interactions in the City in Progress

Abstract

COVID-19 era forced society, cities and shared spaces at the edges of society, progressively shattering their own memory. The most common and crowded places have become almost exclusively virtual, hastening a process of digitalization and technological growth aimed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 UN ‘Agenda’, but which is still immature and superficial because, in many cases, it is forced by an emergency rather than by a consciously planned evolution. Moreover, the temporary emptying of metropolitan areas and the denial of social relations at all levels - personal, work, psycho-cultural and recreational - has progressively, but not indelibly, determined a sort of schizophrenia of the ‘signifiers’ as well as the ‘meanings’ of the urban fabric, of the memory of the spaces’ use, as well as of public buildings or private houses. The current boundary between analog and digital, that will hopefully be transformed into one harmonious integration and interaction, is the field on which the paper intends to focus its attention trying to define a balance (trans- and post-pandemic) between the re-appropriation of the collective living and the preservation of advantages widely demonstrated by the support that digital technologies can offer.