Ethics and public space in contemporary Western societies

Abstract

Space, as the material field in which personal, collective and social practices develop, is imbued with the values and meanings of each occasion and is shaped, as regards its organization, content and form, in correlation with the different aspects of a predominant ethics and/or the conflicting value systems that characterize the specific production context. A disputed term that is relativized in accordance with the formative cultural, geographical, environmental, technological, social and economic context, ethics has from Plato to contemporary thinkers provided answers to questions relating to values, meanings and how to live as an individual or a society, proposing concepts or systems differing in their epistemological character, particularly in cases of descriptive ethics and meta-ethics. This paper attempts to record, comprehend and critique the contemporary content of ethics, the difference in relation to earlier periods (i.e. modernity, if we accept that the age of globalization on which we shall focus coincides with hypermodernity), and its effects on the constitution of contemporary urban public space in the Western world.