Abstract
Abstract This article discusses the role of public libraries under the new political and social dynamics of democratic societies. It assumes that the continuity and expansion of the democratization process lead society to demand an increasingly larger and more active participation in the public arena and in decision-making. In the landscape of a world in crisis, seeking spaces of participation and new forms of coexistence and fellowship seem insufficient. Formal cultural institutions are urged to dialogue with new, proactive players, and with the new loci of production, circulation and appropriation of culture in democratic societies. Flexibility and openness to the new social dynamics are a challenge that they must address. This article is an exploratory reflection and, as such, the essayistic form was chosen as a strategy that allows one to understand, by means of subjective perceptions grounded on the bibliography of various fields of the human sciences, the emblematic situations of an emerging context presenting knowledge in a way that keeps it open, so that it includes its own rectification and originates new cogitations.
Highlights
We live moments of restlessness and uneasiness
Awareness of the new political-social dynamics and the proactivity of the new players compel us to a fundamental reflection on our formal cultural institutions - libraries, museums, cultural centers - and their role in the new, emerging context if we hope to preserve their relevance
The multiplicity of voices that seek space in the public arena is inherent to democratic exercise
Summary
We live moments of restlessness and uneasiness. The lenses we use to see the world no longer seem able to fathom the context in which we are immersed, and we have yet to find new lenses that might allow us to understand it. The formal cultural institutions are urged to dialogue with the new individuals and loci of production, circulation and appropriation of culture (understood as a process that makes something proper, subjective, driven by desire and will) in democratic societies. This article is an exploratory reflection and, as such, it seems to us the essayistic form is a strategy that allows one to understand, by means of subjective perceptions grounded on the bibliography of various fields of the human sciences, the emblematic situations of an emerging context. To conceive the public library in its inextricable relationship with the city and the territory, the subject which we propose to reflect upon, led us immediately to Calvino’s book, both for its poetic prose somewhere between desire and fear, the elements that shape our cities, and for the image of the arch, which doesn’t exist without the stones that compose it. The Italian writer Calvino (1978) was fascinated heterogeneous forces in action
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