When asked by the committee to write a short essay about my contribution to “Urbanism of Inclusion – Infrastructures of Inclusion”, my first reaction has been reading backward my PhD Thesis, “Corridors, Genealogy and dissolution of a modern spatial device”, that then has become a book, more ambitious and elaborated in his final italian version (Irene Guida, Corridoi, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2015). This backward reading started from the last book published this year, “Di chi è la terra. Dalla giustizia sociale alla giustiza ecologica” (Irene Guida, Paolo Groppo, Di Chi è la Terra, Milano, Meltemi 2019), passing through the e-book “L’acciaio fra gli Ulivi. L’Ilva di Taranto ,dalle origini a oggi”, (Milano, L’Inchiesta 2012). My second thought was of extreme happiness, because there still is a continuity with what I learnt in 2010 with the Baltimore LTERBES. It has been in Baltimore, while volunteering with ecologists and participating to their field research, that I made the direct experience of the dissolution of the strictly architectural point of view of my training, into a wider environmental issue. That experience introduced me to elaborate the idea that we are facing a new global form of quest for justice, which is no more social nor spatial justice, but nothing less than ecological justice.
Having been among the first visiting scholars from Europe in the Urban program at Parsons, the freedom of research was huge and exciting with a fresh, thoughtful vibe that in my point of view is the backbone of “Corridoi. La linea in Occidente”, and translating it English is still one of my aims, given the fact that the book is my main contribution. The structure of the book is simple, there are three parts which are named in series “Régions Passages”. They have the function of providing a wider framing of the issue of the corridor in environmental and theoretical studies; they are intervals (introduction, reflections, conclusion) among two main parts, one dedicated to the ecological corridor, and the other as analogy, dedicated to the genealogy of the modern spatial device of the corridor.
It is a book which in itself is an “homage” to the art of editing, and it is in itself an act of ordering like corridors do with our thoughts, and even the book is carefully designed to be a corridor in itself, it is a self-defining object.
This extenuating work on the book lasted almost two years, and it lead me to a sense of perspective. His main thesis is that the rhetorical telling of networks is only there to cover the reality of our lives strictly defined into disciplinary space, defined by financial, spatial and cultural segregation. We live in a corridor – like space.
In continuity I would go further, making a genealogy of public space as space of ecological care at large. It would lead to a critique of western “logos”, which is not only rationality in designing and building our shared spaces, but also in perceiving and narrating space.
This critique is what I would call “La città interrotta”.
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