A book not only about cities, but about the future of cities. ‘Città e Futuro’ has been published in bookstores and on the online platforms by Roberto Besana and Roberto Poli, with contributions from Gabriella D’Elia, Giulia Fasoli, Safaa Mataich, Fabio Millevoi, Elena Petrucci, Carlotta Poli , Roberto Poli, Silvia Rigamonti, Mattia Rossi, Stefania Santilli and the photographs of Diego Bardone, Roberto Besana and the La Spezia native Cesare Salvadeo. The authors, with this work, present an opportunity for reframing, a way of seeing, with a different look, an otherwise known theme, to discover clues that could suggest new ways of action, possible hopes where otherwise only negative prophecies are seen. “In just over ten thousand years, a blink of an eye in the history of homo sapiens – Poli writes in the introduction – we have gone from micro-groups of nomadic hunters to megacities. In this volume we will not talk about megacities, a predominantly Asian and African phenomenon , nor sprawls, the widespread cities typical of the United States. They are two abnormal ways of using space in which wherever you look and for tens of kilometers you always find yourself within urbanized contexts examples. We will instead deal with small and medium-sized cities, let’s say between thirty thousand and one million inhabitants. These are the cities in which the vast majority of Italian and European citizens live. These cities are neither too large nor too small advantages of living in an urban context without imposing the additional costs linked to the abnormal developments of urbanization, whether intensive as in megacities or extensive as in sprawls”. The United Nations expects, however, that by 2050 three out of four people in the world will live in urban contexts. “This single fact explains why it makes sense to think about a book about cities and their futures: because it concerns most of us.”
m. magi
