Let’s start with what works, with things done well: the Park and Ride, for example, has been an essential element in Bari’s road network for years now. Why does it work? Because it solves a problem by practicing a reality exercise: if on the one hand it pushes you to prefer public transport to the car, on the other it shows you where to “give up” the latter. He doesn’t expect machines to dematerialize, suddenly disappear, disappear from the horizon just because the world is in the throes of ecological revolutions.
Cycle paths, however, work in the opposite way. They offer you an alternative, sure, but without reality exercises. And so hundreds of parking spaces are happily removed to free the cyclist in us. As long as it doesn’t rain, of course, or there are no children to take to school or elderly people to accompany. Or too many shopping bags in tow. The result is that a small segment of people, or rather the elite, go cycling, usually awaited by killer intersections at the end of the journey. come en rose. A grotesque cross between Lost roads by David Lynch and Fantozzi’s Cobram Cup while, in all this, hundreds of cars (they are the same as before) are looking for a parking space (they are half as many as before), attacking the innocent surrounding areas. They all discovered themselves to be lovers of Dostoevsky when he said that “two plus two equals four but how much more beautiful it would be if he equaled five”. The people of Bari in the car, between cycle paths and pedestrianized streets, try to do five every day. Curiously without success.
But it is a plebeian undertaking, that of parking, which works against the great transformations of our time. Transformations that Bari has been trying to adapt to for some time. Some call it modernity, others would call it conformism. That having to evolve, we Mediterraneans, in Dutch tulips: bicycles, pedestrianization, contemporary art. The new world. It’s a shame that even copying, which is not a crime, is a difficult art. And let’s go back to the beginning: the P&R, invented by the English fifty years ago, turned out to be an excellent solution for Bari. Everything else was more or less thoughtless ideological fury. Therefore, “in the Bari that I would like”, the precondition should be the exercises of reality, even in the conformism to which we are condemned. For example, a separate collection that does not require degrees in chemistry to separate materials or a master’s degree in Silicon Valley to operate some incomprehensible app that forces the elderly to turn to their children and grandchildren: because the result, then, is inevitably the “waste transfer” where the ancient bins survive. The solution must be greenbut it has to be easy, about as easy as going down and throwing a bag, or the game won’t work.
Of course, you also need to practice honesty as well as reality. Not everything is conformism as the Murattian of closed shops and shouted brands – Dubai style – might suggest. Bari also has its own very strong identity which however it only knows how to exhibit in grotesque forms: panzerotti everywhere, pilgrimages for the orecchiette, the focaccia, the dialect. The commonplace of one’s own commonplaces. The eternal festival of the village from which only Saint Nicholas patiently escapes, rising a little, with his breadth of gaze and his transversal affiliations. In the hope that NATO won’t bomb us, we remain clinging to him.
For the rest, the scenario is this: Bari is a city that copies poorly from those who (often wrongly) it considers better than itself and shows itself worse when it wants to show off its traditions and roots. Maybe we should do the opposite. Starting again from the fundamentals, for example: hygiene, safety, minimum services from which hundreds of families are excluded, community centers for children and the elderly. Then we could continue by planting those strange plants with the trunk, branches and leaves – apparently they are called trees – in some park, avoiding the continuous repetition of lands scorched by heat waves. And, finally, try to revive the city’s identity in new, less caricatural, more thoughtful forms. Not easy. But it’s the hard art of management, beauties, and your doctor didn’t tell you to do it.
