Pratiche informali e istituzioni. Per una politica dell’attenzione Informal practices and institutions. Towards a politics of attention

Cities are places where a renewed social activism is growing in unprecedented ways. Inside a wide spectrum of different urban collective movements, many practices are “informal” actions of re-appropriation: practices that challenge property and normative regimes in the attempt to recover a multiplicity of spaces that have been dismissed by modernity. These practices are islands of resistance but also incubators of new imageries: organizational experiments that are potentially able to build the city even out of an institutionally recognized framework; symbolic and material tactics of spatial sense-making; a net of molecular and minute writings that transgress the text of the planned city; the result of a capillary battle with power mechanisms. These forms of social mobilization can potentially increase the environmental and social quality of life in urbanized environments. But they need to be supported. In this perspective they represent a crucial challenge for institutions. What role could institutions play in this respect? What kind of tensions need to be explored between social practices and institutional powers? Can public policy promote urban inclusion by legitimizing these self-guiding society expressions?