New Imaginaries. The public city from representation to affective experience

The global pandemic has dramatically transformed our way of inhabiting the home and the city, making explicit processes already in progress, based on the control of space and bodies. However, we live a reversal whereby sociality and freedom of (virtual) confrontation are concentrated within the domestic enclosure; separation and mutual control mark public space. The practices of re-appropriation of public space by the inhabitants produce places where human experience is formed, accumulated and shared, becoming part of the collective memory. The aesthetic dimension linked to the representation of the city is therefore flanked by one deeply influenced, sometimes determined, by the affective ties that citizens establish with the spaces of the city and the atmospheres to which they "are subjected". Let's imagine now that we could widen every sidewalk in the city by at least one meter: we could, in a future pandemic phase, not have to completely renounce the freedom of use of open spaces; in a phase of regained "normality" enjoy greater quantities of public space, open to the experience and actions of citizens.