Living in L’Aquila after the 2009 Earthquake. Forms and Practices of Space

The man and the surrounding environment constitute a unit that doesn’t provide for divisions and fractures, penalty the sense of anxiety, fear, insecurity: the destructive or catastrophic events produce a profound change in the social organization, weaken the cognitive categories and the symbolic structures through which a community perceives and comprises the world. The earthquake specifically change the environmental morphology, but also the social space, break off the practices and relationships that have animated - or better inhabited - places, streets, squares, houses: it distorts the deep meaning of living a place, which concerns the spatial relationship between individuals and things, but also the historical experience, that presupposes the everyday, permanence, identification and rituals. Losing the indices of spatial sense, the vital space and the domestic references leads to a radical crisis of the individual as being-in-the-world. The earthquake that struck the city of L'Aquila on 6 April 2009 is exceptionally emblematic of the physical and social vulnerability, because it led to a crisis of an entire microcosm, characterized by relationships, socialization, memories, sharing. The rubble, the barriers, the cranes have become an integral part of this landscape that includes a double disaster: the violent destruction and the stressfull, slow, reconstruction. The facades of buildings enclosed by steel beams, networks, wooden blocks are alternated to restored buildings and to shipyards, sometimes covered by installations of art, designing a new skyline, which transforms the chaotic post-earthquake panorama in new forms/prospects equally chaotic. The research here presented intends to analyze, through the qualitative and visual method, the transformation of the urban and social space of this community, but also the new way of living l'Aquila, a still fragmented and discontinuous city, in which citizens gather and socialize around "non-places", whose vocation is not territorial, doesn’t create identity, nor symbolic relationships and common assets, and is anti-relational.