The Future is Backwards. Re-cycle as Destiny

In Italy, past has a very strong and emotional presence and this influences the way we think about future. Territorial studies have always got wrong predictions, building beyond all limits, leaving a legacy of empty spaces, unsold edifices, disused railways and roads lines. Detroit represents a manifesto of the next urban condition. In a few years it became the American Pompeii, as a result of the same crisis by which it has been generated. Nevertheless, something has happened. New assets are replacing the traditional urban images, and they give the ruins back to narrative and nature by transforming Detroit into the real first post metropolis. Citizens and urban-makers work with waste and remains. They recycle ideas and materials diffusing social innovation. The core concept of these activities is based on shift from a way of measuring to a system of values. Reducing, reusing and recycling seem to be the only sustainable social strategies capable of expressing innovation, of generating consensus and producing beauty. The event, as a labile and uncertain temporary happening, is a collective expression as a manifestation of a will and an intention, therefore, a reaction/interaction that becomes possible anticipation, as it stages a series of visions and shows that it is possible. While visions of the future are an abstraction, in the event the future manifests itself as a concrete possibility. Anticipation can be analysis and it can be activism. In this sense, we consider Recycle as destiny: it is the way in which, through his intentional acting, an individual meets the historical-social background.