O medo do Outro. Planeamento através de diálogos terapêuticos em comunidades altamente conflituais

The concept of difference is becoming more and more central to the way in which urban societies are understood, and a whole raft of theorizing (feminist, postcolonial, poststructuralist, queer, and psychoanalytic theories, for example) has contributed to this new awareness. But so too has a new politics of difference which has been re-shaping not only how we think about cities and urban processes but, more importantly, re-shaping cities themselves. Managing these differences has become an increasing challenge to the running of cities and has particular implications for the city-building professions. The choice is clear: ghettoization or hybridization; separate lives, or change-by-conjoining. The challenge is clear. How to build new hybrid communities rather than increasingly segmented and fragmented cities? Planning’s responses to this crucial question has not often been really satisfactory. Many scholars have acknowledged the overall failure of the planning system to respond to the increasing cultural diversity of the city, to the ways in which the values and norms of the dominant culture are reflected in plans, planning codes and bylaws, legislation, heritage and urban design practices, to planners’ inability to analyze issues from a multicultural perspective or to design participatory processes that bring racial and ethnic groups into the planning process (Ameyaw, 2000, p. 105). Finding out ways to manage our coexistence in increasingly diverse urban landscapes is not an easy task. A different path can be built: a path based on a communicative and collaborative planning approach whose goal is to encourage a dialogue among conflicting subjectivities. We call it a therapeutic approach (Sandercock 2003; Sandercock and Attili 2014): a way to engage with emotions in planning practice, recognising the importance of working with and through people’s hopes, fears, memories, wounds. In this respect many scholars, in the recent years, have been drawing attention to the need of creating a dialogic space for the unspeakable, for emotions to be heard and named, for talk of fear and loathing as well as of hope and transformation (Marris 1974; Baum 1997, Forester 1999, 2009; Sandercock 2003; Erfan 2013). This urgency involves the design of a safe space in which conflicting parties can meet and speak without fear of being dismissed, attacked, or humiliated—a new space of recognition in which differences and historic injustices are acknowledged, as a necessary prelude to addressing contemporary conflicts