ON CITIES (III). A collage of notes.

En essència el COLLAGE

és una suma de parts contradictòries

fent un tot, no és això la CIUTAT?

Imanol Buisan

Let's assume, as Aristotle stated in his Politics, that the city (polis) can be understood as a community of individuals whose finality is to create the conditions for a good life.

Aristotle model is (should be) our model. ¿?

A city is a diversity of things. Not all of them directly visible.

Infrastructures, buildings, geography, fauna, clima, flora, an environment, a global scenario, economies and people, institutions, necessities, interests, ideas, mindsets, myths, relationships, cultures, religions, desires.

The city is (or should be?) above all a public space (the agora of the greeks). The city is the place of the otherness, of the meeting with the other. With the ones that are not like us. The place of the logos, of the dialogue between people of different communities and origins and interests. As José Luis Pardo, following to Kant, points to...

the only way to be able to communicate in the public space consists in doing it following a rule that is not just acceptable for our community (for our people), but too for everyone that is not like us.

And once again Aristotle:

the city is by its nature a certain plurality, and by becoming more one, the city would become a home... so, if someone were able to do this, they should not do it, because it would destroy the city ... a city does not result from like-minded individuals.

The city is then complexity, irreductible plurality. And the necessity of the dialogue, of the dialogue with anyone else. Only in this kind of dialogue the own complexity is formed through the complexity of the other, as points Richard Sennet. A cosmopolitan, open-minded, urban mentality gets shaped so.

In Hannah Arendt's words: "Thinking with a broad mentality means training your own imagination to travel."

Come on!

Are you not thinking of the school in these terms yet?

Are you not thinking of the Erasmus+ either?

Is it all not about travelling and open our minds and meeting other people?

Oh, yes!, I tell you: yes, it is...

Let's travel.