La città come testo. Oltre l'idea di città

What we usually call “town” can still be seen as a specific part of an objective reality? When the appeal of the “urban” was at its zenith, the concept was already primarily designating not a place but a process, a way of transforming social relations and personal stories. As the concept of “urban” has always been based on a differential gap with the surrounding areas, we are no more always able to discriminate urban areas from something “not urban”. And finally we are pushed to think that towns are not “there”, and maps are not an instrument to describe their independent “reality”, but that the new purpose of maps is to create the “urban effect”, inventing the identity of places, their plan and their boundaries: the new maps, in the era of Google and social networks, don’t represent a territory, they write it.