LA MIA TERRA È DOVE POGGIO I MIEI PIEDI

Abstract

My LAND IS WHERE I PUT MY FEET. MIGRANT DWELLING BETWEEN POLITICAL AND SPATIAL PAR ADIGMS. The phenomenon of migration today has taken on decisive importance within our glo balized societies. The number of flows of human beings moving today from the African continent (but not only from that) tells us that the mobility of people on the planet fully invests the future design of our inhabited spaces and communities; and looks at it as a reflection of the theme of world cities and its political and social implications. Migration has historically brought about decisive transformations that have redrawn the physical, human, social, economic and cultural landscapes of countries; such as the United States, which in the 1900s transformed the transit through those lands of millions of men and women into a collective resource. Our continent is struggling to design a course capable of transforming the emergency that this phenomenon constitutes into a project for the future. As I write these reflections, European governments are squabbling around the management and distribution of flows; and they show, not as of now, a difficulty in imagining virtuous models to turn this crisis into an opportunity. However, in real dynamics, communities old and new show a repertoire of adaptations and mutations of urban spaces and architectures that suggests paradigms for new political and social narratives: looks that also become useful perspectives for interpreting and governing spatial transformations. The essay describes some practices, formal and informal, of the Sicilian territory connected with the crossings and rootings of migrant communities within those territories. From recycle, to adap tive architecture, to the post-production of public space, to the self-construction of temporary habitats, foreign habitation points us to traces, clues, themes and materials for new spatial paradigms capable of nourishing the discourse of architecture; and of updating the practices of contemporary design of our changing landscapes.