Date limite pour proposer un article: 20 mai 2023
Since the dawn of Western modernity, the city has been the place of choice for experiments aimed at promoting its development consistent with social needs and at remedying the “social ills” produced by urbanization processes. The challenges posed by demographic growth, the densification of social life and by the new functions conferred on urban centers during the age of the industrial revolutions provoked a rapid decline of both the Renaissance ideal city and the laissez-faire approach. At the same time, a growing number of scientific disciplines and areas of knowledge emerged that, based on new methods of quantitative and qualitative investigation, aimed at controlling, operating, and developing the city through mediating between science and administration. Thus, the city became the main place for the “scientization” theorized by Lutz Raphael: a primacy that it has never abandoned in the following decades, through the emergence of new urgencies such as today’s growing awareness for environmental sustainability.
The special issue will focus on the Western European space between post-WWII reconstruction and the present. This period of time has seen the emergence of three phenomena: “the apogee of the European state” (in the words of Tony Judt) during the 1960s, with the expansion of state powers and prerogatives and with the design and application of “strategies for social cohesion, moral sustenance and cultural vitality”; the emergence of an increasingly composite civil society, ever less able to be framed in simplifying schemes and progressively aiming at self-representation and self-management through intermediate bodies; the questioning and (re)affirmation of the category of “experts” as holders of technical knowledge functional to a non-pathological development of society; and finally, the rise of the “neoliberal city” theorized by David Harvey and others.
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