Bodies. Between Space and Design

dualism: the body is not a place of appropriation: it is not the owner of a self,
conscience, or soul. The body is not mine. I am the body. 29
These dichotomies have built the history of Western thinking. They recur
constantly. They cannot be put aside once and for all. However, my reasoning
is not based on these dichotomies.
13
What Is Urbanism?
In the past dynamic season—the last few decades of the twentieth century—
urbanism was interpreted based on the concept of place; place as context
(Vittorio Gregotti), palimpsest (André Corboz), statute of places (Alberto
Magnaghi), ground (Bernardo Secchi), uncultivated (Lucius Burckhardt), and
site (Sebastien Marot). Dwelling, producing, and exchanging have profound
roots in places—and so do urban projects. This statement is almost superfluous.
It is something that clearly and manifestly characterises the European
tradition. 30 Who can forget Siza’s white sheet, used to hide and at the same
time reveal every little deviation, depression, and protrusion of the ground? 31
European urbanism is founded on the relationship with a solid place, consisting
not simply of material, geographic, and morphological signs but of
values, norms, and rights. Context, palimpsest, ground, site, and uncultivated
are concepts that transmit the weighty, visible, steady character of things. For
Marot, “the site is like a volume”; a mix of multiple stratifications “between
the lithosphere and the atmosphere”. 32
Furthermore, European urbanism did something else: it considered space
through the body, as I shall try to demonstrate in the pages that follow. It
questioned what passes between the body and space: trust, rights, battles,
contrasts, tensions, memories, conflicts, exchanges, pleasure, enjoyment,
longing, turmoil, empathy, power, technical organisation, and actions. By
doing so it implicitly or explicitly interpreted the site as a place of the body
and, as such, as multiple, mobile, vulnerable, volatile, tenacious, powerful,
and fragile—as all bodies are. Not as an impression, a “calligraphic stroke”,
a persistence or permanence of actions over time—but as a space of the
body measured against the great questions placed before us by the present
moment: health, sickness, ageing, environmental changes, the plurality of
practices, and the political nature of space. These are the topics design has
to tackle through the body. It is this aspect of my reasoning that I wish to
highlight. It is this other kind of urban planning, nestling within the first,
that I wish to discuss.