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You are here: Home > Diritto di Voto / EU, Italy, Turin > the structural elements of change: part 1 - #Utopianhours #Turin

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Published on 2024-10-20 13:54:00 | words: 1783



Yes, another article series- but soon will resume (and complete) the one about the European Parliament elections (and their aftermath: see here; yes, I have to update the list with the actual publication weeks).

As I shared this morning on Facebook:

yes, another rainy day

good for a conference (yes, this afternoon and evening)
good for walking under arcades (yes, this morning)
and, of course, good for reading and writing (stay tuned)

meanwhile, an old album that I purchased decades ago on CD and was part of my travelling MP3 compilation


When decided to attend again this year "Utopian Hours" in Turin, I also considered when I should write about it.

Eventually, through my interactions with the locals, saw that probably would be better to post something on Sunday, i.e. today, the last day of the event (also because until next week-end I think that will have hectic days).

Well, to be precise: the idea was to post something before attending the last session, that starts at 2pm CET and tonight (with the "after hours") should wander into dinner time.

It is always entertaining to hear some of the local commentary: which is a proof that the locals and in Rome are able to stretch across time any inquiry or assessment (unless of course you are sponsored: then, I saw things or selections solved in matters of days or months, not years or decades), but all the while projecting their own expectations and staying quite superficial.

With obvious results when the "fast and furious" approach is adopted for those sponsored.

So, one of the most common comments I received is about my interest in architecture and history, as if it were a pose, and not something that has been a lifelong interest, but in interaction with society (i.e. started with archeology, evolved into cultural anthropology, and only then extended to architecture and urban planning).

Today was reading within the Sunday cultural supplement of the leading Italian business newspaper (Il Sole 24 Ore, published by the Italian industrialists' association) an interesting article from Sabino Cassese, reviewing a book about comparative law.

Which reminded another commentary about my interest in law, specifically Constitutional law: well, when I started first in politics at 17 to read material from Brussels, actually was coming from years of reading books- I still have somewhere in my book boxes a book comparing Constitutions that read in the late 1970s, as a teenager (while most of my classmates found boring even reading our own Italian Constitution).

If had been less superficial, would have understood that you cannot start suddenly in business (as I did from the late 1980s) to delve into contracts, negotiations, marketing without any formal training on that, unless you had plenty of prior "exercises" and trial-and-error.

Even funnier: since the late 1980s, for my employers and partners (and also for some customers), I was routinely asked to help in recruitment and executive recruitment- but, again, it was based on prior experience (first in politics, then... in the Army).

I liked the Utopian Hours format since the first time I attended it- also if back then there was a significant element of "city design", e.g. showing how key areas of Turin could become something else.

Over the years, shifted more from "what" toward the conceptual and "why" side- which was a much welcomed change (at least from those like me who attended to hear ideas and concepts that could be transposed elsewhere).

Why this change is, in my view, something that should happen more often (and not just in Italy)?

Because, just to stay on the urban planning side, unfortunately the obsession with "leaving a mark" and focus on design (in my view, an egomaniac trip- so common in Italian politics and public affairs, but also between archistars) left the "use" outside of the picture, generating repeatedly projects that were wonderful models on computers and "papier-mâché", yet a nuisance for the human dwellers having to navigate through them on a daily basis.

If you follow this website, now you would expect a short table listing the section of the article.

Anyway, did you look at how many words contains? Or at the title?

This article has a different purpose, i.e. sharing not a position, but some threads that will expand later.

And no, if you are looking for a traditional summary of the first two days...

...this is not it- maybe in a future article.

It is more something on the line of a book I wrote by accident while visiting Berlin in 2012, #BerlinDiaries, that you can read for free here

The Leit Motiv is really "change"- structural change, social change, and not just brick-and-mortar change.

On Friday evening, after the first day of speeches and presentations (and a nice selection of Better Cities Film Festival), decided to go and watch Coppola's Megalopolis.

Well, I would have probably enjoyed more the original version- but I would like to share few "cameos" on the dubbed Italian version.

In Italy, there was an old rule that required to change the text to align to lipsync, which generated funny episodes in the past, e.g. in "The Hudsucker Proxy" in English someone utters that they would call those guys with white gowns (i.e. to put somebody into a straightjacket and commit to a mental asylum), but in Italian, to retain lipsync...

... "white" became "verde", i.e. green: i.e. calling a team of surgeons was not was meant.

Megalopolis (a bit of spoiler), an Italian-American composition blending Ancient Rome, Shakespeare, Dante's Divine Comedy, and other Christian themes, start with a scene that really reminded me "The Hudsucker Proxy".

Then, in Italian, you are entertained few minutes down the road with a mangled version of Hamlet's monologue, and toward the end an equally distorted version of Ulysse's speech from Dante's Divine Comedy.

And, just for good measure, you can listed to a Caesar Catilina talk about Heaven Purgatory Hell (well... maybe after Constantine was possible- certainly not in Cicero's time), and the famous "quo usque tandem abutere", with here and there some Latin.

And then they talk about AI model's "hallucinations"... but it is funny- and from an urban planning perspective, it digs into a lot of XX century material (albeit some parts of the design look more like the 1971 version of "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory".

Why this digression? Because actually the movie was a nice "intermezzo" between the first and second day of the "Utopian Hours", as it explores how a building (or a plan) is never just a plan.

As you probably read in other articles on this website, I started working in multinational environments in the 1980s (actually- first political activities, then late 1980s real business).

I wrote few paragraphs ago (yes, space-time) about the quixotic mix of long-term commitment of resources to "dig" into points, coupled with a superficial attitude toward what actually should contextualize those activities.

As an American colleague and mentor told me in the early 1990s while working together, whenever he was working in Italy and proposed something that required to cope with complexity by making it as simpler as possible but not simpler, he was told "troppo difficile" or "troppo complicato" (troppo = too much).

Which, in Italian culture, does not have that literal meaning, within an organization: it implies not complexity per se, but complexity of relatioships.

Italy, as I wrote repeatedly, is still the same tribal society that in the last segments of the life of the Roman Republic generated some funny twists in the electoral system to avoid diluting the voting power of the original "core" (Rome per se) while extending its territory to the whole of Italy.

Yes, a 2,000+ old concept that still I see lingering in our social fabric.

Meaning: probably none of the tribes as all the expertise needed, and "troppo complicato" means often simply that, to implement that solution, you would need a cross-tribe collaboration.

We Italians want to live in the XXI century with XXI century services and opportunities, but whenever there was a similar occurrence of complexity, the natural instinct (almost a Pavlovian reflex) generated proposals to...

...rebuild in-tribe what other tribes had already available, to avoid having to barter.

Of course, it is fine if you have to dig holes, or do other activities that require half a day of training.

Anyway, when what you are talking about requires years or decades of aggregate learning, what you are proposing is actually an "autodafé" bordering self-defeatism.

When we are talking about "a new concept of relationship between citizens and those designing their cities", reminds me what my German girlfriend told me over 30 years ago (it was her business), when she explained how the Dutch were actually involving citizens before designing, not after.

In Italy, unfortunately, we still blend the superficial assessment of the context that I referred to above with a kind of "demi-god self-awareness" from any expert.

And when I say "any expert", I mean it: from the bus driver, to the lawyer, to the urban planning staff, to Mayors and Members of Parliament, anybody who gets a title then often behaves as an aristocrat under an absolutist monarchy.

They do not need to interact with those who they cannot acknowledge as having the same level of entitlement to guide the masses, certainly not city dwellers who should just be grateful of any choice bestowed upon them.

I am joking- but not that much.

So, what now?

Of course...

... the event is about to start- hence, see you in the next section of this article.