The Real City, the Imaginary City, and again the Real City

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between the real city, the imaginary and the virtual city. The possibilities made available by the new technologies and by the Internet make reality always more futuristic, reality in which people could theoretically communicate amongst themselves without any limit in space and time. With regard to urban planning there are several important considerations to be made amongst which, of primary importance, the need to re-think the city: on the one hand to improve both the internal as well as the external systems of accessibility; on the other hand to challenge the tendency of economic and social separation and the phenomenon of the ghetto (with its relative urban degradation), which inevitably occurs when individuals cannot easily move from one place to another and when they do not have places where they can meet and congregate so as to meet and socialize, where they can share their interests and desires, their points of encounter being in airports and train stations.