Languages, perceptions and urban tensions in the global city

Abstract

The city is a subject of narration under different points of view – technical, scientific, literary and artistic ones  – expressing themselves through specific languages.

Besides these “external languages” there is also a typical language of the city which constantly writes and rewrites parts, configuring the city as a palimpsest.

The city tells itself to the user-observer of its external spaces, who perceives the city’s messages through the senses and re-elaborates them through mental filters, translating them into perceptions.

In the contemporary city a sense of disorientation is being perceived, giving rise to worries, anxiety, fears; “tensions” in one word. The reasons of this discomfort may be found also in the effects of globalisation, which has generated an imbalance between the virtual and the real, the global and the local, introducing discontinue fragments of globalism in the neighbourhoods, exasperating fears and mistrust, and consolidating differences, exclusion and segregation.