URBAN EVENTS AND THE SOUL OF THE CITY. The Poetic Political Tripartition of Urban Form

The analogy between the concept of soul and the idea of city is established in Book IV of the Republic. An analogy that historian and philologist Nicole Loraux sees in her famous publication, The Divided City, as a true paradigm for understanding the essence of Greek cities, Athens first and foremost, since it leads us “ to give the city a memory that resembles that of the individual, since they (the Greeks), perhaps more than anything else, conceived the analogy between the city and the individual as political”. Keeping the French historian Nicole Loraux assertion open, we could say, in other words, that the essence of the Greek city is expressed in the link between city and citizen, between place and individual. Now, projected into the space of collective values, the signs of this invisible link, the signs of the soul, are also expressed through the forms and spaces of the city and can be investigated by looking at the urban events. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that, in the 1960s, in his efforts to outline a rational theory of urban design, Aldo Rossi defined Athens as “ the first clear idea of the science of urban events; it is the passage from nature to culture, and this passage, which is part and parcel of urban events, is offered to us by legend”. According to Rossi, Athens is a clear idea of a city because it develops from the inside toward the outside according to a tripartite layout in which the primary generating elements of the urban form are articulated and recognizable: the temple, the organs of political and social life consisting of the buildings connected with collective activities, and so on; these structures are surrounded by the dwellings of the urban and rural communities. Athens is a clear idea of a city and yet, Rossi continues, it is also an unachievable urban idea: a city that “remains as the purest experience of humanity, in conditions that can never return”. The conditions that can never return, to which Rossi probably alludes, are those expressed in the link between city and territory and which, in turn, are reflected in the link between city and citizen. The feeling of the loss, in our time, of this original link between man and place by the universal Mobilmachung drives people, consciously or unconsciously, to live together but without being part of a community. This essay addresses exactly this issue: does the loss of the original link between place and individual mean the loss of the city’s soul? And again: is it possible to think of a city, an image of a city, without a common origin among its citizens?