Infrastuctural space: forms of perception and strategies of representation

The way in which the experience of the city is lived and socialised is closely connected to the narrative and visual strategies through which the urban phenomenon is represented. Perhaps it is not possible to establish a single causal link, that is, to attribute an absolute primacy of experience over narration, since the cultural context in which we experience the city is simultaneously the cause and the result of the representations of that same experience. However, it is possible to highlight how parallel to the process of formation of the large European metropolises a method of representation of the city mainly oriented to the visual aspect has taken place and that this same method significantly influenced the understanding and development of the urban phenomenon in the following decades. This is the case of photography, cinema and comics, eminently visual languages that are widespread among the populace and that, between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, saw a very rapid technical and structural maturation, becoming negotiating spaces1 where residents of the metropolis could find respite from the "intensification of nervous life"