Cities’ Mind: Some Lessons Learnt from the Mediterranean

The city is not made up only of stones, buildings, roads, bridges or gates. The city is also a mental place that hosts ways of life, practices, perceptions, rituals, movements, moods and feelings. This distinction between the built territory on the one hand, and the way in which people inhabit and live in a city on the other, does not seem to be sustainable anymore, above all in the light of the technological transformations which over the last few decades have contributed to reconfiguring the urban space as a hybrid space. This essay, in a dialogue with the concepts of Gilbert Simondon's philosophy, offers a general picture of the evolution processes of the city, which the author considers the first and oldest example of "artificial intelligence".