lution of the experience: at the Cinema Palazzo in Rome deep relationship and collaboration with local communities have developed over time, as well as in the experience of Cinema America in Trastevere; the relationship with the territory as well as activities and useful services to the local environment are often constituents of the experience itself in the case of occupied factories; the relationship with buyers on the one hand and with manufacturers on the other is a specific area of work and development in the case of GAS (Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale, solidarity- based purchasing groups) and peri-urban agricolture.2 Many of these experiences are affected by an ideological legacy: it suffice to remark how a term such as re-appropriation seems to evoke a return to something lost or taken away by development, and this could be very questionable. On the other hand, from the point of view of the search for meaning, processes and practices of reappropriation are a sign of vitality of the city and a response to alienation not only in the work, but in the very forms of urbanity (Harvey 2012; Brenner, Theodore 2002; Brenner Marcuse, Mayer 2012), in an age of advanced capitalism in which cities understood as a (urban and socio-economic) whole exploited, in ways ranging from the financialization of the settlement processes to ‘planned consumption’ devices (Lefebvre 1968). Self-organization is a response to the commodification of the city (Harvey 2012; Schmid 2012) and to the expropriation of creative design skills of the inhabitants, as well as of their ability to be active protagonists in the construction of the city. At the same time, they are processes of re-signification of places and ways of living together, in which people, whether they are residents or other individuals who have established a deep relationship with the places, act practices that give meaning to their life environments (Cellamare 2011).
which precipitates the linear chronographic time and turns it into everyday lifetime, giving him a qualification against the stream that modernity has accustomed us to perceive as continuous and homogeneous, and therefore alienating (Gasparini 2001). Places, even in their physicality, with the concrete problems that arise from them and where the needs of each individual collide, are often at the same time means and the cause of social interaction and politics. The process of self-organization in / with the territory becomes a principle and a process of individuation (Simondon 1989; Stiegler 2006). It is a very real and concrete space, which has to do with life and in particular with daily life. The places, urban and territorial environments are also ‘spaces of practicable action’, the ‘manipulative area’ (Jedlowski 2005) of a community in action. These experiences try to find a dimension of sense within the space of contemporary city, which is generally suffered and overdetermined, mostly generated by hetero-directed processes. Their protagonists, in accordance with a sort of ‘reality principle’, are well aware of the strength and consistency of these processes, of their role in the construction of the city, which is hard to overturn and face directly. They open a gap in the network of constraints and imposed rules (often implicit, unspoken and unwritten), in contexts that are often stiffened by formalization and institutionalization, and conditioned by economics prevailing over politics. They aim at building and managing a sort of parallel space, by experimenting with new forms of cohabitation and then promoting them in wider contexts, often by building relationships within the territory and local solidarity networks. These experiences share the attempt to reconstruct a path of autonomy, understood as a ‘practice of freedom’ (Foucault 2001), as in the experience of Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino (1957) who, in order to pursue what he believed in, had to take a completely different path from the ones given as viable in his reality. Nevertheless, before any intentional policy or drive to build new institutions, the basic goal of self-organization is to pursue an autonomous social organization on the territory, regardless of external, institutional or statutory overdeterminations.
Appropriation of places, everyday life and the Baron in the Trees Space is the medium of all these experiences. Places and everyday life have a strong centrality in them. In fact, these experiences find in the texture and spatiality of places (understood as deep intertwining of tangible and intangible dimensions) their solidification point, their drive and motivation, often Self-organization and the culture of the public their raison d’être, as well as an activator for their The experiences of self-organization differ greatly passion. A place is a material and significant space, depending on their culture of the public. The idea and the cultures of the public can be very different 2 This is also not untinged by some ambivalence. Econo- (Cancellieri, Ostanel 2014) and generate different mist Bruno Amoroso has argued that, in fact, the devel- kind of problems. opment of direct relations between producers and buy- In an consolidated anarchist approach (Ward 1973, ers, the so-called “short networks”, mostly shown in their 1997), if we lived in a state of complete self-organpositive side (reconstruction of relationships, even with ization, and if problems could be addressed by the territories, deleted from market), still completely skips the community in total independence and without the economic role and social function of small businesses influence of socio-economic models, people inwithin the neighbourhoods, thus weakening a network of volved would be more strongly empowered, driven relationships that instead is very important within urban by a collaborative spirit, able to evaluate the pros environment, and has been already put in jeopardy by the massive presence of great distribution and shopping and cons of choices and oriented to consider the collective interest also useful for the individual. malls.
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