Publication: Urban Forms of Life: For a critique of forms of urban life

What forms does life take in urban contexts? Where does their presumed, current “illegibility” come from? What prevents the flourishing of fulfilling, worthy, vital forms of life? What experiments should we try to awaken a new (common) sense of urban life? What opportunities and what pitfalls lie ahead with the unstoppable penetration of new digital technologies and artificial intelligence into the city fabric?

Faced with the disconcerting transformations of the ways of living in Italian cities that have occurred before our eyes over the last few decades - Rome, first of all, but also the cities of art or the more anonymous ones, and smaller inhabited centers -, the specially written contributions for this volume by authors from different backgrounds try to answer these questions. Some preliminary surveys have revealed the impression of a widespread surrender of thought in the face of the complexity of current urban life, despite the considerable patrimony of philosophical literature on the cities of the last century. A surrender which, with exceptions, translates into undergoing the divide and rule that characterizes our times, surviving day by day, each for himself, as one can and should. Open Cities Platform initiator prof. dr. Nanna Verhoeff contributed to this volume with the chapter called 'Hodos: The Streets and Methods of (Post-)Pandemic Cities'.

This volume constitutes a thoughtful multi-voice attempt to react to this situation, without falling into the clichés of the so-called "urban regeneration", aiming rather to re‐imagine our forms of life from within the urban realities in which we find ourselves living.