For a better neighborhood

In her beautiful Life and Death of Big Cities (Einaudi, 2009), Jane Jacobs wonders how cities die, how they end and what determines their end. Jacobs asks questions that try to understand how cities work in real life: «Which species of urban streets are safe and which are not; why some parks are wonderful, while others are morally - and sometimes mortally - dangerous; why certain slums remain slums, while others manage to renew themselves spontaneously [...] what is the reason why the center of the city moves [...]. The first observation point to understand all this is the road.
The road is the nervous system; it communicates the flavour, the sensation, the places of interest. It is the main point of transaction and communication ».

But if the streets lose vitality, if meeting and gathering places are emptied, if the possibilities to speak in public end because there is no one willing to listen, it is the city itself that ends.
For this it is worth asking: When did we stop meeting? When did we start losing the weight and dust of history? When did the periphery pass from physics to geography to existence? When did the other become an object to be avoided? But above all what happened for this to happen? Was it the end of mass labor? The lack of children? The precocious and ferocious senility of the place that prevailed over being? When did we stop being a community of destiny?

Metaphorically Mirafiori did not end in the 1980s, with the letters of dismissal or even with the very long layoffs that spanned the century, but on May 26, 2022 with the death of Don Matteo Migliore. With him the history of the pioneers symbolically ends, of that generation that founded and built the neighborhood. A heterogeneous group of people who worked to ensure that services, buses and trees were planted between the buildings, as well as the walls of the houses, but above all a group that was capable of building community relationships.
People who had triggered a vital chain made up of hands shaking and working for the common good and by working transformed Mirafiori into a vital place.
A group promoting meetings, debates, concrete actions, paths of sharing that passed through circles, unions, trustees of scale, which then fragmented more and more until it became a singular unit: a monasticism that was not chosen, but made up of distance rather than of research. It's time to get up, charge yourself with the strength to return from that other world, from the dream and sing the vision that transforms distance into proximity: death into life.

Fabrizio Floris
NP October 2022