Where will you live?
It’s a rainy afternoon, and I find myself walking around East London, trying to shelter myself running from doorway to doorway, in an effort to prevent humidity from rising from my soaked shoes to what it feels like envelop my actual bones. The aluminium-like surfaces of the puddles reflect the colourful succession of the signs of small bookshops, art exhibitions, neighbourhood’s cultural centres, music shops, university’s study rooms. The whirlwind of images, words, sounds, the continuous flow around me of people of different social status, provenance, sensibility, who casually bump into each other in places freely open to anyone, warm my heart, and literally my limbs. Culture is accessible at every step, without even having to look for it, as if it were the natural landscape of the city, a city that fosters (or at least fostered for a long time) diversity, frees the imagination, opens new horizons, nourishes the body. A banality that never ceases to amaze me. I get back home at dusk, bewildered and enthusiastic, “John, this city is unique, at every corner you can breathe literature, art, music. Thanks for your hospitality, every time it’s a new discovery for me”. John, who teaches contemporary history at university, points out of the window at the overcast sky, with no horizon, and then, a few metres below, at the insane traffic in the rain, bicycles sparkling with little lights darting all over the place, the hopeless dream of a human space discovered in one of the most alienating metropolises in the world. He says to me “What would be left here, if we didn’t have culture? It’d be hell, we would all leave”.
And all of a sudden I feel overwhelmed with anguish. I perceive a maze of identical roads stretching out for thousands of kilometres, of supermarkets that at dinner time fill with lonely individuals, where you buy crates of beer to forget the squalor of a life scarred by competition, which awards a person to condemn a thousand. The claustrophobia of a place which, no matter how big it is, doesn’t offer you any escape routes, unless you board a plane.
In some city areas, the post-Covid scenario is bleak. In London like in Paris or New York.
In the area of Rome where I live, which has always been one of the most lively from a cultural point of view, live music has disappeared, small bookshops are fighting their last battle for survival, libraries and museums are accessible only by booking in advance, cinemas and theatres are still closed, and the risk that they might not reopen, possibly being replaced by amusement arcades and supermarkets (like it has been happening in other parts of the city) is more than real. Devastated by a tourist monoculture, the centre of my city is eerily empty. The owners of houses and shops, barricaded in view of returning to normality, which is clearly not an option, if not at the cost of terrible social lacerations, keep their prices high, thus preventing co-living spaces from repopulating and being rethought. In the meantime, life gets harder. Poverty, especially the one of citizens abandoned by the institutions, starting from migrants, is spreading across the squares and permeates what’s left of the neighbourhood, the market, the public areas. What’s the sense in living in a place like this, if it stops being a place of sharing, hybridisation of diversity, exchange?
Even before the pandemic, since the second paradise, i.e. the artificial one, which had replaced the first in our hopes, began showing its individualistic face, a new generation of humans started colonising uninhabited areas of our country, like pioneers, convinced of the need for a reconciliation between an urban life organised around economic competition and the natural world, source of constant inspiration, where people can avoid the intimidation of survival. They are not mere dreamers, they experiment and act in search of an operational synthesis between these two worlds. And today, in cities, like in the remote areas I’ve been investigating for years, depopulation offers new spaces where to explore new solutions, a working site where to plan the future, safe from the increasing inequality afflicting humanity.
It doesn’t exist yet, but I know for sure that that’s where I’ll live. A place where the tension between nature and culture, between the inside and the outside, will be resolved, where human and scientific sciences will progress together, where biology and literature will speak the same language, and technology and art will be intertwined, where you’ll be able to live and breathe the vastness of the world from a home in the city, and build the future of humanity from the top of a mountain. Looking after the world, at the same time nurturing your inner self. But I won’t be able to do it on my own, no project of individual redemption nor the sum of single projects will. The right question is not where I will live, but where we will live.
