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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Void Zone: Readings of Fear and Solitude in the Post-industrial/Post-modern City

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The explosion of the city consequent to the industrial revolution and, even more, the sprawling diffusion arising in Europe from the post-industrial transformations let us talk about the disappearing of the border of the city. A diffuse urbanization cancer wastes the landscape and finally the city can be defined more for what it's not (it's no country, it's no natural landscape, it's no nature) than for a definite urban space. If the city is configured principally by its surplus (interstices, spaces under, undefined extensions of un-urban urbanization, infrastructural nets...), in a different sense we may, finally, talk about the thickening of the border of the contemporary, postmodern, European city; its shifting to a frontier condition. “Form follows fear”, Ellin (1996, 145) said about the postmodern urbanism. The research this paper is abstract from is called “Fearscapes?”. It’s going to question the relationship between the growing of the borderspace of the city and the growing of the scapes (and feelings) of fear into it. Enclosures, barrier, void, control, economical landscapes are (at least temporary) the categories to analyze these growing scapes. This paper will focus on the void as the connecting structure into the postmodern urban space. While the city dilutes itself, the continuity of urban facts characterizing the compact city is replaced by an empty space where these facts float, linked one each other by fisical and virtual infrastructures. But what happens into this liquid connecting space? We may say the urban facts, while they isolate ourselves from the others, turn into “safe spaces” (Epstein 1998, 211) where our solitude is celebrated by the community with our fellows. Why did we, at a certain moment, stop hiking into the urban space and start passing through it once again isolated by mechanical and technological tools (cars, i-pods, keywords...)? Why do we flow through our cities instead of living them?