Urban space through senses: territory mapping and fact weaving

Abstract

This paper makes a brief per course through the most important de-structuring modern city processes, outlining their most characteristic elements and puts into evidence their effects on “public” and “space”. Sensorial privation, contemplators inercy and distracted reception, to which global cities residents are exposed can be contrasted in local environments when a participatory and artistic approach are adopted in an urban upgrading project is the central argumentation of this paper. For this purpose modus operandi of several collective Spanish and Italian artists groups are presented, as they support direct experience and action-research in their works of sensitive territorial mapping. In this sense, a relational-art experience conducted with patients of the Mental Health Center of the city of Troia (Puglia) – in which a game puts in relation public space characteristics in confrontation with self-subjective feelings – emerges on one hand as a potential new way of looking people lack of affection towards certain places and certain social categories who stigmatization, and on the other hand can help to re-join individuals and society through their biographical stories linked to places.