EMERGENZE / INTERFERENZE. Alternative spatial occasions for the urban agenda

From l’Amérique de l’Italie to an almost non-defined identity, Turin is nowadays shrinking, striving for all sorts of things to happen – an event, an incoming possibility, a new role – that could awaken it from its state of deadlock. In doing so, the city – as planned –starts from its cumbersome, heavy legacy, perhaps the (only?) big chance of swinging from its industrial past to a new urban condition. With not that many alternatives left, the city tries to rethink itself by starting from an archipelago of large pieces, populating what can be called a patchwork metropolis. From these general premises, the research observes and emphasises a kind of internal dualism within the city boundaries. On the one hand the patchwork metropolis, on the other, what seems to be just another patch in the city, once being ‘the’ city: the grid. One bursting with potential urban occasions and populating the public agenda, the other left unquestioned, perhaps for its urban qualities, maybe for the rigidity of its inner structure. The city’s urban nature is captured in this dualism, in an increasingly vulnerable equilibrium. By observing the grid as a neutral background for the exceptional, this work investigates how moments of ladder, contradiction, or exception to the gridiron generate space-implosion phenomena. We can define them as emerged contradictions, or better, emergencies. These events concur to establish unexpected urban conditions, at times becoming moments of maximum urbanity and major vitality of the city, offering support and working as platforms for the daily social practices occurring in the urban milieu. These moments of exception, these emergencies, provide the grid with unexpected, buzzing of life, vibrant, sparkling scenarios. Nevertheless, if emergencies are consolidated urban exceptions, visible, active and vital, there is a world of alternative urban occasions, hidden, latent and waiting. By analysing this constellation of fragments, the research aims at projecting upon them the different urban conditions by which they are surrounded, so as to bring their exceptional status to a consolidated point: from exceptions to interference. Due to their intrinsic nature, these interferences bring us to question the very structure of the city, indulging on the possibility of imagining unforeseen, alternative urban, thus spatial, conditions: another possible urban agenda for the city, stimulating further urban occasions to, once again, break the rules.