Italia '61 otherwise. Rethink the fallen Utopia.

The research focuses on a case study in the industrial city of Torino, Italia ’61, which is a project that ambodies the greatest ambitions of Italian modernism during its economic boom to give life to a progress and modernity utopia that narrates the spirit of its time, but that over the years becomes the antithesis of the utopian discourse of its origin. The thesis proposes the categories of Utopia, Dystopia and Heterotopia as speculative tools for spatial research and design. Reading the project through the lens of Utopia makes it possible to distinguish the highest values and aspirations of society and the context in which it inserts. In the case of Italia '61, these values are a late inheritance of the strict functionalist order proclaimed by the CIAM before its dissolution, which translates in terms of space following the logic of Fiat and the Fordist industrial city under its domain. The lens of Dystopia makes it possible to understand the deformation of such values and the shift towards the search for new ideals in the changing society of the mid-20th century. Both Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle', as well as the origin and evolution of Team X, comprise a critique of that modern, alienated and fragmented society. Consequently, the utopian debate of the 1950s and 1960s conceived an experimental attitude aware of the changing nature of reality, which maintained a critical distance from modernist utopia. The category of Heterotopia helps to identify other previously unperceived spatial logics: actors whose voices, absent in the project discourse, transgressively occupy the space. This category, in particular, allows us to identify otherness in the context, practices, and dynamics, both human and non-human, which collaterally appropriate the projected space and modify it. In this sense, the case of Italia '61 is a speculative case of an eventual non-project or, in other words, a catalyst for tensions collaborating in transforming the given spatial resilience. As a contemporary Urban Heterotopia, anthropic exclusion transforms the Fun Palace into a Feral Palace for multispecies coexistence. By deconstructing the Modern Utopian discourse and exploring an eventual postmodern Heterotopia, new Utopianism emerge, with the aim of reflecting upon a possible otherwise.