The City Project: intermediate Space and Symbol

From the wealth of ideas of Pavel Florenskij we can draw some concepts that enable us to face, interpreting their insights, problems of crucial importance for the project for the contemporary city. The urban world is immersed in a process of slow de-articulation of the traditional city, characterised by phenomena whose interpretation may show significant intersections with the fertile intuitions of the Russian philosopher. One of these phenomena is that defined as “thematisation” of the city, in the sense that, as has been seen, due to the difficulty of transforming the inherited city into a modern city, there is a tendency to recreate it as supervised stage-sets that, from the theme park to the large mall, are often a caricature of the city, reducing its complexity (cf. for example, Sorkin 1992; Warren 1994; Jacobson 1998; Augè 2001; Glaeser et al. 2001).