Urban Memories: Exploring the Role of Urban and Community Planning for Producing Intercultural Collective Identities

The built city is the typical expression of a historical cultural stratification and is under the pressure of social transformations that have occurred as a result of migratory flows. This research process focuses on an urban design that can "find itself" by providing new identities in the existing city and by encouraging interactions between diversities. In the evolution of the European city we can find a "mosaic", sort of creative isomorphism between social and architectural components. This phenomenon is the cause and the effect of the strong symbolic meaning of city. Secular cultural cross-pollinations used to create peculiar architectonical and urban forms that contributed to define the identity of the city, building a bridge between vestiges of the past and effects of globalization. The present city is a crossroads of globalization phenomena that accelerates social, relational, physical transformations. Every cultural and social group brings into the city its specific way of living public spaces: a successful urban plan needs interpretation and implementation of this bottom-up "demand". There are a lot of interactions between modus vivendi and physical-functional organization of cities. The multicultural city needs a new ethic and aesthetic dimension to perform an architecture that could be plural and able to improve dialogue between diverse peoples. In this framework a possible definition of local inclusive identity could be outlined through the fusion of multicultural semantic values with local cultures and traditions. This research has been oriented to identify the contents and the syntax of a dialogue to enhance an intercultural strong identity plot. In particular, the main topic is to develop a methodological approach that targets enhancement of multiple roles of public places in order to improve processes for producing inclusive spaces.