We will discuss how places and towns can become creative living artifacts through our experiences, conflicts and desires.
Our identities are deeply linked to places and to objects of our daily life. Stones, bricks, iron, plastics, constitute buildings, streets, institutions, furniture, clothes. They are inanimate hard materials: the psychological processes of human beings give meaning and life to them. All these artifacts produce and incorporate experiences. Concepts as geographical emotions, visceral design, experiential design spread their influence on architecture and urban disciplines. We focus our attention to the possibility to create new urban and social forms through micro behaviours of individuals and groups in the town. We discuss small communities and practices that are able to satisfy desires, and facilitate optimal experiences. The interesting point is that these behaviours are characterized by micro conflicts and small asynchronies between the self and the society: new forms of ruptures and integrations that produce large changes in the societies and the towns of the planet and maintain unconscious alliances with the past and tradition.
M.D., Ph.D. – Social psychologist- University of Milan
Biography: Full Professor of Social Psychology, Director of the Department of Geography and Environmental Human Sciences, University of Milan (Italy). His main areas of research include optimal experience, the relationship between biological, cultural and psychological processes, cultural evolution and self development, environmental psychology, mental health and culture.
