» We will not save the environment until… * Spacing Toronto * understanding th... - The Diigo Meta page

• 11 Jan 08
  

  Scott Walters

  community social_entrepreneurship

• 15 Dec 07
  

  Yule Heibel

  - transcript of a talk by Pier Giorgio DiCicco; emphasis on the bodily; added two rather long comments.

  anonymity cities embodiment pier_giorgio_di_cicco sustainability urbanism

  • After the many seductions, logical and visionary, have been played—I shall make a plea for the salvific aspect of the act of walking. Yes, salvific. Not just to save the environment, but to save ourselves, and not just by regarding the environment. We will not save the environment until we have found a reason for living together. Until we discover civic care in each other, until we restore the city to its definition as a place of unexpected intimacies, not just as a place of amenities, convenience, business, and entertainment, we will not have sustainability. For sustainability is about replacing an ethic of entitlement with an ethic of sufficiency. And sufficiency is what we find in each other.
  • It is not cars that are the enemy of the pedestrian. The enemy is the absence of civic communion, the lack of empathic citizenship, our inability to see cohabitation as that place where we enjoy ourselves, by enjoying others. All human traffic is under siege, because it is becoming increasingly purposed, guarded, and negotiated. The body is not just a means of locomotion. It is our chief means of restoring a city to its raison d’être, its purpose. And that purpose is civil encounter.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • The problem is to make people aware that anonymity is as toxic to the ecology of heart as hydrocarbons are toxic to the atmosphere.
    • The problem is how to restore intimacy, curiosity, trust, and play into the happenstance encounter of citizens, in an era when the happenstance and the unpredictable are a threat.

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