City and language - City and serendipity -City and vitizen
City and language
City is inhabited by citizens, language by words. In intercultural city the language we don’t know is the reason for examining the dipole ‘‘otherness – identity’’ with its prospects. The relationship of knowledge and power, power and possession plays a significant role, whilst mobility cultivates the criterion of observation to the citizen. Moreover, in an intercultural city we hear evanescent sounds while walking through arcades, going down metro steps and looking at our book under our arm as if it were a personal translator. The sounds of a language we don’t speak can show us that even we don’t understand, we can see through these sounds; feel when people are anxious or unhappy. Also, the desire to know what they are saying is not genuine desire for knowledge but it is aspiration for power and possession. When I know something, I include it in a homogeneous sum and I am not interested any more, therefore it is not other, it is similar to other elements. Possession is against otherness.
City and serendipity
The history of cities has demonstrated that cities are consisted of heteroclite elements. Dialectics about interculturalism relates to the notion of serendipity; to the quest of different that circulates in the already old. It relates to the new, the non similar, so that experience creates the framework of lived interculturalism. Only the judgement of the world a priori, according to Kant argument, is not enough to distill messages from life. Messages demand personal involvement. Cultural coexistence abolishes the image of a registration city. Respecting interculturalism means also respecting crypticism, private life. Arcades and collectors call upon this proper sense and transorm the image of city into something interesting. Light is the shadow of the other person. I don’t know what he or she says, I know that he or she stares at me.
City and vitizen
In 2008, in the year of intercultural dialogue, cities abolish borders, achieving what flags have not achieved yet: to shape a new dweller, a collector, who belongs to the world and life, by crossing cities and combining the local with the global. This new dweller – not citizen- I call Vitizen. He is not a consumer; he sees one encyclopedia through any arcade. Vitizen, as I have thought to define the term, is a dweller of the world in a broader sense without paying attention to flags that call upon the nation, the army, the massive parade.
akatsadima@yahoo.com
